Yes, oracle will reclaim your server if it falls under certain thresholds for the resources you've signed up for. So it might be better to request less resources then you need but this will somewhat complicate things if you want more resources in the future since iirc you can't simply resize.
One way to get around all of this though is convert to pay as you go (PAYG). PAYG gets the same always free allocations and you only pay for use above that, and oracle won't reclaim PAYG (at least not my server for ~4 years). Just set up a budget of a $1 and then alerts to email you if you reach 1% of your budget. If you somehow go over your free resources it'll tell you.
Lastly in some cases oracle just straight up loses your data or disables your account. As always practice 3-2-1 backups (don't rely on the free rotating backups on their servers as your only backup).
It's some hoops to jump through but i was paying $5/ month for a digital ocean droplet and the oracle server has been running for 4 years now, and i also have scaled up one project and started a few others that wouldn't have all fit on my droplet. Other than the threat of reclaiming my resources before i switched to PAYG I've been pretty happy with it.
They probably get you in bandwidth fees over X amount. It would cost pennies for a small scale virtual server with big numbers as the hardware is shared, it would spend most of the time not doing anything. They could set up a machine and oversell a tier like that and make it all back with profit on their first bill.
I bet they run these free accounts on their test infrastructure, not production. What they get from it is real-world user testing of changes to their infrastructure, similar to how Microsoft uses its Windows Home versions for testing new updates.
I have a GSA flashed with non-google firmware that has eight cores and 156GB RAM… it’s not set up yet, but I’ve got all my drives I need. It’s going to be a like 7TB local UNRAID server someday.
That's not bad at all gonna have to check it out. I host my site on digital ocean it's on the smallest single core 1gb ram droplet. I run crowdsec and nginx and a couple other little things and it sits around 40% ram usage. Costs 6$ a month and I added 4 weeks worth of automatic weekly backups for $1.50 a month.
I can deal with $7.50 for a little static web server.
They do offer a free $200/60 day credit if you get in with one of the free Linux Foundation cloud classes which is plenty to play with.
FWIW, if all you have is a truly static website (html, css, and js), then GitHub Pages is free and you can point a custom domain there from your registrar, and don't have to worry about backups or server uptime.
I wasn't aware of the Github pages being free that's neat. It is fully static (running on nginx but generated with hugo) and I use freedns.afraid.org for the domains. Good to know thanks for the tip :)
Been using racknerd to host my tiny stupid websites for a couple years, it's great value for money and a fantastic way to learn sysadmin stuff. I also appreciate that they give a lot of heads up for auto-renewal and don't escalate pricing on renewal.
Could you link the page which shows your exact config at that price? I can't find anything like that. KVM, AMD, Windows VPS - I looked at all three but none suggest the price you've written.
That price sounds like a steal, and I'd love to get it if possible. I currently pay $6/month per VPS with Digital Ocean
I do the smallest Amazon Lightsail instance for a static site of about $1.50/month. Site is statically generated from templates in a private git repo I host and backup at home, so I don't worry about the site itself needing a backup.
I was going to host a Bitwarden instance, as well, but with its RAM requirements, it was cheaper to pay a Bitwarden subscription. So it ended up being just a static site, plus Route 53.
One thing is that it's pretty clear Amazon doesn't like Lightsail. They do it because it competes with some other small fixed price hosting options from other companies. To let me use it, I had to email AWS customer support and answer a bunch of questions about what I wanted to do with it and if I had considered EC2, instead.
My site is also statically generated from templates I keep in a private git repo hosted on github I keep local backups of, but I do the generating directly on the server. I just pull the site and generate it manually whenever I do an update. I like the sound of your setup better thanks for the pointers!
For a static site Cloudflare Pages is good for free hosting, doing a git commit and watching the site change in a matter of seconds is very satisfying.
This is the opposite of the time my friend posted a link to my personal site on Digg. It was running on a Pentium 1 with 128 MiB of RAM on a home internet connection.
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