Self hosting for free (with caveats!) with Oracle Cloud

Installation Hosting
62

You have Apache running, so Discourse can’t use ports 80 or 443.

onnecting to somethingawesome.com (somethingawesome.com)|64.13.192.115|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 
  HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error
  Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2020 21:58:07 GMT
  Server: Apache/2.4.39
  X-Powered-By: PHP/5.6.21
  Expires: Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT
  Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0
  Pragma: no-cache
  Last-Modified: Wed, 30 Sep 2020 21:58:07 GMT
  Vary: User-Agent
  Connection: close
  Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
--2020-09-30 14:58:08--  (try: 2)  http://somethingawesome.com/

You usually get a different error than that, which suggests that this might not be the VM that you’re trying to install Discourse on.

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63

@pfaffman somethingawful is not his site

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64

Oh. My bad. Well, then it’s going to be hard to be much help. Good luck!

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65

Hey don’t apologise, Jay. That’s a useful insight in any case. I will try to remember that one

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66

Sorry to disappoint but nothing is free in this world as they will still charge you up to three dollars every day for things such as block storage and storage which I contacted support about and they said nothing is free in Oracle, so go with Digital Ocean.

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67

I’m still hosting a test site there for free

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68

How long have you been running the site?

69

More than 6 months, but less than a year, I’d say. Only a very basic, and low-powered server is available for free.

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70

When you create a server, make sure that every selected option is “Always Free Eligible”.
Example:

image
image1192×225 17.8 KB

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71

I have had it and even support said it’s not free so I’m a bit confused.
But anyways - I setup a sandbox discourse forum for 40 dollars for my 100 dollar trial on Digital Ocean so that’s fine.

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72

Did you actually had to pay something? Can you share your invoice?
Like @jtbayly, a friend and I have both free servers on Oracle since May and we haven’t been charged anything.

From Oracle’s website:

What are Always Free cloud services?

Databases Compute Storage Additional Services
Your choice of Autonomous Transaction Processing or Autonomous Data Warehouse. 2 databases total, each with 1 OCPU and 20 GB storage. 2 virtual machines with 1/8 OCPU and 1 GB memory each. 2 Block Volumes, 100 GB total. 10 GB Object Storage. 10 GB Archive Storage. Load Balancer: 1 instance, 10 Mbps bandwidth. Monitoring: 500 million ingestion datapoints, 1 billion retrieval datapoints. Notifications: 1 million sent through https per month, 1,000 sent through email per month. Outbound Data Transfer: 10 TB per month. Logging and Logging Analytics: 10GB of storage per month.
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73

Discourse will run fine in a $5 DigitalOcean droplet. Don’t use their one-click installation.

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74

Alright, thanks. I appreciate it.

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75

WARNING: Discourse requires 1GB RAM to run. This system does not appear
to have sufficient memory.

Your site may not work properly, or future upgrades of Discourse may not
complete successfully.

Can not install.

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76

You aren’t really telling us anything useful for us to be able to help you.

The free tier has 1GB of RAM which is adequate, is that what you’re installing on?

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77

Yea, i’m using free tier:

image

But check on cli is not 1GB:

image
image734×138 4.01 KB

Don’t know why.

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78

Seems strange as when using Digital Ocean it’s telling me it requires 2.

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79

No; I haven’t paid anything as I deleted my instances but free credits were taken off of my account and this shouldn’t of happened.

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80

It will enable swap on a 1GB server, but either way you need 1GB of RAM.

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81

Yep! Seems to be working now, https://discourse.work is online.

1 Like