That is only free for 12 months though. Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud offer one free VM in their "always free" offering. Personally I use a $5/month Digital Ocean box.

Oh, absolutely.

But I have an instance that I already use for other things (IRC bouncer, Mumble server, Taiga task/issue tracker, and test server for a game I was writing) that has plenty of CPU time to spare, so it's not costing me anything.