I’m looking to host my own website and mess around with some services but my current home server is already pushed to the max. Planning on getting some thin clients for proxmox when I have some more money, but for now I wanted to mess around on Oracles free tier to test some stuff. I heard they will randomly delete accounts / free cloud vps and was wondering if there was a way to mitigate this. Some post I’ve seen seems to be tied to not having a CC on file with them so after 30 days or so when it “charges” your account and there is no payment option, the vps will get deleted. Does anyone have experience dealing with this? I wouldn’t mind adding a card to the account as long as I won’t wake up to a huge bill one day because I went over the limit.
I have heard that they do this but in about 2 years of having mine and doing nothing out of the ordinary they have left it alone. There was even a decent chunk of time where it was just sitting there idle. I have heard people say that having a credit card on file helps but I have never had any form of payment on file nor ever purchased anything from them.
These days I just have uptime kuma on it.
I’ve had mine since Nov 2020, no issues with deletion. I think the trick is to have a CC on file or be charged at least one. I know I generated a few storage charges, ended up paying less than $2 but I think that has classified me as a ‘paying customer’. However I would recommend always being prepared for eventual deletion. Make backups, record your process for setting things up so you can switch to a different provider should the worst happen.
And just like other posters, don’t keep anything you can’t lose on it. I keep my matrix homeserver there but have a backup and some other containers that if they get lost, no biggie. I’ve only had mine for ~6mos or so but haven’t had any issues.