Oracle Free Tier VPS Self Hosting Ideas
Hello SelfHosted!
I have recently setup my own free tier oracle VPS and am looking to get my feet wet with some simple services that I can host on there to get started.
I should mention I have successfully setup SSH with the private key so that part is good to go.
Any ideas are welcome!
I'd like to really really caution people about Oracle Free Tier.
They've been known to suddenly ban free tier users, with no explanation or recourse. Happened to me and many others. I had a lemmy instance on it, hadn't started my backup plan yet cause I was dumb, and Oracle just emailed me that my "trial was over", server immediately shut down, and support stonewalled me.
Couldn't even get my data. So if you want to try it, make sure you have a backup plan and a plan on what to do if they pull the plug.
Some have been using it for years, though. Just be ready.
Yeah. Don't use any Oracle product, ever, for any reason, for any length of time at all. They are absolute garbage.
It did seem hugely generous in terms of what you get.
Thanks for the warning. Oracles got the worst reputation but I might have given em a shot if it cost me nothing.
I've been lucky to have no issues with them for over a year, but one thing I've noticed is everyone who has had issues has been running a VPN of some sort; were you maybe?
It'd be interesting to see if that's whatever keeps causing the ban triggers.
Mine is about a year old as well. I'm also curious to know what triggers these bans. I also noticed people bringing up Minecraft servers on r/oraclecloud. I personally have a Valheim server running for months but I haven't had any issues.
I'd like to know too. I've been using the free tier for years now and hosted a bunch of different stuff on it (no VPN though) and never had any problems
Nope. Literally just Lemmy, signed up and administered while not behind a VPN
The plan isn't to have any mission critical services on here. Mostly just to have a sandbox environment to test things out before I actually pull the plug on a reliable VPS service.
Glad someone mentioned this already. It's a nice sandbox or test environment but nothing prod will ever run there.
Oracle a company to actively avoid doing business with or realying on in any way.
Spend the $5 for a commodity VPS from literally any standard vendor. I suggest Vultr.
Best cheapest vps I’ve found is nerdrack
You mean Racknerd correct?
They are great, I have a couple of servers with them (including the one that's hosting my lemmy instance)
I snagged a couple of VPS from Racknerd in the Black Friday sale. One of them became a home for my Mastodon instance and now the other gets my new Lemmy instance. No issues to speak of with them yet, so I'm perfectly happy with 'em.
Searx NG worked well for me. I currently have Matrix running on another, set up with the ansible docker repo. Actually trying to set lemmy up on another.
I converted to pay as you go so they would open up the smtp ports so I could use postmoogle with Matrix but i still only use the always free shapes and still havent incurred a charge in roughly 6 months
Sounds cool! Could you link to matrix? Looking up matrix as you can imagine provides a lot of movie related results lol
https://matrix.org/
https://matrix.org/ is what you're after.
That's a great idea, I have my SearXNG instance running on my local box but moving that and some other low computer/storage stuff there would at least make my home network more secure.
I use my Oracle free tier for Tor Snowflake. It was a service I didn’t really want to run myself and not something I ever need to connect to so if Oracle suddenly shuts down my server for any reason then it’s no loss for me. In the meantime it provides value for people in countries with harsh internet censorship, so I’m happy to just set it up and leave it.
Just FYI Oracle has language that reserves the right to shut down free tier machines that they deem “idle”.
https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier_topic-Always_Free_Resources.htm
You can prevent this by adding a credit card to your account. It “upgrades” your status, and then as long as you stay in the free tier allocations you won’t be charged.
Man I would be so nervous to trust Oracle with my credit card though.
Do https://privacy.com then! Can set it to like $10 limit in case they charge a tiny bit to test the card and you'll never spend more.
They do a $100 test charge IIRC when upgrading to their PAYG (pay-as-you-go) tier. They also don't like virtual/prepaid CCs.