irmadlad@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I know of a few VPS that are ‘free’, and I use that word quite loosely. Long time back I explored a few, and I can tell you that they are not the time of day. Very cheap VPS can be had. I had one that ran me $25 USD per year. It wasn’t the most thread rippin’ VPS you could have, but it certainly was cheap, and at one time I had about 25 different containers running on it with out much trouble. A good place to look for cheap VPS is at lowendbox.com.
Oracle offers a free tier, but you really have to watch your consumption of resources, and I believe they require a credit card to open an account. There are horror stories of people who went over the limit and ended up with a good size bill
I realize $25 USD is not free and does not fit withing your request, and I empathize. As far as using your own computer with something like Docker, and shutting it down each evening…I shut my server down every evening via a cron job. I am the only user, and I just couldn’t justify letting it run while I slept. So I guess you’d say it’s an intermittent service.
non_burglar@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Just to add to your comment:
As much as I hate oracle, I run their free-tier vps in a Canadian datacenter and it never required my cc. I think it’s geographic location-dependent.
irmadlad@lemmy.world 1 week ago
That’s cool. I was thinking one of the free tiers like Amazon, Google required a CC to open one. Side question: What do you run on Oracle, and how fastidious do you have to be about controlling resource consumption? I’ve read about people on one of the free tiers getting socked a big bill, in fact it’s a meme now.
spoiler
Image
non_burglar@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I only run two instances, both run nginx and static HTML sites (plus all the stupid mandatory bits like fail2ban, python for ansible, certbot, etc. They are very low usage and get no seo or anything so they are really, really low usage.
I’ve never been warned about resources so far, and it’s been 3 years. I intensionally don’t run any high-bandwidth stuff like a matrix server or file sync for that reason.
I just lock it right down with keys and firewall entries for SSH. Logs are pretty quiet, except for llm scraping, but they are rate-limited, so they go away quickly.
Be aware that Oracle presents image “shapes” as the os images for use,which include oracle, Ubuntu, and a few others. These do have oracle metrics gathering and agents installed to help with migration between data centre zones, so it’s conceivable that they can read what’s on the os. I don’t have any PII on there except public keys and my email address.