If you’ve ever been shopping at Costco during lunch time, you know all about “free samples”. The Internet has taken this marketing approach to whole new levels.
Enter dply.co, which will give you a free VM, for two hours. Use it for two hours and it costs you nothing, or pay if you want to use it for longer than that. They spell out the process on their how it works page. The specs listed on that page are out of date, increases were announced in January:
What this boils down to is reselling DigitalOcean.
I’ve tried it out a few times, and it works about how you’d expect. It spins up a new VM, gives you the details, then automatically destroys it at the end of two hours. You can pay for longer periods at any time.
The only requirement for spinning up a VM is a Github account. It doesn’t ask for payment details unless you want to extend past the free two hours.
This won’t be disrupting the major players in the on-demand server market, instead it is attempting to fill a different niche.