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Comment by isoprophlex | Hacker News Reader

Whoa, "Oracle Cloud", i have no experience with their services, but judging from their enterprise products that sounds like the grossest possible thing to run a personal project on...

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The reason they are gaining traction among hobbyists is their enormously generous free tier, where you get a 4x vCPU / 24 GiB ARM Ampere VPS and get to keep it as long as there is traffic and CPU usage.

Thanks for sharing. It does sound almost too good to be true. I'll check it out

Setup details from a user of the Oracle Cloud "Always Free" tier: https://ryanharrison.co.uk/2023/01/28/oracle-cloud-free-serv...

Disclaimer: I haven't tried this out myself. I found this blog post a few days ago when I first heard about the generous Oracle Cloud free tier.

Wow. Wonder how long it will last?

I've been using it for about 3 years now (the large ARM instance a bit less than that, but since about when it was introduced). There have been two outages about a minute each (seems like a no-no-downtime host migration, but I am not sure). For the cost, I am not complaining.

Have tried this out, and yes actually using it in any capacity risks an account ban with no recourse. Easy come, easy go. (I was running an IPFS node, which at the time was CPU and bandwidth expensive)

I use it. Google how to open ports because the firewall rules can be tricky

O wow, that's pretty incredible! I didn't know that, thanks.

Not to mention the inclusion of 10TB bandwidth. In AWS world that's a lot of $$$!

In Hetzner world that is $10 even if you are paying for it which you probably aren't.

Didn't they have an 18 hour hard outage the other day?

Edit, sorry, 9 hours: https://ocistatus.oraclecloud.com/#/incidents/ocid1.oraclecl...

Before you think of this as a favorable option, I do recommend you keep in mind that this is Oracle trying to gain traction.

After moving to Oracle Cloud to use their Free Tier for my personal blog, I got this email from them back in April, basically requiring me to migrate to pay-as-you-go since my blog had near zero traffic. To be fair, I'm perfectly fine with this and happy to still be billed $0 per month. But it just set the perspective that Oracle wouldn't blink an eye to kill my site off if its PMs or lawyers thought they needed to revisit a subscription plan or usage terms - and I'm not saying that it's any surprise to me.

> Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) will be reclaiming idle Always Free compute resources from Always Free customers only. Reclaiming idle resources allows OCI to efficiently provide services to Always Free customers. Your account has been identified as having one or more compute instances that have been idle for the past 7 days. These idle instances will be stopped 7 days from now. If your idle Always Free compute instance is stopped, you can restart it as long as the associated compute shape is available in your region. You can keep idle compute instances from being stopped by converting your account to Pay As You Go (PAYG). With PAYG, you will not be charged as long as your usage for all OCI resources remains within the Always Free limits.

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One alternative folks should consider for very basic hosting is the fly.io free tier. It's not a VPS, but a container platform. The reason it seems like a more stable option is that they interact with the community on their forums, including occasionally helping getting service restored to free users who have a legitimate use. But it goes without saying that they could change at any moment, like any free tier, and you certainly can't bet on forum-based support saving you. Definitely make daily backups and have somewhere else you can migrate to.

Nice of them to e-mail you. They just nuked my instance.

i think they've cut this down to 8gb, but i got grandfathered in. i started paying a small amount monthly for one of their services to avoid being culled because it's still a very good deal

The limit is 8 GiB of RAM / 0.125x vCPU only for the x86-64 VPSes. The ARM VPSes are still overpowered. But you may have to wait a few weeks to get one, depending on the region. They get snatched up as soon as they become available.

i spun up an arm free tier instance for someone else a few months ago and it maxed it out at 8gb (and i think 2vcpu)

Strange -- they still advertise the 24 / 4 free offer on this page: https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ I know folks who have done it quite recently.

IIRC it's possible for the slider to have a lower maximum if you're already using some of the resources on another VM, since they allow splitting. This has caused some confusion for some people, possibly due to leftover block devices from deleted VMs acting as if they are taking up free RAM/CPU credits.

Might also be limits per specific regions. It always goes out of stock.

Plus they'll kill your account whenever they want

I had one for years, but it got shutdown probably because of under-utilization.

More trouble than it's worth, imo. Was fun while it lasted.

However, you have to provide a valid credit card number to register for the 'free' tier... dodgy dodgy...

It's very likely that they just used two free-tier instances for this and Oracle discovered that and it's against their ToS (creating multiple free-tier instances).

> but judging from their enterprise products that sounds like the grossest possible thing to run a personal project on...

Maybe not the best way to judge? i.e. based on impression of other products?

People run personal projects on AWS etc.

Oracle cloud is also a lot better priced than the big 3.

AWS is by all means a legit cloud provider, one of the big three. You know what you are getting in to, and the skill/knowledge required is transferable to your dayjob.

Now when I read "oracle cloud", my thoughts immediately go to their horrible, gross way of doing business in DB land. Pay outrageous amounts of money for poorly specced machinery, the "you are not allowed to benchmark us" snafu, poor docs, no open source mindshare to speak of/terrible community. And I personally hate their sql dialect but that's me.

Then, you apply this feeling of grossness on the idea of them being your cloud provider. One that at the moment is not dominant, so learning how to navigate and use it is probably not that useful for your career right now. And one with, for me, a pretty shit-tier branding.

All in all I'm not surprised to learn they have a very generous free tier to lure people in.

> AWS is by all means a legit cloud provider, one of the big three. You know what you are getting in to, and the skill/knowledge required is transferable to your dayjob.

> Now when I read "oracle cloud", my thoughts immediately go to their horrible, gross way of doing business in DB land.

And you don't think about issues with Amazon the ecommerce provider? Lots of complaints there. How do you treat that separately? Every provider has their pros and cons.

Oracle cloud is currently the fastest growing cloud provider and catching on to be the top 4(?). The skills/knowledge is likely transferable too.

Oracle the database at its time was good. There were likely some shady practices, but it was actually a good database for large enterprise that needed it. Your only other choice(s) included SQL Server from Microsoft and it didn't perform as well. I can't claim I like it either but it wasn't useless.

> All in all I'm not surprised to learn they have a very generous free tier to lure people in.

All in all - let go of your bias as it clearly impacts how you view things. Most of it is sentiment and based on some opinion or hype. Lots of companies have shady practices in 1 way or another - some are well known and others are nicely hidden. In large companies not every product or department is the same either.

As an engineer and to live up to that name - I rather operate on stats and facts. Perhaps Oracle cloud is less reliable, not as well documented or have other problems - that's all fine, but not that its "gross". What does that even mean? Will it stink if I login to it?

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