7 Failed Attempts to Create One Cloud Server on Alibaba Cloud

This is Part 3. Part 1 covered 3 bugs in the video merging engine. Part 2 was about Oracle Cloud's "Always Free" servers that don't exist. This one is about what happened when I tried Alibaba Cloud instead. Why Alibaba Cloud? I run long strategy sessions — 6 to 8 hours each — where we plan product roadmaps, discuss architecture, and make decisions on camera. Each session produces 30 to 50 short video clips that need to be merged into one continuous video. I offered $2,000 to a developer to build a service that merges videos and uploads them to YouTube. They turned it down — didn't see the problem it solved. Multiple developers refused. So I built Merge Video myself — with AI as my pair programmer, in 3 days, for $0 in development costs. The code works. Now I needed to put it on a server. In Part 2 I deployed the Telegram bot to Fly.io — 256 MB RAM, just enough for polling. But the backend needs ffmpeg , yt-dlp , and enough RAM to merge 50+ video files. It needs a real VPS. Oracle Cloud