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.
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/186994/boom-boom-4th-of-july-deals-come-come-deals-freebies-by-racknerd/p1
These seem incredibly cheap, like too good to be real cheap.
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
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.
Racknerd has been around for a really long time and has a great reputation.