Free Servers Forget Everything: Five Myths About Ephemeral Deployments

Developers often assume free compute and model endpoints retain state, but such resources are typically shared and disposable. Apparent persistence may just reflect landing on the same machine during a lucky restart window. The article offers a stdlib-only Python probe that writes a small JSON state file and compares results across runs and restarts. Its results show that persistence can be confused with same-host luck, and that even surviving state needs write-then-read verification. It also argues that job state such as counters, cursors, and sent markers belongs in an external store rather than in process memory, and that chat endpoints are request-scoped, so context must be resent by the client.