Did anyone really expect OCI deal not to become, shall we say, less generous as they slowly creep up their market share? Anyone banking on OCI being cheaper provider is playing a game of musical chairs.
Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18
51–60 of 134 posts
Re: Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18
#52A substantially better article: https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/07/oracle-cloud-free-tier-li... The actual Oracle docs: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...
Thank you. The OP's article is clearly AI-written.
Re: Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18
#53For 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.
Re: Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18
#54The A1 has been available for 6 years without a rug pull or reductions until now on a very overly generous offering - whatever you think of oracle, it's something else. My instances from 2020 are still running...
Years ago I had an Oracle free instance which I shut down, didn't have any use that was worth the security maintenance time.
Recently wanted to make a new free instance at the lowest settings, but my zone is completely overbooked. Oracle does not let you move your free instance to a new zone.
According to what I read, the only way to spin up a new free instance is run a script elsewhere to attempt instance creation every minute using the API; and that takes an average of a couple weeks to bring something up.
Re: Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18
#55These were never actually available anyways, I tried multiple times over the years in multiple regions and I always got “no capacity”.
Weird, I've been running instances for many years and never had an issue spinning a new one up. Did you have a trial account or PAYG account? (There is a difference, trial account instances are harder to get and are subject to termination at any time.)
IIRC, the docs say you're supposed to be able to use it with a trial account. I think I did try to sign up for the other kind and ran into a wall where I had to contact support or a sales rep, and the last thing I ever want to do is talk to Oracle sales.
Re: Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18
#56If by "just," you mean a couple of weeks ago, yes. I noticed the change to their documentation about two weeks ago. A couple days later, I checked my own account for something unrelated. My main instance (using 12 GB of RAM) was still up, but another that I only used for testing random things had just vanished from my account without a trace. I get that they are well within their rights to reduce the Always Free reso…
Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower
Re: Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18
#57The question is how far can they lower it while still claiming to have still provided the 'always free' - I mean can they reduce my nice free VM to 32k of ram and a 1/1000 of a core and a byte of bandwidth/month?
I'll take 32KB, a 6502 core, and 2400 baud of bandwidth.
Re: Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18
#58You 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
Re: Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is extraordinary, but it also was incredibly hard to procure. Most data centres were almost immediately out of instances, and only the original batch of always free land grabbers really got these instances. Which I imagine is what motivated this change.
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.
Re: Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18
#60For 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.