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

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

#111

Post by monocasa »

everfrustrated wrote: post #59
mapkkk wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you "upgrade" your account to PAYG you will not have this limitation. The "no free instances available" issue is only for accounts without a payment method. I got this confirmed with a salesperson ~2yrs ago when I first set up my free tier on there.

Can confirm. I opened a new account and could never get any ARM instances in Ashburn region (capacity error). Signed up for PAYG (took a day - who knows why) and now no capacity problems.

> took a day - who knows why

I bet they want to see the test payment work it's way through the system, which given the number of midnight batch jobs that still exist in banks means waiting a day.

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

#113

Post by abawany »

999900000999 wrote: post #58

You pay in other ways. You’ll spend hours upon hours trying to get a free spot. And like anything free it’s full of spam. Your free server will likely have a blacklisted ip address. Oracle is exceptionally frustrating to use in the first place. Pay the 5$ a month and use AWS or Digital Ocean

[dead]

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

#114

Post by picofarad »

sophacles wrote: post #89
tcdent wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coupled with the fact that free VM is marketing, nothing more, it's odd people would feel any other way. The idea that a company would give compute away for free without one-or-more underlying motives is incredibly naive. The users of this are not owed anything.

The real problem is that humans hear terms like "always" and assume "always" means "always". The things in marketing love to take advantage of this. (see also: unlimited).

Always does mean always and unlimited does mean unlimited; I think the confusion here is marketing is lies, not language.

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

#115

Post by queenkjuul »

Oof. Not actually the end of the world for me but i do have two of their free instances that i rely on every day. Lucky for me i mostly just use the functionally unlimited bandwidth they give out for free (VPN to my home server so i can access Plex, Nextcloud etc via my domain name--basically zero CPU, but lots of big file transfers)

My god though, OCI is an absolute shambles, far and away the most awful cloud related UI of any variety I've ever used. Early on i didn't realize just how impossible it was to provision free resources, i got really lucky (probably helps i signed up in the middle of the night? Idk) but i deleted a misconfigured instance that i couldn't figure out how to fix... Took me a couple days to claim another.

They say they don't take prepaid or virtual cards but pretty sure they accepted my Privacy.com virtual card which i retroactively set a $1 spending limit on. I'll still have to go make sure they're not gonna try and charge me though. Can't trust em one bit (except with my VPN traffic lmao)

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

#116

Post by queenkjuul »

silisili wrote: post #53
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…

Did "always free" ever really work? When I set mine up months ago, the advice was use PAYG with free tier, because Always Free would always report it had no capacity available. Sure enough, I tested it and this was true at the time.

I did actually once claim a completely free instance without payment info. It can be done but you're best off using a script, or just sticking to the free limits on a PAYG plan

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

#117

Post by queenkjuul »

esseph wrote: post #95
smoe wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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????

It's basically unlimited bandwidth for a VPN server, for free. I hate oracle but i also hate spending money lol

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

#118

Post by dizhn »

brnt wrote: post #74
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…

No CC required? I _have_ to enter one?

CC was always required. The difference is you can then add a CC for billing and move up to a paying customer status. Then you don't actually buy anything that costs money.

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

#119

Post by everfrustrated »

monocasa wrote: post #111
everfrustrated wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm. I opened a new account and could never get any ARM instances in Ashburn region (capacity error). Signed up for PAYG (took a day - who knows why) and now no capacity problems.

> took a day - who knows why I bet they want to see the test payment work it's way through the system, which given the number of midnight batch jobs that still exist in banks means waiting a day.

It's only a preauth payment. It doesn't settle.

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

#120

Post by [deleted] »

qwytw wrote: post #106
ajross wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> over and refusing to acknowledge it. I guess one option would be to vote with your walled and stop paying them? Oh.. wait.. Whatever Oracle is in general this specifically (and the reduced 2 CPU + 12 GB tier ) is still massively more "generous" than what any other cloud provider gives you for free.

[deleted]
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