OTHER CLOUD PROVIDERS

Amazon Web Services offers Amazon Linux, Debian, Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu and Windows as part of a 12-month free tier. Amazon offers MacOS, but not as part of the free tier. A marketplace offers hundreds of additional images. Armbased hardware is included in the free tier until the end of the year (look for an instance type of t4g.small).

Google Cloud offers a Free Tier (not to be confused with its Free Trial) that isn’t time limited. It’s tricky to configure instances to stay within the Free Tier because there’s no clear labelling of what’s included, and if you accidentally use anything that’s excluded you start running up charges. Operating systems offered include CentOS, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Red Hat, Rocky Linux, Ubuntu and Windows. There are additional charges to use Red Hat and Windows. A marketplace offers many additional choices of carefully selected images. Google offers no Arm-based hardware.

Microsoft Azure virtual machines (VMs) are only available as part of a 12-month free trial. Azure has experienced shortages of the VM sizes that are included in the free trial so you may need to be flexible on the location of your machine. Only badly outdated versions of CentOS, CoreOS, Debian, Red Hat and Ubuntu are listed by default, but a marketplace offers a selection of more recent Linux distributions. Arm hardware is being trialled, but isn’t generally available at the time of writing.

There are many companies offering low-cost virtual private servers, and these are typically cheaper than bigger cloud providers if you don’t need the advanced features of the bigger providers.