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Comment by creatonez | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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...

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

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.

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

Plus they'll kill your account whenever they want

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

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

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