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Oracle Cloud Always Free vs Budget VPS for Node.js + FFmpeg Streaming?
iamstrangemind
Member
in General
I'm comparing Oracle Cloud Always Free with low cost VPS providers for a Node.js + FFmpeg streaming backend. For those who've run media workloads, what providers have given you the best network performance and uptime?

Comments
Honestly many yearly deals here. Just buy one
Just buy a cheap one, I've tried the Oracle free instances. Even the @DediRock $8.88/year plan does far better than the Oracle free instance.
Not for me. The Oracle AMD has limited disk speeds, but the Arm ones are faster.
Oracle has pretty good network and uptime and free backups. You just need to script the backup with oci cli.
I just setup a YAMS with Oracle for the content downloading and a dedirock 4TB for the storage.
Video streaming? For raw throughput, nothing beats a provider that passes through a GPU for hardware-accelerated encoding. Soon you'll start seeing even VPSes using virtio to expose things like VAAPI even!
Oracle Always Free offers a great 10TB bandwidth allowance, but its current 2-core ARM limit is too weak for FFmpeg, and sustained transcoding will likely trigger an automated account ban. For reliable media streaming without buffering, budget providers offering dedicated CPU threads—like Hetzner's CCX line or Netcup's Root Servers—are your best bet. To completely eliminate egress costs, run your transcoding on one of these dedicated VPS instances and put Cloudflare in front of it to cache the video segments at the edge.
And for now it's 50mbps limit for channel 🥲
Try to encode on a different machine and then serve it from VPS. I don't know of any low budget VPS that would be good for live transcoding