Oracle offers free container hosting on their infrastructure. It's gradually becoming saturated with tenants and new signups are more restricted than they once were, but the service still exists. I'll post another article on the particulars of this cloud presence another time. In creating this blog, I needed to run an nginx server serving pure HTML. Because I'm cheap and use free DNS, and because I don't want my site self-hosted for a number of security and practicality reasons, I host it on one of my OCI instances.

As part of my deployment practice, I like to take snapshots before engaging in a project I've never undertaken before. This is shorthand for understanding that I'm likely to mess it up while trying to set it all up. Using the Oracle OCI management tools isn't very intuitive.

Here's how to get it done:

• Select your instance
• Go to Boot Volume submenu (bottom left)
• Click the Boot Volume attached to the instance
• In Boot Volume, go to the Boot Volume Backup submenu (bottom left)
• Click Create Boot Volume Backup

This will cue the backup into a request, which quickly initiates into a backup.

It should be noted that the 'always free' container tier likely has some limits on how many and how large the snapshots may be, so be aware of those and manage them accordingly.