Do you want to lower your electric bills for free?
I have been locally hosting corporate level infrastructure for quite a few years. This infrastructure included rather large datacenter grade redundant virtualization servers running Proxmox. For my storage system, i was using TrueNAS providing over 6 TB of redundant storage. To connect all this, I also had a 10GB switched network. All of this required lots of power.
I wanted to say thanks to all the Opportunistic Greedy Em Effers in this country for raising prices on everything from Eggs to Energy for no apparent reason. Due to this, I was forced to look at alternate solutions. My power bills were ranging between $160-$300 monthly, which is nuts.
So being a fairly frugal individual, what could I do? Well, just like my companies I have worked for, move everything to the cloud. I set out to find a very inexpensive option for hosting outside of my house. My needs were I would say “Medium” level computing, nothing crazy. Several WordPress sites, seperate Databases, and maybe some development servers.
I review the following services
NameCheap
- As the name says, it is kind of cheap. I moved a few of my sites over to it but since things were mostly GUI, I found it very inflexible to manage.
- The amount of processing wasn’t enough for a reasonably fast nginx web server and a mysql database.
- Pricing was fairly reasonable at $44 a year.. but again, i’m cheap.
Digital Ocean
- Brought up a VM but the cost would have been around $50 a month for a single setup
- Too much money for me
Amazon AWS
- I use this for work everyday and find that it is overly complicated to setup and create a single Containerized Service.
- Also, costs too much
Google Cloud Platform
- Have used this in the past which is somewhat ok, but I also find the interface very frustrating.
- Very low powered systems for the price
Azure
- Also use this at work and find it not easy to work with
- oh… and it’s Microsoft
Oracle Cloud Platform
- The price is right! Free
- Don’t get me wrong, I am not an Oracle fan. Most of my links to Oracle actually say “Orable” from my many experiences with Corporate Support and Sales.
- But the services which they are providing for free is very generous and actually allowed me to move my complete workload to OCI.
- Here’s what is included with their free tier
- Compute: (Note- 1 Oracle OCPU = 2 vCPUs)
- 2 AMD-based VMs: 1/8 OCPU = 0.25 vCPU with 1 GB RAM each
- 4 Arm-based VMs: 24 GB RAM total, 3,000 OCPU hours and 18,000 GB memory hours per month
- 2 Block Volumes Storage, 200 GB total
- 10 GB Object Storage – Standard
- 10 GB Object Storage – Infrequent Access
- 10 GB Archive Storage
- 10TB of network data egress/month per originating region
- Resource Manager (managed terraform)
- 5 OCI Bastions
- 2 Oracle Autonomous Databases incl. Oracle Application Express (APEX), Oracle SQL Developer etc., each with 20GB storage
- NoSQL Database with 25GB storage per table, up to 3 tables
- 4 Load Balancers: 1 Flexible (10Mbps) and 3 Network
- Monitoring and Notifications
So long story short, i packaged up my systems and moved them to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
For certficates, I use Free Cloudfront account to provide CDN, Certificates, Email, and Forwarding.
My new bill is 90 dollars.
