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I've been meaning to write about the Oracle Cloud "Always Free Tier" virtual private server (VPS) hosting service for a while, and was prompted to finally do so by this post on knijn.ga:
=> gemini://knijn.ga/posts/2022-01-29.bliz
This capsule is hosted on an "Always Free" server and I hit the same problems after my 30 day trial was up, but it's not as bad as it sounds, which I'll explain shortly.
First, here's the main things that you can get on the Always Free tier:
On first glance, this seems too good to be true, but despite some caveats it actually is an amazing deal. I genuinely recommend using Oracle Cloud Always Free resources to host your Gemini capsule (or indeed anything else), but before rushing off to sign up, please read the rest of this post!
This is the issue that knijn is facing in the link above. When you sign up for the Always Free tier, you actually start a 30 day trial with some free credits to use features and services that aren't available in the Always Free tier. After 30 days you get a phone call and an email telling you that your trial is over and anything you've set up that isn't eligible for the Always Free tier will be deleted after a further 30 days. Because of the weird way that the Arm A1 VMs are treated in Oracle's back-end, any VM you create using Arm cores is not counted as "Always Free", even if it meets the stated requirements for the Always Free tier. This is not very well communicated on the site and came as a surprise to me too. When I queried this with the customer support person who rang me, they didn't seem to know much about it either and actually told me (wrongly) that it wasn't the case for my server. 30 days later my capsule went down for several hours before I realised that the instance had been deactivated.
The good news is that this isn't as bad as it sounds! A given VPS instance and its storage are actually two different things in the Oracle Cloud management system, so all you have to do is detach the storage, delete the deactivated instance, and create another (identical) instance using the same storage. The new server will boot up within a few minutes, with the OS and all your files intact, and you just need to update your domain's DNS entry to point at the new IP. If, unlike me, you know this is necessary, you can do this any time in the 30 days after your trial expires and have minimal downtime.
Note: knijn's post suggests that creating a new VM might be more difficult than I found it - availability might depend on which region you're in. In my case (using the UK region) I didn't have any availability problems.
I've made the resolution of the above issue ("just recreate the instance") sound slightly easier than it actually is. The website through which you manage your instances, networks and storage easily qualifies as one of the most confusing and annoying interfaces I've ever used. It's definitely focused primarily on corporate users with hundreds of VMs and dedicated staff to manage them, not on individuals running a single server. Everything is extensively documented, but somehow the documentation is so extensive and exhaustive that it actually becomes quite difficult to parse out what you have to do to achieve a specific goal. Last weekend I finally got around to setting up an IPv6 address for this capsule, but it probably took about half an hour of reading documentation and clicking around and if I had to do it again there's no way I'd remember the exact process.
Some of my confusion is certainly due to my own lack of knowledge and experience with this sort of server and networking administration, but I still feel confident in placing some of the blame on the convoluted series of steps required to do anything, with multiple levels of hidden sub-menus and slow page loads.
It also appears to be impossible to bookmark anything in a way that will actually work after a period of inactivity. After a few hours, all links will redirect you to the login page, which then dumps you (eventually) on the home page of the admin console. To illustrate how annoying this is, here's the process required for me to view the status page of my server:
The good news is that you (in theory) only have to use this UI twice: once to set up your server for the first time and once to set it up again after 30 days.
Some minor points of potential confusion when creating a new server:
=> See this post for a new caveat
This is probably the first positive review/recommendation post in history to be almost entirely a rant about how awful the recommended service is! I have no idea whether the generous "Always Free" offering will genuinely always remain free, but I've been running this capsule since late October last year, I haven't come anywhere close to hitting any of the resource limits and it hasn't cost me anything other than a few hours of my time.
Possibly the best strategy for migrating to Oracle Cloud is to sign up now, use the 30 day trial to set things up and play around, but don't actually start hosting your capsule there until after the 30 days are up and you've been able to recreate the VM instance successfully.
Obviously Oracle are a massive company who don't care about you and could terminate this service at any time. Please don't rely on "your" Oracle Cloud server for anything that is not backed up elsewhere!
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