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Comment by 5e92cb50239222b | Hacker News Reader

Off-topic, but who is using this? $3.50 a month for a machine that was fine around 15 years ago. You can get a 4-core aarch64 server with 24 GBs of RAM for free from Oracle if you're willing to sell your soul to the devil. I did a few months ago, and it's been great sailing ever since.

https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/#always-free

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That's insane. What's the catch here? I do scientific computing on my laptop and would love to offload some of that to the cloud. Am I going to get hung up somewhere after investing a bunch of time only to find out that it's not as useful as it sounds due to some obscure fine print?

There is no catch. I'm using it for a while without much problems.

No fine print. Even their data transfer limit (10 TiB out per month) works as advertised. I run a tor node which pushes ~9.5 TiB out each month, leaving half a terabyte for myself. No issues yet.

Watch out for:

> Resources identified as Always Free will not be reclaimed. After your Free Trial expires, you'll continue to be able to use and manage your existing Always Free resources, and can create new Always Free resources according to tenancy limits.

> However, Ampere A1 Compute instances are disabled when your trial ends and then deleted (terminated) after 30 days, unless you upgrade to a paid account. To continue using Arm-based compute instances as an Always Free user, you must delete your existing Ampere A1 Compute instances and create new Ampere A1 Compute instances.

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