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Comment by angulardragon03 | Hacker News Reader

You can host Minecraft servers for free on Oracle Cloud’s “Always Free” tier [1] now that they’ve added free ARM cores. You get 4 cores and 24GB(!) of RAM to assign to up to 4 VMs - more than enough for a server for friends or family.

[1] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

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Oracle and "always free"? Boy are these interesting times...

Almost sounds like a paradox

They're probably always free, until $x happens.

Then there's an audit, you're found non-compliant, and now they own your house.

Oracle, 2021.

From what I understand, suing people is a great business strategy. Much better than producing any actual value.

I mean, it bought a Hawaiian island. Capitalism at its finest, really.

It's hilarious given that they used to charge you per CPU _for software_. You had to bring your own CPUs.

Pretty sure they still do for some software they sell ;)

That's still a common billing model- how Red Hat bills for openshift for instance.

It's a simple and pretty good proxy for usage

Maybe thats why POWER chips have so many SMT threads per core

Oracle and VMware per-socket licensing is one of the main reasons server-class CPUs have gazillions of cores. A vSphere licence+support for a single machine can easily run into 5 figures.

I'm sure the TOS says "terms and conditions may change at any time in the future". Always is a trademark and not meant to convey any future services.

Pretty sure every website will tell you everything is subject to change at any time at their leisure.

> To enable us to provide free Oracle Cloud accounts to our valued customers, we need to ensure that account holders are real people. We use your email, phone number, and credit/debit card for account set-up and identity verification. For users in the United States, you may see temporary charges of $1 on your account statement. Users in other countries will see a similar charge in their local currency. These are verification holds that will be removed automatically, typically within 3 to 5 days.

> We will not use your credit/debit card information to automatically upgrade your Always Free or Free Trial to paid without first getting your explicit approval.

I gave a throw away google email and google voice and just used my first initials, the one thing I could not use was a throw away debit card, they really wanted a real credit card.

So far so good.

One guy complained they shut his server off after he transitioned from the $300 free credits in the first month to always free.

I didn't have that issue, although I do check the billing statements periodically.

I did this literately yesterday following this guide: https://blogs.oracle.com/developers/post/how-to-set-up-and-r...

Kids played for a couple of hours last night without issue.

It should even be able to load mods without any issue right? If I recall correctly mod installation in minecraft is nothing more than placing some files in a folder?

Yes and no. Although Minecraft is Java, there’s none of the “ahem” pleasure of using something like Maven/Gradle to manage plug-in dependencies. So plug-in A might require plug-in B, but not too new. And then these only work on the not-quite-current version of Minecraft.

It’s usually an hour or two of work every time my kids want a new plug-in or MC version.

I tried this today, picking a local home region that wasn't in their list of "oversubscribed" regions (Zurich) and have not been able to create an instance. Even 1vCPU/1GB RAM is seemingly unavailable.

There is a script for that, I was able to score a 3CPU/12GB Ram after a few days.

https://hitrov.medium.com/resolving-oracle-cloud-out-of-capa...

Well, thanks for this. Now I can have fun running https://www.brow.sh when ssh'd in from by original Raspberry Pi.

Yes, there is no point to this, but if it's free... ?

This still needs credit cards or phone numbers right?

Yes.

I don't remember giving them my credit card during my registration.

I explicitly remember them asking for both when they first launched

Yeah that's not the case for me. I only gave them a phone number. The salesperson did give me a call, but gave up after I explicitly said I'm only here for the free stuff.

Yes, although in the signup, it claims that they won't charge you unless you upgrade your account from the free tier - i.e. at the end of the trial period, you won't get a surprise subscription bill because you forgot to cancel something.

Are those ARM-based instances fast enough? Last I tried, Oracle Cloud's free tier "AMD" instances (with 1/8 vCPU) were so slow that I could not use them for any useful applications. Even their network speed was slow.

I run 3 servers on a single 4-core host using the Paper fork of Minecraft. Works great, I get 20TPS even with some pretty large farms.

"4 Arm-based Ampere A1 cores and 24 GB of memory usable as one VM or up to 4 VMs."

Here's the Anandtech review of the Ampere Altra, which is what Oracle is serving these VMs from: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16315/the-ampere-altra-review...

The TLDR:

"The Altra’s strengths lie in compute-bound workloads where having 25% more cores is an advantage. The Neoverse-N1 cores clocked at 3.3GHz can more than match the per-core performance of Zen2 inside the EPYC CPUs.

There are still workloads in which the Altra doesn’t do as well – anything that puts higher cache pressure on the cores will heavily favours the EPYC as while 1MB per core L2 is nice to have, 32MB of L3 shared amongst 80 cores isn’t very much cache to go around."

I'm wondering if I can use this to host Ark for 10 players. The cost of clustering all of the maps on dedicated servers is like $60/month or more.

How can they offer that for free!?

I'm sure in GCP's Always Free tier the server they offer only has 0.5GB RAM.

GCP increased that recently.

> How can they offer that for free!?

Opinion: They're losing badly in the Cloud Wars and need to scrape together some sort of customer base in any way they can, even if it means burning money.

I can see why....

Three times i've tried using OCI to move Oracles own products from on-prem to cloud. All three times they told me not to bother as it wasn't supported.

Seriously if Oracle can't figure out how to run RDBMS, Weblogic and Opera what hope have i got?

And if they've spent $billions building out huge capacity data centres, but only have a few customers, then they might have large amount of capacity sitting idle that costs them very little to put into the Always Free tier. It's free developer-mindshare-marketing anyway.

First one's always free. The cloud providers are vying for market share, and free tiers so that people / companies have buy-in is one of the ways to do so. It worked for Dropbox.

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