My mastery of language is fading.
I had some ongoing frustrations with hosting on GoDaddy last year, and AWS the year before. Even though mclaughlin.one is a very fancy and influential site on the interwebs, the horsepower required to support and deliver this site is modest. Because it’s mostly text, the whole site totals only 11 mb and can be delivered easily.
Due to the low computing and storage requirements, I built this on OCI on the ‘Always Free’ tier. Oracle offers a unique twist on their free tier. Unlike some other cloud services' time-bound free resources, Oracle choose a collection of limited services and made them ‘Always Free’. It is more than robust enough to support my efforts here.
The problem was I thought ‘Always Free’ meant always free. As in ‘this will always be free’. However, there is a catch. Oracle notified me that my free resources would be reclaimed because, get this, I wasn’t using them enough! My cpu/memory/network use was not consistently high enough over time. They went on to explain that under-utilized free resources are reclaimed to make capacity to give to other users. That’s fair, and one thing I learned in ‘Negotiation and Decision Making’ in my last year of college is that it is difficult to argue against fair.
What to do??? I had three choices:
- Go somewhere else. But, eh, I’m already here. Also, I 99% understand what is happening in the bowels of the internet and the black-magic of Cloudflare that get you here when you type www.mclaughlin.one, but that stray 1% worries me when I consider moving.
- Work around it. I liberated a bit of bash script a kind person noted here that would allow me stress the system and avoid the low-use problem. That seemed backwards and burning resources for no common-sense reason felt like bad karma.
- Pay. Sort of. Against my nature and my understanding of language (always? free?) I had to change my relationship with Oracle and agreed to a paid plan. Now instead of dating we are married. With this I have dodged the shutdown for limited use, but in return all of Oracle’s paid services are now open to me.
Here’s the rub: the world of cloud computing is complex and difficult to understand. If I keep mclaughlin.one as is I will stay within the bounds of the free offerings and all will be well. But if I do something that carries a fee, whether accidental or intentional, I’m on the hook. It’s easy to make a mistake. It is costly to make an exponential mistake. Wish me luck!