Over the next week or so I’m sure a lot of people are going to try spinning up Lemmy instances - I’ve certainly been looking at it.
Does anyone have any recommendations for a VPS provider / resource allocation?
From what I have read, it sounds like you’re going to want a host that focuses on storage / bandwidth (at least if you are allowing image upload), but maybe those of you already operating an instance have a different opinion?
One other option is the “Always Free” tier on Oracle Cloud. You get some potato EPYC instances and some Altera ARM ones that are quite nice.
There are people who have issues with their accounts getting banned with no recourse, but I’ve used OCI free for over a year with no issues (and run a Mastodon instance on some of the ARM stuff), and know a good number of people who have various services running on it with no issue long-term, so YMMV.
The price is right, though, and you should keep current backups regardless.
I had this long post typed out on Jeroba about why I wouldn’t recommend it, but maybe I hit the character limit? IDK. Anyway, the point I wanted to get across is that I’ve been down that road, and up until February it was going ok, but one should absolutely not trust the Oracle free tier for any service that should be reliable long term, they can and will take the VM down and take back that generous free tier allotment, and IIRC sometimes without any notice. In my case it was literally because my VM was under utilized. No option to downscale my instance, just a notification that they’re taking my allotment back and deleting the VM a few weeks before it happened.
Yeah, I should probably have included that I did convert the account to pay-as-you-go from the free-only service to avoid the reclaiming.
I’ve had zero issues, but I know that is, for sure, not the exclusive experience people have had.
Tried doing this as well (should have mentioned), but I’m broke asf and the $100? authorization charge attempted to overdraw my account and it rejected the charge. So in the end, no recourse for me. IMO it’s ok for unimportant things that it was just me using, but if I’m going to take on the responsibility for operating an instance for anyone else (potentially 1000’s of users) I just can’t trust that Oracle will keep my instance safe in the long term if they decide to change their usage terms in the future.
Oh for sure; if I really am concerned with hosting something, I pay for a VPS somewhere. OCI is for things that, I’d prefer them to stay up, but if they don’t, it’s not catastrophically bad.
Oracle’s ‘too bad so sad’ support policy around this is absolute garbage, though.
Oh I’ve heard some of the horror stories too. I was subbed to OracleCloud? I think for the major duration and realized fairly early that the hammer would come down eventually, so I made sure to have religious backups for my admittedly disposable services.
Yeah, heard the same stories.
I’ll admit some bias against some of them because I spent most of the last decade doing abuse and anti-fraud work for another cloud hosting provider, and boy did I ever hear an endless parade of ‘oh but I wasn’t doing anything!’ stories - even when I had absolute hard evidence that they were, indeed, doing something.
Still, you could always get a human and the human could make a decision and reverse any account action after looking at your account and talking to you - which is something that Oracle seems to absolutely not do, which is just… stupid? The people they’re banning are, at some point, going to be asked ‘hey have you used a cloud provider you like?’ and absolutely zero of them would ever recommend OCI.
I can only imagine the stories you have too. There were plenty of let’s say “suspicious” posts I’ve seen that were complaining of unannounced termination that I kinda suspect were either doing something illegal or against the EULA like mining crypto. But yeah agree that it would have made a big difference if I could appeal to OCI support and see if there was an alternative to removing the VM. But in the end people will probably keep getting hooked in on Oracle’s free tier, I just hope they’re making sure to be careful not to trust them too much.
They’re mostly boring stories: crypto mining and spam are probably 95% of them.
I would say, though, that you really shouldn’t ever trust any hosting provider too much. You (like, the global you: not anyone in particular) ideally wouldn’t want to be beholden to a single provider, (though I know that makes things cost more and isn’t really always practical) but you should never never never let your provider be the sole arbiter of your data.
The teams that make the decisions on your account are under weird metric pressures to follow the flowchart and move on as fast as possible and don’t really make any of the policies they’re following and so if you somehow end up in their workflows, expecting the worst outcome is probably not the wrong mindset.
Always have a backup of your data in your control so you can recover if your hosting provider kicks you off/vanishes/has a hardware failure/whatever.