5 ms·

For many homelabbers, just being cheap and avoiding the $3 VPS, that's it

• comrh 11mo ago
  I dont even pay anything, my tiny homelab is completely covered by the free tier
  • kohbo 11mo ago
    What provider still has decent free tier?
    • antonkochubey 11mo ago
      Oracle. 4 vCPU, 24 GB RAM, 200 GB SSD. It’s arm64 but nowadays that doesn’t really matter.
      • gear54rus 11mo ago
        Which region were you able to create this in? They seem to be out of capacity all the time in EU.
        • jnsaff2 11mo ago
          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.
        • petronic 11mo ago
          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.
          • Peacefulz 11mo ago
            I hit the same roadblock as the above user and it never occurred to me to just cross the barrier with cash and then scale back to free. Thanks for this.
            • elantile 11mo ago
              It doesn't actually charge you anything. You just have to put a card down to be considered a priority because now you potentially can spend money & therefore are more important then the other free-tier losers. /s It's still free tier & still free. The free tier is also based on capcity usage, and not instances. If you want 3 cores on 1 machine & 1 on another, they're cool with that. I personally run Pangolin on a 1 core & self-hosted github runners on a 3 core.
      • Incipient 11mo ago
        That can't possibly be free?
        • renewiltord 11mo ago
          That’s generous but Oracle is very generous.
        • jazzyjackson 11mo ago
          https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier_topic-Always_Free_Resources.htm https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier... Only caveat I see is they reserve the right to delete underutilized/ idling instances
          • siwatanejo 11mo ago
            I guess they require a credit card before accessing that free tier?
            • ranguna 11mo ago
              If they do: create a virtual one, create an account with it and delete the card right after.
              • deleted 11mo ago
                [deleted]
              • ranguna 11mo ago
                An honest advise being down-voted? Thanks
                • siwatanejo 11mo ago
                  I upvoted you.
• anon7000 11mo ago
  Exactly, just today I set up a cloudflare tunnel to a docker compose service running on my home server. I didn’t want to expose the server directly to the internet, and I want to share this service on a certain domain with broader family. I have a server at home that works well. I don’t reaaaally want to pay an extra $30-$40/yr and have an extra thing to manage when the CF tunnel works fine for free. I like Tailscale more, but I want to share this with family who won’t install TS and also want to use a specific domain.