IMO get a <$25/year VPS rather than dealing with Oracle's free tier. Look at sale pricing from RackNerd, GreenCloudVPS, HostHatch, etc.
this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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These seem incredibly cheap, like too good to be real cheap.
Racknerd has been around for a really long time and has a great reputation.
I've bought a few of their yearly vps and they aren't bad. Don't seem to be oversubscribed on CPU and memory at least. Not sure on network and disk, but I haven't noticed any issues so far.
Granted it's very much in the realm of expecting to get what you pay for. I doubt they're lenient towards people abusing super cheap vms.
If you stick with the known good providers, things usually work out well.
I'm running my Lemmy and Mastodon servers on a VPS I got from GreenCloudVPS during their 9th birthday celebration: 9 cores (old Intel Xeon E5 though), 9GB RAM, 99GB NVMe SSD for $99 every three years (effectively $2.75/month). I haven't had any issues with it, and it's located very close to me so the ping time is <10ms.
I'm running my email server on a similar VPS but with fewer cores on a much newer AMD EPYC processors.
Any companies that have been around 5+ years are usually fine. Hosthatch is the main host I use and I think they've been around 10 or 11 years now. They sporadically have very good sales on Lowendtalk.com
The documentation clearly states that idle vms on free tier could be reclaimed: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier_topic-Always_Free_Resources.htm#freetier_topic_Always_Free_Resources_Infrastructure
Idle Always Free compute instances may be reclaimed by Oracle. Oracle will deem virtual machine and bare metal compute instances as idle if, during a 7-day period, the following are true: CPU utilization for the 95th percentile is less than 15% Network utilization is less than 15% Memory utilization is less than 15% (applies to A1 shapes only)
So don't create a 4 core 32gb ram vm to run a vpn, and you should be fine :)
A lot of the issues people have with Oracle is caused by using not using a normal credit card or not keeping a valid card on file. A bunch of failed signup attempts will probably get your account flagged. When you sign up for free tier, you will be charged a couple of times, but it will be returned within a few days. You can't do anything on free tier that will cost you money. You would have to upgrade to pay as you go, which requires re entering your credit card info, if you want to use anything that's not free.
Don't run any public proxies or VPNs. Your account will be gone as soon as they get a DCMA notice. If they get complaints about anything you are hosting, they will likely terminate your account as well. Don't do anything even remotely related to crypto currency. Don't do a bunch of port scans or ping a large nunber of IPs. Don't stop or remove the Oracle services that come with their images either.
If your instances don't have enough load on them, they will be stopped after about a week. You can always restart them, but that can be difficult with the ARM instances since they are in high demand.
The point is: Oracle did not accept my credit card for unknown reasons. I wanted to pay, they refused. Ok, will spend my money at Hetzner.
I have heard that they do this but in about 2 years of having mine and doing nothing out of the ordinary they have left it alone. There was even a decent chunk of time where it was just sitting there idle. I have heard people say that having a credit card on file helps but I have never had any form of payment on file nor ever purchased anything from them.
These days I just have uptime kuma on it.
I've had mine since Nov 2020, no issues with deletion. I think the trick is to have a CC on file or be charged at least one. I know I generated a few storage charges, ended up paying less than $2 but I think that has classified me as a 'paying customer'. However I would recommend always being prepared for eventual deletion. Make backups, record your process for setting things up so you can switch to a different provider should the worst happen.
And just like other posters, don't keep anything you can't lose on it. I keep my matrix homeserver there but have a backup and some other containers that if they get lost, no biggie. I've only had mine for ~6mos or so but haven't had any issues.
Man, I was paying Oracle and I still got my account deleted. And no, I wasn't spamming or something similiar. In fact, I couldn't even use SMTP for my own domain, they couldn't seem to find my tenant ID in order to open the port, but they sure knew how to charge me for my usage.
Oracle isn't worth free.
I just ran stress -c 1 on mine to keep the CPU usage above the idle threshold until I did enough stuff on it where that wasn't necessary anymore
You could setup a "temporary" card with Privacy.com and set the spending limit to something low. Your bank might also offer a similar service.
Have had an account for a year and a bit. Never any issues.
Did eventually add a credit card to get an Ampere instance as at least at the time that was the only way to get one.
Could have split up the Ampere into more than one instance but why not have 4 cpu 24gb ram setup.
I don’t do anything too crazy and the 2 other free tier ones I use to mess around with.
I'm running a PBS instance (plus networking containers) for 4years now, cc on file for the first 2 years, now on file, but my usecase is operating within the free-forever tier.
My instance has not been deleted by them, though I've rebuilt the multiple times since.
The region you are on might be struggling with capacity issues, I use middle east region and never encountered account/vm deletions (yet). For my case, latency isnt an issue so i dont mind having it ona far away region.
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