I’m looking to host my own website and mess around with some services but my current home server is already pushed to the max. Planning on getting some thin clients for proxmox when I have some more money, but for now I wanted to mess around on Oracles free tier to test some stuff. I heard they will randomly delete accounts / free cloud vps and was wondering if there was a way to mitigate this. Some post I’ve seen seems to be tied to not having a CC on file with them so after 30 days or so when it “charges” your account and there is no payment option, the vps will get deleted. Does anyone have experience dealing with this? I wouldn’t mind adding a card to the account as long as I won’t wake up to a huge bill one day because I went over the limit.
IMO get a <$25/year VPS rather than dealing with Oracle’s free tier. Look at sale pricing from RackNerd, GreenCloudVPS, HostHatch, etc.
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 :)
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