I have an Oracle Always Free VPS. 4 ARM Ampere A1 vCPUs, 24GB RAM, 200GB storage. Will this be a good fit as a server for a Lemmy instance? Are there any issues with hosting Lemmy on aarch64?

  • ppp@lemmy.oneEnglish
    16·
    1 year ago

    Oracle has a tendency to pull the rug and take your VPS away. You can read about it on the forums or on r/oraclecloud. I still have mine but I’ve heard of so many stories about how Oracle will flat out just terminate your instance without warning.

    If you want to push through with it, make sure to do regular backups (as everyone should do).

  • I eat words@group.ltEnglish
    10·
    1 year ago

    it works fine, depending on popularity of your instance - you might have to add more resources in the future.

    as for aarch64 - there are docker images available for lemmy and lemmy-ui

    • Midas@toast.oooEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      as for aarch64 - there are docker images available for lemmy and lemmy-ui

      Oh seriously? That kinda stopped me from hosting my own. Got a link?

    • neoney@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Thanks, I’ll hope to not use docker though - planning to run NixOS, which has a module for it.

      Just double checked, the nixpkgs for lemmy-ui and lemmy-server have aarch64-linux support B)

      • I eat words@group.ltEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        i have not used NixOS yet, not sure how easy to setup it on Oracle OCI, but i guess you will do fine ;)

        • neoney@lemmy.neoney.devEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          You were right :) look at my username! Installation was very interesting - using kexec to swap the current loaded kernel to a NixOS live image, and installing it right over the current system surprisingly worked flawlessly. One reboot for an entire install (I might end up writing a post in !NixOS@infosec.pub about it).

          Setting up lemmy was a bit more difficult though, as the lemmy module is currently in the middle of a pull request to improve it, so I had to do some hacky trickery.

  • HTTP_404_NotFound@lemmyonline.comEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    Well, do just note- hosting an instance doesn’t directly help offset the load of this one-

    I had an extra server laying around, 32 cores, 64 threads, 256G of DDR-4, and figured I would host and instance to help offset some load, and support this movement. And- that is how https://lemmyworld.com/ was born.

    HOWEVER, as most of the communities were created on lemmy.world. most of the load will stay on lemmy.world. All of this hardware will only get leveraged if/when somebody decides to create a popular community on here.

    So, that being said, you can. But, be aware of how lemmy/mastadon/etc is setup.

    • neoney@lemmy.neoney.devEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I’m aware, thanks

      Ended up creating an instance just for me, my main reasons were:

      • not scared of instance shutting down and me losing my data - if I do, that’s on me
      • can block federation to an entire instance if I really don’t like some people
      • cool username
      • I don’t really get lag - if other instances are overloaded they work slowly, mine will work fine. Content from the slow ones will be slow, but the homepage will be better
      • I can make myself a community and use it as a blog

      I probably forgot about something too…

  • Gauntlet1525@abstract-scones.crabdance.comEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    A lot depends on what you intend for the size of the instance, but I host my private instance on Oracle too with even fewer resources and it’s been smooth sailing thus far.

    The only snags I ran into were some network and firewall issues - resolved by adding ingress rules to the VCN’s security list. See step 3 of https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/developer-tutorials/tutorials/apache-on-ubuntu/01oci-ubuntu-apache-summary.htm

  • scrchngwsl@feddit.ukEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    In my experience the Oracle Always Free ARM A1 instances are really good. There’s nothing I’ve really struggled to run on it personally, but I’ve never opened anything up to the public.

    However, as @ppp@lemmy.one said, Oracle tend to remove your instance without warning. You can mitigate this by “upgrading” to a paid account and adding your credit card info. As long as you stay within the free limits you’ll never be charged - but of course it is a risk! And they might still pull the rug anyway…

    • neoney@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I should upgrade my account then. My bank allows me to generate internet credit cards with a money limit, which I can just set to 0 B)

      • orankiEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        They’ll make an initial reservation of around $100 on the card, so don’t set the limit to 0 right away.

        The $100 is never charged, of course but you need the balance.

  • Midas@toast.oooEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Did anyone actually manage to run the Docker images on the Ampere instance? I get an exec error.

    • falcon15500@lemmy.nine-hells.netEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      You need to make sure you are pulling the images for your arch - the default ones are for x86_64. Check the docker hub pages for each, specifically the “Tags” tab.