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?
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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).
They deleted mine after 4 days.
Never again.
Huh, really?? I must be lucky then, because I just checked, and my server has been running since Mar 11, 2022!!
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
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 have not used NixOS yet, not sure how easy to setup it on Oracle OCI, but i guess you will do fine ;)
You were right :) look at my username! Installation was very interesting - using
kexecto 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 [email protected] 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.
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?
you can find them on docker hub - https://hub.docker.com/r/dessalines/lemmy
Ah I thought you might be referring to someone building their own image based on the Lemmy repos, because those give me exec errors when I start them on my OCI
i used to compile then using Dockerfile in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/docker/Dockerfile - probably you can use those commands on nixOS as well.
WTF? That’s crazy good stats for always free.
I know, right?
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
Ahh, the Oracle firewall, always annoys me for some reason…
Did anyone actually manage to run the Docker images on the Ampere instance? I get an exec error.
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.
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 @[email protected] 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…
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)
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.
damn, I don’t even have $100 right now lol
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.
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…
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