Around 2017-June, PharoCloud released a statement that they were no longer supporting generic Pharo images. At the time Pier is not in a place where it can store all of its data in a database, so new hosting needed to be found. Several services (like CleverCloud and AWS lambda) provide container services, however these may have similar problems with persisting data. There is an example of using Squeak on Ubuntu 10.04, so it seems possible.
As of 2017-July, this site is running on Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS, it has a few libraries/software installed:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install libssl1.0.0 sudo apt-get install libfreetype6 sudo apt-get install nginx
The last is needed for running NGinX in Front of Pier, it needs security settings, see "Configure Security Group" on http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/CHAP_Tutorials.WebServerDB.CreateWebServer.html.
Pharo is installed with:
user@ip-171-41-14-123:~/Pharo$ cat install_pier_addons.sh
#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -xv
export PHARO_VERSION=${1:-50}
export VERSION=release3.1
export JOB_NAME=$PWD/pier_addons
curl get.pharo.org/${PHARO_VERSION}+vm | bash
./pharo Pharo.image save $JOB_NAME --delete-old
./pharo $JOB_NAME.image --version > version.txt
REPO=http://smalltalkhub.com/mc/Pier/Pier3Addons/main
./pharo $JOB_NAME.image config $REPO ConfigurationOfPier3AddOns --install=$VERSION --group='Pier-Blog'
./pharo $JOB_NAME.image config $REPO ConfigurationOfPier3AddOns --install=$VERSION --group='Pier-Shout'
./pharo $JOB_NAME.image config $REPO ConfigurationOfPier3AddOns --install=$VERSION --group='Pier-TagCloud'
./pharo $JOB_NAME.image config $REPO ConfigurationOfPier3AddOns --install=$VERSION --group='Pier-Google'
./pharo $JOB_NAME.image config $REPO ConfigurationOfPier3AddOns --install=$VERSION --group='Pier-Setup'By 2018, this version of Ubuntu is out-of-date, upgraded using do-release-upgrade without any major issues.
After a year of enjoying the free-tier, found that the bill could be reduced by reserving an instance.