Web Hosting... for Free?
Move over Digital Ocean!
Introduction
I build web-sites and provide hosting for a few small companies, and a few larger ventures. Including my anime convention. Nope, I have no interest in anime either…. a long story for another day.
Current Solution
I’ve used DigitalOcean for many, many years. Their smallest droplet with a dual-core CPU, 1GB memory and a 64GB SSD is enough for Ubuntu, Apache and PHP for a few sites without issue. Add on excellent customer support, great documentation, point-in-time backups, UK geolocation and for ~$8/month you’ve got a pretty good offering.
Truly, for such little money I can’t complain. I’d highly recommend them to anyone looking for hosting or needing infrastructure in the cloud. It’s easy to setup and “It Just Works”.
Discovery
I’ve just left one job and now joined a new exciting company in a senior automation leadership role (no surprise). After handing my laptop back to my previous employer I was travelling home a free man and enjoying Southern Railway’s onboard wifi. On the laptop did my infrequent search to check DigitalOcean is still competitive and stumbled across Oracle Cloud. And their free tier. As in … totally free. How had this passed me by?
Trial
My initial snag was on the free tier their systems are swamped and I was unable to create anything. Switching to a PAYG (pay as you go) account took £82 (~$100) off my card which was instantly refunded (phew). Then I had a good 12 hours for my account to be upgraded.
PAYG accounts still get free tier services but you’re front of the queue for provisioning. Neat! So I stood up an Ubuntu server, with 4 Ampere cores and 24GB memory (yup, twenty four gigabytes of memory), 128GB of block storage, and installed Apache, PHP, Hugo and reconfigured my Jenkins pipelines to point to the new server.
The cost of this server… nothing. Nada. Nil. Zero pounds. Incredible! Let’s see how it fares for the next couple months. It exceeds DigitalOcean’s performance, let’s see what the uptime is like.