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Oracle Giving Away 4-Core 24 GB Memory Ampere Instances

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Re: Oracle Giving Away 4-Core 24 GB Memory Ampere Instances

#151
post #99
post #34

Be extremely wary of Oracle free tiers. They offered a free tier and forced me to choose a shape. I chose the smallest of the two “shapes” but it was apparently not free. This was not especially clear until I got my first bill (it was extortionate; like 60eur/mo for 1cpu/2g ram) so I stopped/removed the instance. This did not prevent me from being billed the next month, or the next month. They charged me until my car…

Use a virtual card for everything, block it if you don't like something.

What do you mean "virtual card"?

Re: Oracle Giving Away 4-Core 24 GB Memory Ampere Instances

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this even legal? In most jurisdictions, you have to be a government to fine anybody. Sending frivolous charges may be considered fraud and also lead to chargebacks.

> You can only charge for things that you have delivered and only the ones which were requested/consumed. This was requested. By you requesting a product or service which included this as its terms. Same for delivered and consumed.

Not in civilised jurisdictions.

Plain language and clear notification is necessary. Just "included in the terms" is not enough.

But and body can ask anybody for almost anything and if it is provided then no illegality.

Send money now: Acc: 1927-3938277-00

You all owe me US$100 for reading this. Pay now!

Re: Oracle Giving Away 4-Core 24 GB Memory Ampere Instances

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that is legal either. You can charge for some product or service but, unless you are a licensed bank, you can't lend out money and charge for overdraft, which is basically something they're doing here. And even a bank can only do it against accounts open in that bank.

There's no lending of money involved? If your card gets declined, they add a fee to your bill. You can either choose to not pay it (and stop receiving any services from that company, and possibly have your account sent to collections or even be sued since you agreed to pay something and then didn't pay it), or you can pay it.

IANAL But AFAIK in civilised jurisdictions if I offer a service for money, and you offer money, I must offer the service.

If I make up charges for you and you refuse to pay, I can cease offering the service (to everybody) but I cannot just cut you out because you will not pay the out of contract charge.

These laws are to protect people who belong to groups that commonly get discriminated against.

Re: Oracle Giving Away 4-Core 24 GB Memory Ampere Instances

#154
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no lending of money involved? If your card gets declined, they add a fee to your bill. You can either choose to not pay it (and stop receiving any services from that company, and possibly have your account sent to collections or even be sued since you agreed to pay something and then didn't pay it), or you can pay it.

IANAL But AFAIK in civilised jurisdictions if I offer a service for money, and you offer money, I must offer the service. If I make up charges for you and you refuse to pay, I can cease offering the service (to everybody) but I cannot just cut you out because you will not pay the out of contract charge. These laws are to protect people who belong to groups that commonly get discriminated against.

> IANAL

That much is clear.

Charging a fee for providing bad payment info is legal. See "bounced check" fees.

Re: Oracle Giving Away 4-Core 24 GB Memory Ampere Instances

#155
post #6

With Oracle you always read the fine print. I wouldn't risk touching this with your ten foot pole.

It's hard to build yachts by giving away free machines.

    "He gives the kids free samples
    because he knows full well
    that today's young, innocent faces
    will be tomorrow's clientele"

Re: Oracle Giving Away 4-Core 24 GB Memory Ampere Instances

#156
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh my god. Oracle having my address and credit card number is a nightmare scenario.

I wonder what happens if you sign up with a fake name, semi-disposable email address and a prepaid visa gift card that has $3.50 remaining balance on it.

Afaik AWS and GCP refuse visa gift cards, although it's been a while since I tried. Wouldn't surprise me to hear Oracle is the same.

Re: Oracle Giving Away 4-Core 24 GB Memory Ampere Instances

#157
Quite a few negative replies [1], so here's a counterpoint -- Quite a few months back someone on here mentioned using the 24GB/4 core thing for a Minecraft server. While I knew Oracle had a cloud offering, I had never looked at it at all but this enticed me to give it a chance. Not for Minecraft, but lots of time I'm doing things like ETC1 compression of massive textures and I don't want to do it on my MBP. I signed up, got the month free trial (with $300 of credit), and spun up the three "always free" instances (two limited 1 core AMD servers and a 4 core 24GB ARM instance, though I couldn't get the latter until like a week after signing up as there was no availability at the time). All three of these have a public IPv4 which is just super surprising.

These have been perfect since and I have had zero problems. Okay the sales guy in the first month was clearly just bothered by the whole thing (and somehow managed to cancel my account in the process of upgrading it to "paid"), but then it was fixed and everything has been perfect since. On that "personal" account I have had $0 of billing, and they are very clear on billing with up to the moment charting and allocation of every penny billed (not to mention that you can of course set alerts. You would have to really not be paying attention to get surprise billing from this). I've done backups, used volumes, and tried out loads of their services and they have "always free" quotas on loads of stuff. Hilariously I now use one of my AMD instances as the management console to run AWS CLI and kubectl controls for my AWS deployments.

It worked perfectly on me. Since then I've done their "Oracle University" programs and then moved two of my client web applications to Oracle on separate paid accounts, where the pricing is incredibly reasonable (especially the lambda-style functionality which just blows me away). I plan on moving more.

[1] I honestly wonder if some of the negative comments might be people trying to dissuade people from discovering something that seems to be Too Much of A Good Thing. Honestly hesitated posting a positive comment on the chance that if too many people run for freebies it might get the program noticed and clamped down on.

Re: Oracle Giving Away 4-Core 24 GB Memory Ampere Instances

#158
post #151
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use a virtual card for everything, block it if you don't like something.

What do you mean "virtual card"?

Some credit cards come with a feature where you can generate (and revoke) multiple numbers that charge your account.

So you could generate a new one to use with a shady business, and then revoke the number after you are done with the business.

Re: Oracle Giving Away 4-Core 24 GB Memory Ampere Instances

#160

The only valid response to this is "Fuck Oracle". Friends do not let friends use anything relating to Oracle, VirtualBox, Java... Anything. No. Just no. Run, Don't walk.

> Java Uh, whaaaat? I am a legit Java hater, but “friends don’t let friends use Java” is kinda a bizarre viewpoint. You know how much of our industry uses Java? I may prefer other languages but I’m not turning down a job based on them having settled on Java. It’s not PHP. :D

And php is even more popular ;)
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