Over the next week or so I’m sure a lot of people are going to try spinning up Lemmy instances - I’ve certainly been looking at it.
Does anyone have any recommendations for a VPS provider / resource allocation?
From what I have read, it sounds like you’re going to want a host that focuses on storage / bandwidth (at least if you are allowing image upload), but maybe those of you already operating an instance have a different opinion?
Oh I’ve heard some of the horror stories too. I was subbed to OracleCloud? I think for the major duration and realized fairly early that the hammer would come down eventually, so I made sure to have religious backups for my admittedly disposable services.
Yeah, heard the same stories.
I’ll admit some bias against some of them because I spent most of the last decade doing abuse and anti-fraud work for another cloud hosting provider, and boy did I ever hear an endless parade of ‘oh but I wasn’t doing anything!’ stories - even when I had absolute hard evidence that they were, indeed, doing something.
Still, you could always get a human and the human could make a decision and reverse any account action after looking at your account and talking to you - which is something that Oracle seems to absolutely not do, which is just… stupid? The people they’re banning are, at some point, going to be asked ‘hey have you used a cloud provider you like?’ and absolutely zero of them would ever recommend OCI.
I can only imagine the stories you have too. There were plenty of let’s say “suspicious” posts I’ve seen that were complaining of unannounced termination that I kinda suspect were either doing something illegal or against the EULA like mining crypto. But yeah agree that it would have made a big difference if I could appeal to OCI support and see if there was an alternative to removing the VM. But in the end people will probably keep getting hooked in on Oracle’s free tier, I just hope they’re making sure to be careful not to trust them too much.
They’re mostly boring stories: crypto mining and spam are probably 95% of them.
I would say, though, that you really shouldn’t ever trust any hosting provider too much. You (like, the global you: not anyone in particular) ideally wouldn’t want to be beholden to a single provider, (though I know that makes things cost more and isn’t really always practical) but you should never never never let your provider be the sole arbiter of your data.
The teams that make the decisions on your account are under weird metric pressures to follow the flowchart and move on as fast as possible and don’t really make any of the policies they’re following and so if you somehow end up in their workflows, expecting the worst outcome is probably not the wrong mindset.
Always have a backup of your data in your control so you can recover if your hosting provider kicks you off/vanishes/has a hardware failure/whatever.