Times, when I had a big discount on Webh, came to the end. Facing big VPS payments, I decided to migrate. Few solutions attracted my attention.

I was guided mainly by practical reasons – the cheaper, the better. Of course, I’m joking. One of the main requirements was reliability and sustainable performance with cost-effectiveness in mind.

Server specification

I heard about a new Free Tier server from my friend Adam. I looked at what can be provisioned on Oracle Cloud:

4 OCPUs? 24 GB of RAM? For free?

As you expected, I’ve gone the full blast :)
It could be divided into a few smaller servers, but…why?

Let’s look at my maxed-out specification. On the left, you can see processing power and RAM, on the right disk specification.

Disks sized from 100 GB get more IOPS, so it’s a nice hack to go bigger. The only downside is that the system will see only 50 GB, and you need to expand the partition yourself. I don’t know why, but that was my case.

The second factor that you need to know is that ARM VPS comes only in Oracle Linux flavor. For someone, it might be a big downside, for me, it’s acceptable.

Tests

Testing methodology is the same as in my Short VPS comparison. Three basic syntactical tests to show connection speed, disk speed (slowest of 5 runs) and uptime with mean response time.

As you can see, Oracle Cloud ARM has a faster connection than Oracle Cloud Free (~50/50) and paid Oracle Cloud that I tested earlier. I’m amazed by this result. It’s a free solution and speed can be compared to Scaleway which was the fastest last time.

Balanced Performance disks use HDD as a storage solution, so they won’t be blazing fast. Unexpectedly, I can’t see the difference in performance compared to my old Webh server with SSD. Caching of everything that can be cached hides those low speeds.

Stability and response time is on a very good and similar level to my last tests:

Summary

As you can see by the performance of this blog (which is better than on Webh) ARM VPS from Oracle Cloud Free is a perfectly fine solution. A large amount of RAM – 24GB provides infinite caching capabilities. Everything that is static and doesn’t need to be loaded from disk can be cached providing a performance boost.

PS. My migration took place on 29.08.2021 and from that date, everything works without any hiccups. I’ve got only one problem with my misconfiguration of Apache MPM Event which runs out of threads after one month :D