Comment by kohbo

3 months ago

What provider still has decent free tier?

Oracle. 4 vCPU, 24 GB RAM, 200 GB SSD. It’s arm64 but nowadays that doesn’t really matter.

  • Which region were you able to create this in? They seem to be out of capacity all the time in EU.

    • What worked for me was handing them a credit card and transitioning myself out of the free tier. (I'd use the free credits they offer prior to doing this - they give you something like $300 immediately on signup.)

      The always-free infra remains free, you just have the chance of incurring a bill if you make selections that aren't free or exceed block storage/egress (200GB/10TB) limits of the always-free tier. Leaving the free/trial tier gives you access to a much larger pool of instances. I never successfully deployed an A1 instance prior to becoming a "paying" customer - now I've done it hundreds of times without ever having an issue.

      I've been running a small k0s cluster and a standalone webserver for months while incurring about $2.50 - $3 in spending each month, primarily from being slow to remove instance snapshots sitting in block storage.

      Even things that are oddly expensive on AWS - like NAT - are free on Oracle. There are zero gotchas.

      2 replies →

    • I have read that you need to write a script to constantly bombard their API in order to get one. I presume you'd be fighting other scripts.