For 3 years I had a “selfhosted” server and used to host many services, mainly my site, my files (via NextCloud), my federated services (snac and matrix) but one day everything crumbled.
This is the story about how I had to change and adapt and put an end to my selfhosting aspirations (or did I?).
Three years ago I was trying to keep up to date with the IT scenario and decided to learn cloud. Then I discovered the Oracle OCI cloud services. Since they had a “always free” option, I signed up to it and create a FreeBSD server where I had the opportunity to learn both technologies, since I was mainly a Linux guy.
What I hosted on that server:
- my hugo site
- wife’s wordpress site
- a forgejo instance to keep my site and my passwordstore passwords
- my matrix server
- a snac instance
- a lot of experiments (thanks to freebsd jails and bastille <3)
So the problems started. The OCI billing kept growing and the charges were about computing. No matter how much services I stopped, the charges kept going. When I stopped and deleted the server, the charges stopped too. A new barebones server didn’t do much and as soon I startded any service, the billing started charging again. Mind you that I was bellow the thershold on the free service. Nothing had changed and I didn’t use the server to mine coins, LLMs or host any heavy traffic services.
Time to open a ticket. Obviously, nothing was solved.