200GB Free Cloud for Your Files

29 pointsposted 11 hours ago
by to3k
(blog.tomaszdunia.pl)

60 Comments

to3k

11 hours ago

A guide describing how to create your own (and most importantly free) cloud storage with a capacity of nearly 200GB. Step by step about how to get a free VPS from Oracle (4xOCPU, 24GB RAM and 200GB storage), install Docker on it, run Portainer, NGINX Proxy Manager and Nextcloud (with MariaDB database). In addition, it describes how to connect a domain via Cloudflare or FreeDNS:42 with SSL connection encryption.

vjerancrnjak

8 hours ago

I can’t even register an account at Oracle.

I’ve tried many things and their 3rd party check refuses to consider me a good actor.

a2128

8 hours ago

They successfully charged my card for $1 like a dozen times as I tried and failed to get past their check. At the time I wasn't even interested in the free stuff, I wanted to pay for an ARM VPS, and their verification system just wasn't satisfied with something. After getting frustrated I tried to sign up for Hetzner instead and they allowed me to register and spin up a VPS without even having any payment information on file, they just trusted that I would pay the invoice at the end of the month. Funny how different the two companies treat this stuff.

seszett

8 hours ago

I contacted them by email and was eventually able to create an account. Had to contact them again at another point where their system once again checks for something with a credit card and again rejected me. I can't remember exactly for what.

It worked eventually and I use the free tier server for small things, but of course it means I can't ever consider using their service for anything serious.

vjerancrnjak

2 hours ago

Yes, I sent them an email, I tried 3 debit cards and a credit card over a span of 1 year. They told me they cannot resolve the issue or process the transaction. They refused to provide any extra information.

I quit trying.

KeplerBoy

9 hours ago

thanks for the description

OutOfHere

9 hours ago

This is fine as a technical exercise, but trusting Oracle is a very bad idea for numerous reasons if your data is not mirrored or backed up elsewhere.

diggan

8 hours ago

Trusting any single actor with your data is a bad idea, no matter if it's Oracle, Cloudflare or $CurrentInternetDarling.

OutOfHere

8 hours ago

Different levels of trust can be placed in different providers for different types of data. Oracle is however at the bottom of the list with regard to trust.

diggan

8 hours ago

> Different levels of trust

Sufficiently different that you wouldn't backup your data at more locations? I don't think there is a single provider I'd trust that much, at least for data I really need to be still exist while I'm alive.

OutOfHere

7 hours ago

Yes, some paid ones that encrypt the data and have been in business for many years. They're not publicly listed in the stock market, and so they don't have to put up with the self-destructing demands of shareholders

diggan

4 hours ago

Interesting, you're certainly more brave than me :) One of the places I used for backups been around for 2 decades, I still wouldn't trust them enough to store my only copy of something.

bjw4

9 hours ago

How come? Have you had a bad experience with Oracle?

Wowfunhappy

9 hours ago

If any long-term users (say 10+ years) have had a good experience with Oracle, I would like to hear from them!

Dalewyn

8 hours ago

VirtualBox.

doubled112

8 hours ago

Unless one of your employees downloaded the extension pack and now Oracle is after you.

luma

8 hours ago

Famously, the most litigious and generally obnoxious to deal with enterprise software company on the planet. Or ale doesn’t have customers, they have hostages.

tchbnl

9 hours ago

Oracle is not known for its generosity.

NikolaNovak

8 hours ago

I find that Oracle has tremendous generosity on individual level. That's how people become familiar with their products and services.

It's when you're in production and particularly as a billion+ dollar company that screws get properly tightened!

But from the time I was a student in 90s to occasional dabbler now, I find their free / personal / individual / non-prod offerings to in fact be extremely generous.

tossit444

8 hours ago

Sudden suspensions with no chance to appeal or explanation, regardless if you were a paying customer or just a free tier user. It's ridiculous.

keyle

8 hours ago

I take it you've never worked with Oracle.

to3k

8 hours ago

We are talking about nextcloud so backup of everything is on all of your devices with are sync to it

dewey

8 hours ago

Seems like a lot of work (and risk) to avoid paying someone ~ $5 or less / month.

christina97

8 hours ago

The machine has 24 GB of RAM, which is nowhere near that cheap in most places.

dewey

8 hours ago

KS-A (https://eco.ovhcloud.com/de/): 64GB RAM, 480GB SSD, ~5USD/month

zx8080

7 hours ago

I would not trust OVH anything which not ephemeral, as there were couple of quite interesting incidents [0] in the last years.

0 - https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/analysis/ovhcloud-fire...

dewey

7 hours ago

This is a bit alarmist. They are one of the biggest web hosts in the world, whole companies run on their servers and cloud without issues. Accidents happen and you always need to have backups, ideally in another DC.

SahAssar

7 hours ago

Wow, pairing a 9 year old processor with 64GB ram and 100Mbps. What are common use-cases that require much ram but not processing power, disk space or a higher bandwidth?

dewey

6 hours ago

That is their "budget" ("eco") line so the target is people on a budget or hobbyists so that's why you sometimes get odd or old hardware.

SahAssar

4 hours ago

Sure, was just a bit surprised by the amount of ram, but I'm guessing they just had old ram from older high-end servers and put it to use.

Seems it was also just sold out, maybe because of your comment.

TiredOfLife

6 hours ago

Yes, the sku that has a stock of 2 every couple of months.

crtasm

6 hours ago

Do you need anywhere near that much to run nextcloud?

to3k

5 hours ago

Of course not but you can run way more stuff on this server in parallel to nextcloud

immibis

10 hours ago

Note that Oracle free instances may be deleted at any time for no reason.

staindk

9 hours ago

And per many anecdotes on HN it's not just a "may" - I recall reading about people who had been prompted to upgrade to some paid tier, and upon declining their free tier account was closed.

IMcD23

2 hours ago

From what I've seen, there's actually two different levels of free tier. There's the one where you make an account and don't give them your payment info, and are on a free trial (availability of Ampere servers is severely limited in this, and they deactivate your account if you don't sign in often enough or use the servers you create), and the other where you give them payment information and set up a real account and get credits towards 200GB storage and the free tier compute.

My guess is that people who complain about their stuff being deleted are on the former.

kasabali

9 hours ago

Also good luck creating an account in the first place. Their shitty fraud checking partner keeps rejecting perfectly legit credit cards even after they've been verified with 3D secure check.

hsbauauvhabzb

8 hours ago

They’ve scraped your biometrics and deem you as a non paying customer. They have no further value for you now.

akoboldfrying

9 hours ago

This also happened to me.

I do still get their email invitations to participate in various OCI webinars and developer conferences. Which is, you know, what I really wanted all along.

PunchTornado

8 hours ago

"may" is that English word that non-natives learn too late that it actually means "will".

I remember when I first moved to England and my boss told me I may work on x and I thought that it is optional so I did something else.

appendix-rock

8 hours ago

I regularly use may in a way that doesn’t mean “will”. Sorry that you had a bad experience or whatever.

poincaredisk

8 hours ago

I think that's a British thing (I also worked in the UK for a while and got confused by this).

strijelac

9 hours ago

Blog is not working (too many redirects error). Website is perfectly fine (tomaszdunia.pl). Maybe it's just me because Pi Hole and stuff...

to3k

8 hours ago

Nope my blog exploaded because of the number of entries :( Sorry for that!

jeffrallen

9 hours ago

I was a happy "customer" of Oracle always free instances until they locked me out of my account. My instance is still running for now, but I can't change the firewall anymore.

You get what you pay for...

tomp

9 hours ago

Is anyone still using Docker?

I am, simply because I haven't "updated" my stack in a few years.

But are there any remaining arguments for using Docker instead of Podman (sudo-less docker alternative)?

Alifatisk

8 hours ago

I still use Docker, any particular reason why I should switch to Posman except it being daemonless?

afiori

9 hours ago

If you have a complex compose setup* I guess that docker is still a good value.

Overall going with the most popular option has various benefits in terms of compatibility and support.

*Either in terms of many complex services or in terms of services like traefik that rely a lot on listening to the docker socket

vel0city

8 hours ago

If you add yourself to the docker group you don't need to use sudo.

drowsspa

7 hours ago

Because you are basically root then

TiredOfLife

6 hours ago

Every 3rd party application that uses containers provide only instructions/support for docker.

lousken

7 hours ago

this seemed interesting before i read about oracle... Never. Trust. Oracle

wildrhythms

9 hours ago

(translated from Polish)

Welcome to blog.tomaszdunia.pl Upload all files to the root directory of your account.

https://archive.ph/CNOLF

to3k

8 hours ago

Yup sorry for that, blog exploaded because of the number of entries.