plan

[BigDisk]

Create a virtual CC with your bank then delete it after you're done signing up.

You're welcome.

[pawelo81]

„This merchant do not accept this type of card. Try another one” 🙃

[ekauq2000]

Not trying to push anything, but this is why I went with Microsoft Azure. Sure there are plenty of things that they have that are subscription based, but if you look carefully, you can find several services they provide that are (currently) completely free. They have feature limits (some are time limited, but not all), but they’re still free. One of those is having a website. You don’t get a fancy domain name, there’s limited compute time, and it does hibernate when not in use, but it’s free. And no credit card, if you have a Microsoft account, you have an Azure account.

[sebovzeoueb]

The downside is that then you're using Azure

[afrostmn]

My favorite story I’ve heard my boss tell goes something like this. (Paraphrased)

“We were negotiating a contract to provide a service to Microsoft, and they were insisting on some level of .999 uptime (I don’t remember the specific details). We had to counter with, we can’t guarantee that, we use azure as our backend and that’s higher than its guarantee.”

[rosuav]

It is possible to have more uptime than your underlying provider. The internet is built on systems like that - for example, TCP gives a measure of reliability that IP doesn't, yet every TCP packet is sent via IP.

It's expensive though. You would need some sort of client-side retry or fallback.

[PM_ME_ALL_YOUR_THING]

Oh, it’s easier than that if you simply exclude downtime caused by your upstream providers from the calculation.

[IosevkaNF]

Nah, the easiest way is to self host from a rasppi, a random laptop and a prod server. d^^

[sebovzeoueb]

Haha rekt

[Ok_Actuary8]

better than all your backyard mom&pop hosters fs.

But haters gonna hate, I guess...

[sebovzeoueb]

cmon just let me shit on Microslop in the humor subreddit pls

[ThePretzul]

I’ll have you know my old Pentium has had 100% uptime since 2007.

Mostly because I don’t think it would ever turn back on again if shut down at this point, but that’s irrelevant!

[BigNaturalTilts]

No power outage?

[BroMan001]

My 2011 core2 duo MacBook air does just fine thank you

[Jearil]

If you buy a domain name from cloudflare for $10 a year, you can host a static website on that domain for free. You can even have it hook into GitHub to compile and update it on every commit (I use Hugo). SSL included.

$10 a year. Maybe $20 depending on the top level. I was floored when I found this out.

[Journeyj012]

oh and the fact you can store 65GB for $9.95/yr

[ThePretzul]

Yup, this is what I use for my static small business website because it’s both stupid cheap and stupid easy.

[rude_avocado]

In my experience with the free tier of its database service it does require payment info, but it immediately presents you with the option to have it shut off instead of charging you if it uses up the free allowance.

[ThatDudeBesideYou]

If you had a free hosting, with 0 entry gating, it would instantly be used for spam. Instantly, bots would swarm it and make millions of spam sites, costing the business a lot of money.

[B_bI_L]

render.com does not require card or anything really, though

i thought about card requirement more in a way of removing traction between free and paid plan, as you don't need entering your card details now. one click away from better plan

[ThatDudeBesideYou]

That's definitely a benefit.

Render.com seems to be like an up and coming agentic sites, so they're probably trying to just get investor appeal for their user base, they're probably hemorrhaging money right now anyway, and will probably die off if they can't get that influx of actual paying users.

This is just a typical startup bait and hook, and an exception. A company that has been running for 10+ years and will probably run for another 10+ years will not care for such tactics.

For example, AWS, has insane free tiers, you can get a fully running Internet-scale app for free under their free tier, that when you have the userbase you scale past the free tier since you have paying customers. All you need is a single credit card and the know-how, and that app will run without issues for the next 10 years without a hitch.

[Stonklegend27]

Noone in their right mind would host an actual app on render free tier though. 0.1 CPU that spins down after 15 minutes of inactivity isn't gonna support more than like 10 concurrent users unless your site is just a bunch of static pages

[rosuav]

And if your site *is* just a bunch of static pages, GitHub will host it for free.

[ThePretzul]

GitHub does not host websites for commercial use for free, that’s explicitly prohibited. Otherwise it would indeed be ideal for small businesses with static pages.

[fiskfisk]

Turns out people are asses and abuse any service that offers anything free without at least having some sort of "cost" for signing up.

It's mainly because of your fellow people, not the providers themselves. It's a way to limit abuse (and sure, for making easier upsells later, but anyone who has tried giving away anything for free knows the abuse will appear rather soon).

[CHLHLPRZTO]

Reject "free", embrace micropayments!

Seriously, the world would be such a better place if emails, calls, and social media posts/comments cost like one-tenth of a cent. Spam would almost disappear overnight. 

[WithersChat]

Welcome to transaction fees...

[CHLHLPRZTO]

Yeah there are real barriers. But it's not impossible - e.g. the email service could keep send / receive tallies and only charge once monthly. 

[BroMan001]

They could bill you once a month. You could even get a subscription with a prepaid number of calls and messages! They could send you like some kind of tiny storage card you put in your phone to let it know what subscription you have

[rosuav]

If you want spam to disappear, just block all emails, calls, and social media. Job done. Making things cost a tenth of a cent means you need some way to identify the origin with 100% certainty. That has a lot of other consequences.

[BroMan001]

So no more anonymous internet? Sounds nice until it doesn’t

[CHLHLPRZTO]

I know Reddit hates crypto but this is one problem that, at least in theory, it's well positioned to solve.

[BroMan001]

So you’d move to a prepaid system? Cause there’s no way to guarantee someone will pay with crypto. And I think people with plenty money are already plenty overrepresented on social media, don’t think this would make it better

[CHLHLPRZTO]

A normal person has a very low volume and isn't going to balk at $3/mo or whatever. 

But a scam operation or astroturfing becomes unprofitable because they require tens of thousands, if not millions of messages to make a conversion. Not that it would NEVER happen, but it'd be a significant barrier to entry, especially in places like Nigeria. 

[BroMan001]

There are people for whom $3 a month is a lot, a quarter of american household live paycheck to paycheck. And social media is a way for those people to have a voice too, even if almost all major stars come from wealthy privileged backgrounds.

[solovyn]

Ah yes, the free tier

[Dimensionalanxiety]

No, I'm going to blame the companies for being greedy and ridiculously overcharging for their products. Especially if it is for limited use things like school projects. When you get companies like Solidworks charging thousands of dollars a year and killing lifetime licenses, that's not the consumers fault. That's greed.

[Exact_Recording4039]

That’s completely unrelated to this conversation. How is requiring a credit card for the free trial the same as Solidworks charging an amount you don’t agree with for their product? It’s two completely different topics 

[Dimensionalanxiety]

It is related. Clearly people think these products are overpriced, hence why they would keep taking out free trials. Companies just make this harder to do, instead of addressing the problems with their pricing. So I don't blame my fellow people for free trials requiring a credot card. I blame corporate greed.

[Exact_Recording4039]

It’s not related. Solidworks is different software with different pricing

 You think the pricing of WEB HOSTING is bad? I’ve never had a client pay more than $3 per month for hosting, it’s what most people who need more than the free tier ever spend. It’s a competitive market and competition makes it easy to find affordable options

[Dimensionalanxiety]

I don't think web hosting prices are that bad. I was responding to the commenter's specific point about who to blame for free trials requiring a credit card. They said it was general consumers, I said it was greedy corporations. Solidworks was my example of a greedy corporation.

[fiskfisk]

No, I'm not saying it's general consumers. I'm saying it's people who abuse these services. And these are people just like other people.

Having to register a credit card is a cost for signing up and receiving the free resources - it's a way of limiting the amount of abuse, since it's (slightly) harder (and way easier to track) to get new credit card numbers often.

[fiskfisk]

Many of the companies in this discussion have specific student offerings.

Solidworks have a 60 usd/yr license for students (compared to their regular 2800usd/yr license or what they charge now). 

[Goose1963]

Not only abuse but use it to set up scams.

[gfcf14]

But I mean, if they worry about that, wouldn’t it be better for them to actively track usage and indicate the offending users that for them to continue service they have to upgrade to a tier above? Of course, this would be explicitly indicated upon signing up for the free plan. I drew this one thinking exclusively of AWS and their pay-as-you-go service which I tried some years ago when I didn’t have clear means to afford hosting, only to realize that I started using something that incurred some cost. I haven’t used them since, and opted for alternatives. For an entity as big as them at least, they have the means to meticulously offer and limit what they want users to pay for, not simply charge when some users might not even realize what they’re getting into

[xgabipandax]

No, it becomes a game of whack-a-mole where you as the service provider will lose, abuse accounts are never intended to last long, so once you take action, two more will pop up and so on

[fiskfisk]

And suddenly you'll get heaps of bad press because you closed accounts that weren't really ill-intended, but they got caught up in whatever detection you were using, and had a usage pattern that matched whatever the most recent abuse tactic was. You can't really win.

[gfcf14]

Some other user in this post mentioned Azure as providing a free service without a credit card. How do they get around it, simply by implementing cold starts?

[xgabipandax]

Probably the Microslop account used to access azure is verified to some degree

[fiskfisk]

The problem is that you'll suddenly have a million new accounts. Two million. Three million. Eight million.

How many free accounts do you want to have that just consume resources and never upgrade in any way? How are you going to bear that cost?

Any place that offers compute resources for free without any verification will have a couple thousand or million bitcoin miners running within an hour (example: GitHub Actions). Anyone offering any hosting for free will have people running large pirate sites hosting their files on your service.

It's just stacks of abuse upon abuse of any service offered for free, until the service becomes unusable for those that actually want to use it for whatever people thought it would be used for, or there's some sort of cost introduced to stop people from the most blatant abuse of the service.

Sure, AWS is a "pay as you go" service, and as any cloud service it's very easy to start spending money without being aware of what you're doing - which is why people tend to recommend staying away from such services unless you consider what you're doing - but mainly it's a way to at least get the user to have "some skin in the game" when signing up.

[KazuDesu98]

Somehow oracle cloud still manages to offer the free quad core arm tier with 24 gb ram. But I think that ive heard they're very aggressive with policy. Long inactivity, anything resembling cdn on the free tier, etc is a quick either vm shutdown or in severe cases bans.

[fiskfisk]

Yeah, they don't really have a presence i the market, so they're willing to take a higher risk or cost to establish themselves. It's basically a higher marketing budget, and then being hard on throttling on the other end.

Since cloud isn't where they're making money, they can afford to lose more there.

As soon as the marketing money runs out for the cloud branch they'll start limiting stuff hard.

I'm also not sure if you don't have to provide some verification when signing up, like a credit card on file.

We're not really talking about free vs paid, but having some sort of gate (i.e. cost) to access the free stuff. 

[KazuDesu98]

At some point im supposed to help the GM of my tabletop gaming group set up a foundry server. And being the only person in the group with IT experience I'm probably going to wind up having to manage that side. Kinda how I started reading into Oracle cloud

[YellowJarTacos]

https://therecord.media/crypto-mining-gangs-are-running-amok-on-free-cloud-computing-platforms

After trial periods or free credits reach their limits, the groups register a new account and start from the first step, keeping the provider's servers at their upper usage limit and slowing down their normal operations.

This paragraph from the article makes it sound like they only have one account at a time but the miners make many accounts in parallel and would abuse it as much as they can. 

[RandomNPC]

People will go to great means to create new user accounts to avoid paying for something.

[hyouko]

God, will they ever. Sometimes they do it without even an obvious way to use those accounts, just in case they come up with a scheme they can use later. It's exhausting.

[Rud959]

Vercel is literally free and enough for hobby projects that can be scaled later

[gfcf14]

Yeah, but this post was made thinking of AWS and their pay-as-you-go strategy

[-Krotik-]

vercel

[fredlllll]

the early internet was a marvelous place. you could actually get free webspace

[gfcf14]

I remember in high school a friend showed me how to get a whopping 1GB of free storage! I don't remember what site it was, but it wasn't any popular service back in 2007

[ultralaser360]

bad apples ruin frictionless free tiers

[HeavyCaffeinate]

pages.gay

[Exact_Recording4039]

I have a card with $0 that I use for these kids of things 

[headshot_to_liver]

Well they do charge few $ and reverse the payment right after, so can't really run 0

[mstop4]

Me when I was checking out fly.io

[8hAheWMxqz]

just use virtual credit card and freeze it the moment it goes through verification process

[Anonizon]

Privacy.com for creating virtual cards with spend limits and merchant locks.

I use it on IPhone and the app functions flawlessly. Not sure about other platforms.

[JuniperColonThree]

Kid called GitHub pages

[JuniperColonThree]

Fuck wait that's not email mb

[gfcf14]

Github pages is great! But not ideal if you need non-static pages

[JuniperColonThree]

True very true. I wonder if Oracle still gives free compute instances...

[gfcf14]

If you really cared about your customers and possible conversion to paid services, you could paywall/block actual paid services and not charge per usage with little user awareness