- Free allowance
- 'SSH to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS server with many tools and apps.' and 'Quota: 42 GB', 'Network: IPv4 + IPv6', 'Private TCP/UDP port: yes — on request'.
- Verdict
- caveatusable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- emailno card, no phone
- Binding limit
- write-gatedactivation requires a physical postcard mailed to a German address
- Evidence
- documented8 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-24checked 2026-10-24 (live); stale on 2026-11-24
| Free tier | 'SSH to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS server with many tools and apps.' and 'Quota: 42 GB', 'Network: IPv4 + IPv6', 'Private TCP/UDP port: yes — on request'. The shell account is free and non-profit, online since 2002. unit GiB; metered on stored-bytes |
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| Price | none stated |
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| Limits | - volume-quota 42 GB of shell quota, shared with mail and web space source
- volume-quota nproc=150 and mem=4 GB per account source
- write-gated (binding) activation requires a physical postcard mailed to a German address source
|
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| Binding | write-gated The postcard is the gate: nothing is provisioned until a piece of physical mail reaches Germany, which is a delay of days and a cost of one stamp, and no digital route exists. |
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| Identity | email no card, no phone, no document, no national ID. The signup form asks for a desired login and an existing email address only; a token arrives by email and is then written on a postcard and mailed to a German address before the account is enabled. The identity cost is a postal address, not a payment instrument. |
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| Egress | not published: no traffic allowance or port speed is stated. 'Liberal fair-use limits' is the only qualifier. |
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| Per-object cap | ulimit values per account: 'nofile=unlimited', 'nproc=150', 'fsize=unlimited', 'mem=4 GB' |
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| Retention | Not stated on the pages read: no inactivity deletion rule is published. Backups run daily with 30 days retention, which is the only retention number on the page. |
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| Interface | ssh, sftp, webdav SSH to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, a ShellInABox browser terminal, rsync/scp, WebDAV through ownCloud, MySQL over the CLI and phpMyAdmin, and a private TCP/UDP port on request. Podman is available for containers. |
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| Tooling | any SSH client; Podman for containers; rsync/scp for transfer |
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| Composes with | A shared shell with 4 GB of memory, 42 GB of disk, a real IPv4 and a private port on request, for no money and no card: the closest thing to a free always-on host, at the cost of a physical postcard and a shared kernel. |
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| Reliability | No reliability event observed. It is a non-profit club, not a company, so continuity rests on volunteers; the page states it has been online since 2002. |
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| Notes | The best free always-on shape found that takes no card: 4 GB of memory, 42 GB of disk and an inbound port. Three caveats. First, activation is by physical postcard to Germany, which is days of latency and a stamp, and it is the only route. Second, it is a shared host, not a VM: no root, a shared kernel, and Podman rather than Docker daemon access. Third, no vCPU count and no egress allowance are published, so the compute and bandwidth sides of the shape are unverified. A third-party aggregator states 20 GB and 1 Gbps for this service; both disagree with the vendor's own 42 GB, and the vendor page is the one recorded. |
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| Evidence note | documented Quota, memory, nproc, the IPv4+IPv6 pair, the private port and the postcard activation are all quoted from freeshell.de's own services and get-started pages read. Egress allowance, vCPU count and the inactivity rule are not published on any page read. |
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| Parsed numbers | - price USD 0 10 hours a day / month
- price USD 0 / month
- has-free-tier 1
- volume-quota 42 GB
- volume-quota 4 GB
|
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