Oracle Cloud has the best Compute/VM Always Free Tier around (2x 1G RAM/50G VMs), which is likely sufficient for a small matrix/synapse server, so realistically you could do it for zero. I don’t know how much network transfer is included in their free tier, however (I’ve looked but never seen it clearly stated anywhere).

So, what, Google is bad now, and Oracle good? Funny world.

Good until they capture enough market share to stop bribing people to switch.

I thought I was just talking about vm/compute, which is quite a lot different than using a mail service where you are essentially the product.

Bad guys are bad guys whatever service they sell. I've created an Oracle Technology Network account (luckily, with my ex-company email) in order to download something from OTN and soon was swamped with spam from various companies they sold my address to, with no way to unsubscribe. Should I mention that I always untick the "send me marketing offers" checkbox?

Switching from Google Products to hosting parallel products in Oracle Cloud is basically the same as one step forwards, two steps back.

It’s not switching from Google to Oracle. It’s just a place to spin up your own vm/instance, and for very little. You are conflating services.

thank you so much for this, didnt know they had such a gracious free tier. The only thing I saw was "Outbound Data Transfer: 10 TB per month." but you are absolutely right, it isn't spelt out directly.

Ah ok I think I remember that and I wasn’t sure it that was linked to the LB service or the VMs. Perhaps/likely it’s either/both. In any case, wow 10TB is awesome. I think Google Cloud’s Free Tier transfer limit is 1G, which is one of the reasons I powered it down (the other being they started charging for external IP’s on the free tier compute instances).

Also they have Oracle Linux 8 as an OS option for free tier, so you’re covered if you prefer the EL ecosystem (eg given the current CentOS situation).

As an alternative to all the US products being suggested, let me suggest an EU alternative: Contabo.

Their cheapest offering (€4/month including tax) is more than enough for even the heavy web applications and their lowest storage tier will net you 300GiB to play with. The big downside is that networking is limited to 100Mbps, but for casual use that's not that big a deal in practice. That's plenty for a NextCloud instance, a matrix server, a bridge or two, a mail server and more with RAM to spare. The benefit of the classic VPS model over auto scaling cloud compute with a free tier is that a runaway script won't cost you a few hundred bucks if something goes wrong.

I've been using them for some random projects and they have been pretty decent for the price.

That's a good point! I should add the total cost to the post. I mentioned I use the cheapest Linode server but didn't actually say how much that is. I pay $5/month (USD) for the server (except I got the first two months for free from some promo code I found on another blog), and $10/year (CAD) for carbon offsets. I also paid $5/year (USD) for the domain name I use.

awesome thank you so much for updating. Unless I missed it in your post, who is your domain registrar for the low price?

I use namecheap.com. The prices vary a lot, I use a .cloud domain, I think obscure TLDs and domain name choices are cheaper, but I'm not exactly sure how their pricing actually works.

Synapse is essentially invisible on a $5/mo digitalocean VM, in my experience. I don't have too many people on it, but I've run my own server for about a year and a half now and I've had no issues whatsoever. Throw it on a VM if you have one lying around, and if not you can always spin up a new one and use it for any other services you want to host in the future.

It was fine for me until I federated and the avatar folder grew over the gigabyte because joining another room triggers the downloading and caching of pictures and there are no thumbnails.