So free VM and other stuff is always free.
Free f1-micro VM for Life @ Google Compute Cloud
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No, there's no location restriction on the account.
The "US regions" restriction on the free VM refers to the location of the VM's datacenter.
do you really need this?
I think this offer is definitely a case of "If you have to ask that, it's not for you"
Happy to help. Regular price to setup is $100,000 but ozbargain special to you is only $1,000.
excellent.
Be interested to know what my fellow OzBargainers are going to use this for?
Only 1GB of outward bandwidth is pretty low for most things. Watch out.
its free
Yes but im presuming they have your payment details on file to bill you when you inadvertently go over, which you almost certainly will running any kind of service thats open.
I just tried to pay using a reloadable card and they refused, somehow they knew it was prepaid..
@leTintin: Pasted this from another deal a few minutes ago but is relatable to this exact situation -
The cards actual numbers have identifying codes in them, you don't even really need to use third party merchant software to work it out; if you take the time of course, like Foxtels team I assume will have.
They come straight from ISO 7812 standards.
For example, 5 is the starting number for Mastercards, Visa's start with a 4 (Then following numbers are bank/location, etc) so forth, I don't know the exact identifying parts for the reloadable cards but it follows the same pattern and in the cases that they don't.. It can usually be seen in merchant information when being submitted through a creditcard processing application.Warning Take this following advice with a grain of salt! I personally like to use my LadBrokes card for things like this.. or my William Hill card.. etc - Of course this is more convenient for someone who already does some betting since any limits/restrictions or the actual purchase of the card to use (15/20$ processing fee) are already taken care of.. But in the end maybe food for thought for some of you!
1 GB network egress from North America to all region destinations per month (excluding China and Australia)
Yep, network egress to Australia is 19c (US) per GB, or 6c if you have peering with Google.
I'm not yet sure of what happens if you go over this. If you host a small blog and someone DDOS' your site or "bandwidth raeps" it, is there possibility they will charge your card $X?
Edit: I created a billing alert to get notifications if I spend $0.05.
They give you $300 of free credit (12 month expiry) and any extra charges are deducted from this.
Once this is gone, then you have to pay.
They also said they won't charge your card until you give permission - I assume if you don't give permission they will turn your stuff off.Edit: found the wording on their FAQ page
What happens if I spend all of my free trial credit?
If you spend your entire $300 credit before the end of the 12-month period, your free trial ends at that time and your account is paused. Your credit card is not charged unless you upgrade to a paid account.
Confirming that.
they already have my payment method in file.
That puts you to $25 a month, slightly less than the $26 needed for an Ubuntu insantiation.
The multisite WordPress is very tempting, at $4.28/month (this is an f1 with 10GB so you could upgrade to 30G and still be within limits of the offer)
Also other things like MySQL
Remarkably a RedHat VM is more expensive than 2016 Datacentre VM! Go figure…How do you provision the multi site WordPress?
I couldn't find the multisite wordpress at $4.28/mo. Do you mean to install wordpress on f1 or on appEngine? Either way, I have to maintain it, watch for security upgrades, and manually handle spams. I hope you meant a special wordpress setup where those are automated for you.
If you're using it for a web server you can stick Cloudflare in front on it. If configured properly you site should see little traffic as Cloudflare's free CDN should handle most of the traffic.
I hadn't realised Cloudflare had a free option, thanks!
I haven't read the T&Cs. Is there a limit to the number of accounts you can make? Otherwise you can "scale horizontally"…this is/was surprisingly allowed with Firebase, but we don't even need a credit card for the free usage tier.
"Thanks for signing up for the 12 month free trial. We've given you $300 in free trial credit to spend. If you run out of credit, don't worry, you wont be billed until you give your permission."
FYI if anyone is trying to find the VM section, its under "Compute Engine" on the main menu.
found that… dont see any free f1 so far.
No - I just tried to create a VM (tried several US server locations) and the cheapest config I could see is still $4.28 a month..
The site says:
Google Compute EngineScalable, high-performance virtual machines
1 f1-micro instance per month (US regions only) 30 GB-months HDD, 5 GB-months snapshot 1 GB network egress from North America to all region destinations per month (excluding China and Australia)The $300 free trial is a different offer. The "free f1-micro VM" gives you a VM instance which supposedly is billed at $0, and is not limited to the 12 month trial. According to the FAQ, you create a f1-micro VM as usual, and at the end of each month, google will credit you for up to the limits you've given there. Note that also according to the FAQ, the account must be upgraded from the 12-month free trial account; the upgraded account will be charged if you go beyond the free limits.
Caveat ozbargainer.
the cheapest config I could see is still $4.28 a month..
This different product can come out of your $300 credit.
FREE
It's "Free for Life" until Google decide it's no longer free and stop the service :).
That said, free for now is still good!
People always incorrectly assume "for life" means their life when the saying actually means "for the life of the product/service".
True. Products guaranteed for life are guaranteed to last as long as they last.
Funnily enough, I'm on a three month trial and I got a notification that it has been extended to 12 months. Related?
I already activated the $300 trial, how do I instantiate this free offer now?
Will there be overusage charges?
found a NOTE: f1-micro instances get 0.2 of a vCPU and is allowed to burst up to a full vCPU for short periods
I see the free 12month trial,, but no "life time" vm?
So basically, when you sign up, you gain access to the "free trial", $300 of credit for 12 months. Without doing anything further, your account will be in free trial mode, where you won't get billed for anything. To get access to the "Always Free" tier, you need to upgrade your account to enhanced billing, where you WILL get charged if you use up all your credit.
While this would probably be fine for US customers, we get the shit end of the stick where we'll get charged for traffic to the VM, so it's not truly free once the trial credits run out.
In what regions is Always Free available?
Google Compute Engine and Google Cloud Storage are eligible for Always Free in us-east1, us-west1, and us-central1 regions.
1 GB network egress from North America to all region destinations per month (excluding China and Australia)
That is datacentre location, not client base (AFAIU)
Free is great and I've signed up just because, but what do I actually do with GCP? I'm not from a dev background so have no idea what I can use it for otherwise
Wait, I got downvoted for asking this question? What is it, some big secret that you're not allowed to tell non-developers or something?
may as well go with AWS.
They have t2.micro instance for free for a year and that's 1vcp and 1gb ramSo basically it is free trial for a year and after that it is free but very limited (no traffic to Australia, i.e. useless for most of us).
FYI, other cloud providers usually also offer free 1 year trial, for example, Amazon AWS free tier is here:
https://aws.amazon.com/free/Can it be used to mine bitcoin?
Do I need to create an account as a US resident? How do I do this?