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

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.

2 Likes
63

@pfaffman somethingawful is not his site

3 Likes
64

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

5 Likes
65

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

1 Like
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.

2 Likes
67

I’m still hosting a test site there for free

1 Like
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.

1 Like
70

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

image
image1192×225 17.8 KB

2 Likes
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.

1 Like
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.
1 Like
73

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

2 Likes
74

Alright, thanks. I appreciate it.

1 Like
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.

1 Like
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?

1 Like
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.

1 Like
78

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

1 Like
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.

1 Like
80

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

2 Likes
81

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

1 Like