I am learning Elixir and Phoenix at the moment. I would like to know where I can get free hosting for my open-source Phoenix app. I know Oracle Cloud has a free tier, but unfortunately. It seems there hasn’t been any availability for the past month for always-free apps. I read Fly.io had a free tier at one point, but they seem to have discontinued it. I beleive the only free option right now is Gigalixir but, it seems they delete your apps if you don’t deploy often. Any suggestions?
Gcloud offers a free e2-micro VM. I’m sure other providers offer similar.
I will say that pay as you go on fly.io is pretty affordable for personal projects. They can shutdown and startup automatically with traffic.
If your bill amounts to $5 or less, Fly doesn’t charge you. Depending on your usage it often ends up being free.
4 Likes
https://northflank.com/ - 2 services/apps and an instance of PostgreSQL, in which you can have multiple databases, for free. I’m now a paying customer.
Also, https://www.koyeb.com/
You can use Phoenix’s production Docker method for both: Deploying with Releases — Phoenix v1.7.21
1 Like
I suggest to go with a cheap paid plan; more sustainable for both you and the hosting company: they made money off you and you see a bill and will use the resource wisely. Major hoster usually charge ~5 USD per month for the lowest plan, but there are even cheaper ones here:https://lowendbox.com/
2 Likes
Don’t discard this option too fast. There’s some nuance:
-
It’s true that ARM instances have low availability, but you can still use their X86 VMs. While weaker than the ARM offer, they are pretty decent. Much better than what Google is offering.
-
If you apply to their PAYG plan and stay within the free plan limits, you will not pay at all. PAYG gives you almost guaranteed ARM instances - the availability situation doesn’t affect the paid plan. PAYG also protects your servers from shutdown due to low usage (the policy on the free plan).
The offer from Oracle is so good that it should be the first option for any project without funding.
If I upgrade to the PAYG plan, how will I know if I am using an always free resource or I will be charged?
You would need to be careful about the resources: use only the right VM types, make sure total RAM/oCPU/storage volumes across all VMs doesn’t exceed the free plan allowance. It’s not very hard, but it requires to understand what you are doing.
You can also set alerts if your bill exceeds a certain amount, but I’ve never needed it.
