Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18

cnelecar.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 134 posts

Re: Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18

#91

Post by sva_ »

It is a nothing burger, for PAYG it stays the way it is:

> Each paid tenancy gets the first 3,000 OCPU hours and 18,000 GB hours per month for free to create Ampere A1 Compute instances. This free-tier usage is shared across Bare Metal, Virtual Machine, and Container Instances.

https://www.oracle.com/cloud/price-list/

When I login, top banner also says:

> Always Free Ampere A1 Compute entitlements have changed. This update does not affect your paid resources, existing paid workloads or bill. Contact support for further questions.

Which is slightly ambitious, but I would orientate around what the price list says.

Re: Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18

#92

Post by chasil »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #78

Gotta cover One Rich Asshole Called Larry Elison’s crazy AI debts somehow.

I realized some time ago that Oracle spelled backwards is "el caro," which (according to Google translate) means "the expensive one" in Spanish.

Re: Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18

#93

Post by Dimtree »

somenameforme wrote: post #70
drdexebtjl wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also apparently they will randomly terminate your instances if they think you’re not using them enough. Or if you’re using them too much. Can’t tell, it’s not transparent. Also, their control plane is so poorly designed, it makes AWS Console feel like good UX.

In my situation they ended up randomly closing my account a week or so after it was setup. I'd tried a few times to get an instance, and failed. Then my login suddenly didn't work and their all so helpful customer support was 'yes your account has been closed' 'why' 'we can't tell you that.' That was after my card and everything was already setup with the company. Oracle's reputation is 100% deserved.

I'm in the same boat. I thought "how bad could it be, surely people are exaggerating" and signed up to check out their free tier. My account was killed without notice about a month after setup and I got the same treatment from support, they just instantly closed my ticket with "you account terminate."

They did eventually notify me by email a full 60 days after actually deleting my VMs and the email had a little blurb with "it would be a pleasure to serve you in the near future" but I'm pretty sure they banned me from the platform permanently.

Never trust Oracle. Using Oracle products professionally is tantamount to negligence. You will come to regret it eventually.

Re: Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18

#95

Post by esseph »

smoe wrote: post #88
snailmailman wrote: post #17

I’m mostly fine with this. Their free teir was crazy generous. 24GB of ram for free is a lot. They were a very popular host for free Minecraft servers because of it. Their communication about this change has been pretty awful. It began with a silent change to the docs a month or so back, and a lot of people worrying that they would suddenly be charged. It looks like there’s actually a date associated with the change…

This is the email I received yesterday. I think them downsizing the free tier is perfectly fine. Giving two weeks’ notice before terminating instances is not. But since this is Oracle, I always assumed they’d do something villainy someday, so it’s a bit whatever. --- Hello, We're writing to let you know about an important update regarding Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Always Free compute. The Always Free compute…

> But since this is Oracle, I always assumed they’d do something villainy someday

Shocked at the number of people here that would even admit to using them. Where did these people come from that haven't heard of the evils of this company????

Re: Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18

#96

Post by sunnynuts »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #37

For what it's worth, I am a user of this and I'd like to clear up one thing that is not obvious here: There are actually two tiers of Free here that Oracle offers. Always Free - No credit card required, sign up. This is what the new limit applies to PAYG - You give a credit card, but like AWS and GCP there is a "free" tier for people who are on pay as you go plans. From what I can tell, the PAYG subscribers are not s…

I'm a PAYG subscriber and I have a single 4/24 server running. I've been on the free tier for the last year and my billing alert went off yesterday. It was set to $1.

Re: Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18

#97

Post by wastedpotencial »

frollogaston wrote: post #90
gryfft wrote: post #47

I tried getting some free ARM oracle servers a couple months back. I ended up setting up a whole PAYG setup, eventually got tired of trying to get their cloud to actually provision me any of these supposed free ARM systems, and have been a customer for a couple months now paying ~80/mo for the couple VPS's I've been playing with. Speaking as an Oracle customer, let me heartily disrecommend them to everyone. Terrible…

Thanks for saving me some time. I wanted a free little server in case my home RPi is down for whatever reason. Not surprised it's too good to be true.

I've been on the free tier 1vCPU x86 / 1GB RAM for years and it was a perfect experience. I recently upgraded to the 4/24, and indeed you need to change to PAYG or otherwise it's out of capacity, but still no problem and within the free limits. For your use case, if the 1/1 instance is enough, I highly recommend Oracle and it's not something I imagined myself saying.

Re: Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18

#98

Post by inigyou »

ajross wrote: post #21
inigyou wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you expecting anything to last forever? The sun's gonna explode, you know.

Expecting someone to lie doesn't mean rolling over and refusing to acknowledge it. Not unlike people making the expected reactionary cynical commentary on internet forums still demands a response. I mean, you're very perceptive! But that's not very interesting, it's sort of the price of admission here at HN. Oracle lying in its product naming is more so.

When Amazon says something is always free in the free tier, it's opposite things that are free for the first 12 months of your account.

Re: Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18

#99

Post by zenoprax »

syntheticnature wrote: post #60
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #37

For what it's worth, I am a user of this and I'd like to clear up one thing that is not obvious here: There are actually two tiers of Free here that Oracle offers. Always Free - No credit card required, sign up. This is what the new limit applies to PAYG - You give a credit card, but like AWS and GCP there is a "free" tier for people who are on pay as you go plans. From what I can tell, the PAYG subscribers are not s…

They'll clean up instances that aren't doing enough for them to notice, even -- I used to run an XMPP server on one, used daily but not with many users, and they kept shutting it down at random multi-day intervals with little warning. Stopped using it.

I wrote a script to simulate a variable workload when the load averages dipped so that I could keep my mostly-idle VMs running. It felt like a waste of energy but the VMs are in short supply which meant that Oracle has already decided that their servers will generate heat regardless of my actions: if I wasn't burning enough CPU cycles they would find someone who would.

Load average of ~30% per core seems to have been enough to repel the elephants.

Re: Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18

#100

Post by blfr »

sunnynuts wrote: post #96
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #37

For what it's worth, I am a user of this and I'd like to clear up one thing that is not obvious here: There are actually two tiers of Free here that Oracle offers. Always Free - No credit card required, sign up. This is what the new limit applies to PAYG - You give a credit card, but like AWS and GCP there is a "free" tier for people who are on pay as you go plans. From what I can tell, the PAYG subscribers are not s…

I'm a PAYG subscriber and I have a single 4/24 server running. I've been on the free tier for the last year and my billing alert went off yesterday. It was set to $1.

I'm a PAYG subscriber and the notice on my account says

"Always Free Ampere A1 Compute entitlements have changed. This update does not affect your paid resources, existing paid workloads or bill. Contact support for further questions."

Post reply on HN