Maybe the title is a bit clickbaity, but if you have a VPS that costs less than $25/month, it's most likely not wrong.
You might know that platforms like AWS and Google Cloud have a free tier for their cloud services. You might also know that signing up for it is not worth it at all because you really don't get that much, and if you accidentally go beyond the free tier limits, you'll suddenly start racking up costs. Oracle apparently wants to challenge that, because they offer the following configuration for free, forever:
Quote
CPU: 4x Ampere Altra ARMv8.2-A @ 3.00GHz
RAM: 24GB DDR4 ECC
Storage: 200GB NVMe SSD
Network: 1Gbit/s, 10TB bandwidth/month
IPs: 2 IPv4, 2x /56 IPv6
Other: running 24/7, root access, VNC, choice from 23 locations
I've been testing it out for myself, and I can confirm that these specs are actually what they look like. You can't tell that it's an ARM CPU from the performance. I've also been trying to find the hidden gotchas of this deal, but it looks like there really aren't any. They've even made it so that your account can't get billed by default, so you can never accidentally go beyond the limits.
Link:
https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
Benchmark:
Quote
! ```plaintext
Yet-Another-Bench-Script
v2021-06-05
! Thu Jul 29 10:55:29 UTC 2021
! ARM-compatibility is considered experimental
! Basic System Information:
Processor : Neoverse-N1
CPU cores : 4 @ ??? MHz
AES-NI : ✔ Enabled
VM-x/AMD-V : ❌ Disabled
RAM : 23.3 GiB
Swap : 12.0 GiB
Disk : 193.7 GiB
! fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50):
| Block Size |
4k (IOPS) |
64k (IOPS) |
| Read |
90.05 MB/s (22.5k) |
321.67 MB/s (5.0k) |
| Write |
89.99 MB/s (22.4k) |
331.23 MB/s (5.1k) |
| Total |
180.04 MB/s (45.0k) |
652.91 MB/s (10.2k) |
|
| Block Size |
512k (IOPS) |
1m (IOPS) |
| ------ |
--- ---- |
---- ---- |
| Read |
204.63 MB/s (399) |
184.65 MB/s (180) |
| Write |
222.13 MB/s (433) |
206.02 MB/s (201) |
| Total |
426.77 MB/s (832) |
390.67 MB/s (381) |
! iperf3 Network Speed Tests (IPv4):
| Provider |
Location (Link) |
Send Speed |
Recv Speed |
| Clouvider |
London, UK (10G) |
1.01 Gbits/sec |
1.02 Gbits/sec |
| Online.net |
Paris, FR (10G) |
1.00 Gbits/sec |
996 Mbits/sec |
| WorldStream |
The Netherlands (10G) |
busy |
busy |
| Biznet |
Jakarta, Indonesia (1G) |
186 Mbits/sec |
43.7 Mbits/sec |
| Clouvider |
NYC, NY, US (10G) |
818 Mbits/sec |
819 Mbits/sec |
| Velocity Online |
Tallahassee, FL, US (10G) |
572 Mbits/sec |
694 Mbits/sec |
| Clouvider |
Los Angeles, CA, US (10G) |
520 Mbits/sec |
472 Mbits/sec |
| Iveloz Telecom |
Sao Paulo, BR (2G) |
236 Mbits/sec |
399 Mbits/sec |
! iperf3 Network Speed Tests (IPv6):
| Provider |
Location (Link) |
Send Speed |
Recv Speed |
| Clouvider |
London, UK (10G) |
1000 Mbits/sec |
999 Mbits/sec |
| Online.net |
Paris, FR (10G) |
979 Mbits/sec |
984 Mbits/sec |
| WorldStream |
The Netherlands (10G) |
1000 Mbits/sec |
1.00 Gbits/sec |
| Clouvider |
NYC, NY, US (10G) |
723 Mbits/sec |
875 Mbits/sec |
| Clouvider |
Los Angeles, CA, US (10G) |
489 Mbits/sec |
373 Mbits/sec |
! Geekbench 5 Benchmark Test:
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