I have no job, so the gift cards I have are prepaid and only have a few dollars on them. I should get a job soon, but in the meantime, I want to run my own Lemmy instance. I know this is probably a stupid question, but is there a way to do so? If I run it on just my computer, it’ll shut down when my computer turns off, and there is an old computer my parents have but they won’t let me use it because they don’t wanna buy a new charger (The charger cord is broken)
I know of a few VPS that are ‘free’, and I use that word quite loosely. Long time back I explored a few, and I can tell you that they are not worth the time of day. Very cheap VPS can be had. I had one that ran me $25 USD per year. It wasn’t the most thread rippin’ VPS you could have, but it certainly was cheap, and at one time I had about 25 different containers running on it with out much trouble. A good place to look for cheap VPS is at lowendbox.com.
Oracle offers a free tier, but you really have to watch your consumption of resources, and I believe they require a credit card to open an account. There are horror stories of people who went over the limit and ended up with a good size bill
I realize $25 USD is not free and does not fit within your request, and I empathize. As far as using your own computer with something like Docker, and shutting it down each evening…I shut my server down every evening via a cron job. I am the only user, and I just couldn’t justify letting it run while I slept. So I guess you’d say it’s an intermittent service.
Just to add to your comment:
As much as I hate oracle, I run their free-tier vps in a Canadian datacenter and it never required my cc. I think it’s geographic location-dependent.
That’s cool. I was thinking one of the free tiers like Amazon, Google required a CC to open one. Side question: What do you run on Oracle, and how fastidious do you have to be about controlling resource consumption? I’ve read about people on one of the free tiers getting socked a big bill, in fact it’s a meme now.
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