💾 Archived View for bbs.geminispace.org › u › sugar › 3315 captured on 2023-12-28 at 16:04:29. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-11-14)
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Urgh, my capsule is down thanks to Oracle's free tier cloud service being jank as hell.
Per
gemini://gem.billsmugs.com/gemlog/2022-01-29-oracle-cloud-always-free.gmi
alls I gotta do is rebuild the instance and I can use the same boot volume and stay within the free tier now that my trial is up. Except I'm getting:
Out of capacity for shape VM.Standard.A1.Flex in availability domain AD-1.
So now I gotta either wait until it's free, or destroy my boot volume (I have a local backup of the relevant dirs) and move to a new AD.
I'm gonna go do my tasks for the day and come back to this later with a clearer head 🤦♀️
Jul 20 · 5 months ago · 🤔 1 🙁 2
📷 billsmugs · Jul 20 at 22:11:
Sorry to hear this has hit someone else! Oracle really need to fix this stupid system (or, at the very least, make it clearer that it's going to happen and how to deal with it proactively).
Once you do get the capsule back up, make sure you don't fall foul of the "Idle" Compute conditions, now that you're out of the trial period:
— gem.billsmugs.com/gemlog/2023-03-24-re-oracle-cloud-always-free.gmi
If your server load is generally low, the method I gave in that post (write a simple program that runs at startup and stays in the background to waste a chunk of RAM) has worked fine for me since then (🤞).
I bookmarked that one too asap haha, thanks for documenting all of this, it's been helpful!!
🍵 michaelnordmeyer · Jul 21 at 12:19:
Oracle is an utterly broken company. I was highly suspicious when learning about their cheap cloud instances compared to AWS or Google Cloud.
I read these two posts as well some months ago. Oracle always finds a way to make it more complicated than necessary while taking advantage of their customers.
And Larry Ellison is one of the most toxic and misogynistic people in Silicon Valley.
Do. Not. Use. Oracle. Products.
🍵 michaelnordmeyer · Jul 21 at 12:21:
BTW, it's highly unlikely that a company with the cost structure and attitude like Oracle is able to keep up having cheaper prices than their more agile counterparts.
📷 billsmugs · Jul 21 at 15:37:
I highly doubt anyone who has experienced using Oracle Cloud Always Free would be willing to pay them! Not knowing anything about Larry Ellison, I know that if anyone I knew (e.g. my employer) suggested using paid Oracle Cloud services I would heavily recommend choosing a different provider after my experiences with the free tier. I'm under no illusions that it'll last forever (despite the name), but I'm willing to put up with these annoyances while it gets me a free server.
You're right that it's a risk though - I hope that if/when the Always Free service gets shut down, they will give enough notice to migrate elsewhere, but that's certainly not guaranteed.
Yeah. I'm unemployed so free is ideal :/
🍵 michaelnordmeyer · Jul 21 at 21:53:
@sugar Sorry to hear that. If you only need a low-powered server, Google Cloud has a free e2-micro instance, which could easily host a gemini server. Compared to AWS, which also has a free tier, but needs a paid Route53 zone to connect a domain, Google is actually free. I used to use this a couple of years ago.
😺 blurrycat · Jul 21 at 23:34:
Fly.io also offers free shared compute, and I think it should be possible to host a Gemini capsule on it (I haven't completely looked into it, but it seems like custom ports are supported so I don't see why it wouldn't work). I might actually try this myself :)
Oh gosh thank you @michaelnordmeyer and @blurrycat, I'll definitely look at both of those! I didn't know Google had free, and aws suspended my account then permanently deleted it without an option for recovery? I don't know why, and I'm definitely not keen on making a new Amazon account
Thank you so much!
🍵 michaelnordmeyer · Jul 22 at 12:27:
@sugar You probably know this, but just in case: You can setup spending limits, which would also apply for traffic. If you set a limit for $0.10/M, you should be fine. I just looked at my old invoices and for whatever reason they billed me with $0.01 for "Network Internet Egress from Americas to China" for a couple of months.
😺 blurrycat · Jul 22 at 19:45:
So I got a simply Gemini server running on fly.io, it's not ideal as it's currently serving a static file baked into the container, but I think I might have a solution for that, to allow updating content without having to deploy the whole server again. Anyway, it seems to be working (although with IPv6-only given the free tier [apparently shared IPv4 addresses limit you to HTTP/HTTPS ports only, so I only allocated an IPv6 to my "app" as dedicated IPv4 are definitely not free]). Might be a solution after all!
sigh, so the option i didn't talk about was self-hosting. we do have a proxmox server, but it's almost entirely inhouse servers that we don't access from outside. So I just caved and set up a VM there and I'm back online, same address, same certificate:
Just slightly annoyed I have to punch more holes in my firewall 😪