I'm not going to repeat my experiences here because it's frustrating to write it out and probably annoying to hear.

I can't in good conscience however, ever allow someone to recommend Oracle Cloud uncontested.

If it's working for you, I'm not going to fight, but please don't recommend it, the axe of Oracle is heavy swung- even if it hasn't caught your neck yet it definitely strikes.

EDIT: for those curious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514359

These days, OCI locks your account to "always free resources" unless you specifically undo it and you cannot provision resources that'd be outside of those bounds.

You can during the 30 days trial and if you get caught with overage after the trial is iver they are supposed to terminate your existing vms. I don't know the particulars of it though.

Don't use any 30 day free trial and expect it available on 31.

While you're in the trial it is not super obvios what's always free and what's not. (I have a summary of it somewhere if anybody is interested.) There's also the problem of what to kill from the point of view of Oracle. You have VMs and you're over the limit on day 31. Which VM are they supposed to kill? I think they might be killing everything.

I'll second this. I've gone through many iterations of self-hosting and I think I finally found the sweet spot.

The 10TB of free oracle bandwidth means you can store media-intensive applications on the instance. For data at rest, I simply nfs-mount a 14TB disk I have at home hooked up to a raspberry pi running tailscale. tailscale is the bottleneck here because it pegs the cpus of the rpi and oracle instance, but I still get 250mbps (something about the arm crypto implementation being slow.) There's some rummaging that go will improve the crypto performance so fingers crossed. I think I'm using less than 10 watts with this setup.

For backups I keep it simple and plug in an external drive and run borg every once and a while. It's manual since the backup disk sits offline.

I created this account specifically to reply to this comment.

Please do not use Oracle's free tier.

I too thought the free ampere machine would have been great. Like most things, it was too good to be true. The provisioned machine sat idle and unused for a few days and was then suspended for "Abusive Activity". I must be clear that there was nothing running on it. Even if there was, I cannot find out because Oracle does not provide any network metrics and refuses to tell me specifically what their problem is. The only detail of abusive activity is:

> Traffic Details: Outbound Port Scanning, Brute-forcing, Web Exploitation, and/or DDoS. (Port 22)

Those traffic "details" could possibly be the most generic and vague explanation for suspension ever.

The only form of remediation is through the support, which is not available for always free accounts. There is no one to email, no one to call, nobody to help. I did try calling _a_ support number, but was told they could not help and I could try contacting sales(!?) who did not even get back to me. The official suggestion is to make a post on their community forum, but unsurprisingly this also went unacknowledged.

This happened well over a month ago and I have little hope this situation will change.

I had also read others' negative anecdotes on Oracle and was reluctant to believe them, now I know better.

Do not use Oracle's free tier.

Not specifically related to Oracle Cloud itself, but I am curious how folks remain on the Free Tiers of these providers, such as Oracle Cloud, GCP, AWS, etc.

It seems, from a glancing review, all of these services structure the Free Tier to force an "on-demand" or "serverless" architecture, since the CPU-seconds and GB-seconds are always undersized for an always-on system (such as a traditional server or OCI container).

For hobby projects or book exercises, the Free Tiers can be enticing, but seem like a gateway into surprise billings. What do you do if you require a few OCI containers at the same time?

How do you folks do it? Is everyone just doing "serverless" these days and I'm old fashioned?

The ARM VM provided by Oracle is actually quite powerful (definitely much more so than anything free by GCP or AWS). Since I have no point of reference for that processor, I have no idea if you're getting four real cores, but it at least feels so. Compiling large C projects is faster than doing it on my machine (although the target architecture is different, so the comparison is a bit pointless).

The two x86 VMs are puny and can only be used as VPN gateways, or for static site hosting, or something like that.

Not using any of that newfangled "serverless" nonsense, and do not plan to. For work projects we rely on colocation with properly self-provisioned and fully controlled servers. It would be silly to use free tiers since you get absolutely zero uptime guarantees.

I created 4 boxes attached 50 gig block storage and run lamp. Serverless is something you do when interest rates are lower.

I had a free tier machine. It got terminated for no reason (only was running postgres). The last time I tried, was not able to provision a new one due to capacity.

You will probably have to recreate the VMs after the initial 30 days (the disk remains, you just have to attach it). Also it has a restrictive firewall and you have to manually allow connections.

They require you to submit your credit card information (even for the free tier). No thanks.

whenever I tried using it, no instances were available, so I just gave up.

It's confusing. Especially the ARM instances aren't available in some availability zones, and there is really nothing in the error to tell you the AZ is the issue.