Skip to main content

Free Cloud Services from UpCloud

Image

Although I typically deploy my development environment or experimental services on UpCloud, I do not always stay updated on its announcements. Recently, I discovered that UpCloud has introduced a new plan called the Essentials plan, which enables certain cloud services to be deployed at no cost. The complimentary services are generally associated with network components or serve as the foundation for other cloud services. This feature is particularly useful when retaining foundational services, such as a load balancer, is necessary, while tearing down all services and reconfiguring the DNS and other application settings each time we temporarily clean up infrastructure to reduce costs is undesirable. 


When reviewing the service specifications of the cloud services in the Essentials plan, they appear to be very similar to those in the Development plan. The difference in service levels is unclear, but it could be related to hardware or resource allocation. For instance, the load balancer in the Essentials plan shares the same specifications as the one in the Development plan, featuring one node and a maximum of 1,000 concurrent sessions.


Changing the plan of existing services from Development to Essentials is not possible through the UpCloud control panel. The Essentials plan appears to be only for new deployments. For instance, it is not feasible to switch an existing loadancer to the Essentials plan via the control panel.


The new option appears when we want to initiate a new deployment.


What is peculiar is that we are still able to change the plan through its APIs. I attempted to switch my load-balancer plan from Development to Essentials using Terraform, and the operation was successful. The cost is now zero; however, even after this action, the control panel still does not display an option for the Essentials plan.


We can see that the cost is already zero in the previously deployed load-balancer, but there is no information for the Essentials plan.

Labels:

Comments

  1. DavidJanuary 29, 2026 at 2:00 PM

    Absolutely love the work TechBritish does in highlighting groundbreaking UK innovations that influence technology worldwide. The platform's commitment to quality journalism and factual accuracy is exemplary. Every visit leaves me more knowledgeable about Britain's leadership in driving technological progress and business innovation globally.

    ReplyDelete
  2. DavidJanuary 29, 2026 at 2:01 PM

    Genuinely amazed by how TechEPaper maintains such rigorous editorial standards while covering the fast-paced world of technology and innovation. The analysis goes beyond superficial reporting, providing valuable context that helps readers understand broader implications. This exemplifies outstanding digital journalism deserving widespread recognition.

    ReplyDelete
  3. DavidJanuary 29, 2026 at 2:02 PM

    Incredibly grateful for Tech Fastest and everything it offers. The smart curation saves me hours of searching, the writing is engaging, and technical details are always accurate. This site has earned my complete trust.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Deploying a Web Server on UpCloud using Terraform Modules

In my earlier post , I shared an example of deploying UpCloud infrastructure using Terraform from scratch. In this post, I want to share how to deploy the infrastructure using available Terraform modules to speed up the set-up process, especially for common use cases like preparing a web server. For instance, our need is to deploy a website with some conditions as follows. The website can be accessed through HTTPS. If the request is HTTP, it will be redirected to HTTPS. There are 2 domains, web1.yourdomain.com and web2.yourdomain.com . But, users should be redirected to "web2" if they are visiting "web1". There are 4 main modules that we need to set up the environment. Private network. It allows the load balancer to connect with the server and pass the traffic. Server. It is used to host the website. Load balancer. It includes backend and frontend configuration. Dynamic certificate. It is requ...
85 comments
Read more

What's Good About Strapi, a Headless CMS

Recently, I've been revisiting Strapi as a solution for building backend systems. I still think this headless CMS can be quite useful in certain cases, especially for faster prototyping or creating common websites like company profiles or e-commerce platforms . It might even have the potential to handle more complex systems. With the release of version 5, I'm curious to know what updates it brings. Strapi has launched a new documentation page, and it already feels like an improvement in navigation and content structure compared to the previous version. That said, there's still room for improvement, particularly when it comes to use cases and best practices for working with Strapi. In my opinion, Strapi stands out with some compelling features that could catch developers' attention. I believe three key aspects of Strapi offer notable advantages. First, the content-type builder feature lets us design the data structure of an entity or database model , including ...
3 comments
Read more

Installing VSCode Server Manually on Ubuntu

I've ever gotten stuck on updating the VSCode server on my remote server because of an unstable connection between my remote server and visualstudio.com that host the updated server source codes. The download and update process failed over and over so I couldn't remotely access my remote files through VSCode. The solution is by downloading the server source codes through a host with a stable connection which in my case I downloaded from a cloud VPS server. Then I transfer the downloaded source codes as a compressed file to my remote server through SCP. Once the file had been on my remote sever, I extracted them and align the configuration. The more detailed steps are as follows. First, we should get the commit ID of our current VSCode application by clicking on the About option on the Help menu. The commit ID is a hexadecimal number like  92da9481c0904c6adfe372c12da3b7748d74bdcb . Then we can download the compressed server source codes as a single file from the host. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Increase of Malicious Activities and Implementation of reCaptcha

In recent time, I've seen the increase of malicious activities such as login attempts or phishing emails to some accounts I manage. Let me list some of them and the actions taken. SSH Access Attempts This happened on a server that host a Gitlab server. Because of this case, I started to limit the incoming traffic to the server using internal and cloud firewall provided by the cloud provider. I limit the exposed ports, connected network interfaces, and allowed protocols. Phishing Attempts This typically happened through email and messaging platform such as Whatsapp and Facebook Page messaging. The malicious actors tried to share a suspicious link lured as invoice, support ticket, or something else. Malicious links shared Spammy Bot The actors leverage one of public endpoint on my website to send emails. Actually, the emails won't be forwarded anywhere except to my own email so this just full my inbox. This bot is quite active, but I'm still not sure what...
3 comments
Read more

Enabling Imagick to Read or Manipulate PDF File

Imagick is one of the popular tools for manipulating image files. Some popular languages such as PHP and Node.js have provided libraries that can be used for manipulating images based on Imagick. One of the common use cases for using Imagick is for generating a thumbnail from an image or PDF file. In PHP, we can install the PHP Imagick module by running the following command. apt install php-imagick Then, we can verify the installation by running this command. php -m | grep imagick For example, we want to generate a thumbnail image for a PDF file in PHP. We can use the following script. <?php $im = new Imagick(); $im->setResolution(50, 50); // set the reading resolution before read the file $im->readImage('file.pdf[0]'); // read the first page of the PDF file (index 0) //$im = $im->flattenImages(); // @deprecated // handle transparency problem $im = $im->mergeImageLayers( Imagick::LAYERMETHOD_FLATTEN ); $im->setImageFormat('png'); $im->write...
Post a Comment
Read more

Configuring Swap Memory on Ubuntu Using Ansible

If we maintain a Linux machine with a low memory capacity while we are required to run an application with high memory consumption, enabling swap memory is an option. Ansible can be utilized as a helper tool to automate the creation of swap memory. A swap file can be allocated in the available storage of the machine. The swap file then can be assigned as a swap memory. Firstly, we should prepare the inventory file. The following snippet is an example, you must provide your own configuration. [server] 192.168.1.2 [server:vars] ansible_user=root ansible_ssh_private_key_file=~/.ssh/id_rsa Secondly, we need to prepare the task file that contains not only the tasks but also some variables and connection information. For instance, we set /swapfile  as the name of our swap file. We also set the swap memory size to 2GB and the swappiness level to 60. - hosts: server become: true vars: swap_vars: size: 2G swappiness: 60 For simplicity, we only check the...
3 comments
Read more