Free or inexpensive deployment options in Aug 2022

Description

I would like to deploy a Rocket.chat instance for as close to free as possible. I have a small server, ~200 users of which ~16 are active each month.

Fly.io lets you run Docker containers with up to 3GB of persistent storage (1GB if you don’t give them your CC info), but the only DB option they have at present is Postgres. Since they only run one container per app, I think I’d need to deploy two apps (a Mongo container and a Rocket.chat container). I’m just wondering if anyone has done this and can give any insight on whether it’s a good idea or not. Perhaps there are some hurdles I haven’t foreseen. Alternatively, can I use a single Rocket.chat container and connect it to a hosted version of MongoDB like Atlas?

Running the premade DigitalOcean droplet for $6/mo may be the simplest solution, although not free. There’s a $4/mo droplet, but it doesn’t look like it meets the hardware requirements.

Thanks!

It looks like another option is to use a GCE free tier e2-micro instance and cloudron. I’m seeing conflicting information about system specs, though. This page from February 2022 says that the $5 DO droplet (which I think is $6 now?) would work for Rocket.chat, and the $6 droplet has 1GB RAM, 1vCPU and 25GB SSD. However, the Cloudron app says it requires 3GB of RAM. The DO droplet helpfully gives you instructions to set up RC on an instance with 4GB of RAM, at $24/mo.

With no more than 16 users per month, and only a handful active at once, would an instance with 1GB RAM be sufficient to run RC and Mongo in Docker?

Hi!

1G RAM may not be enough for a regular usage, considering your usage scenario, with 200 users. What if 100, 150 uses it at the same time?

I have used CONTABO’s smallest VPS with a great performance.

Thanks for the reply! The hardware requirements page says I should be fine with 1GB RAM if I have 200 users, of whom no more than 50 are regularly online together. That definitely fits my use case, as we’ve never had that many users online at one time. I’m just trying to determine if the 1GB is just for RC, or if it includes the MongoDB.

Good suggestion of CONTABO, I hadn’t run across them before! Will have a look, ta.