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Oracle OCI "Always Free" VPS. Why anything else? - Page 2
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Oracle OCI "Always Free" VPS. Why anything else?

245

Comments

  • tedtomatotedtomato Member
    edited November 2022

    @plumberg said:
    You're speaking as if you had an account here for years... that's all.

    ???

    Plus if you had cared to hit the search option, this thread would not be needed.

    Feel free not to contribute to the thread if you think it's a waste of time. So far, some people have contributed some actual, recent experience, so I believe it's useful.

    I surely didn't expect Oracle OCI to be such a sensitive subject around here...Clearly, some people not keen to have it discussed at all, leading to some imbalanced/extreme views.

  • tedtomatotedtomato Member
    edited November 2022

    @cybertech said:
    subscribed for future "account/vm termination" complaint

    I will surely provide feedback here if it happens. Sounds like people have had different experiences, from running fine for over a year, to account being suspended after a few days/weeks.

  • @tedtomato said:

    @plumberg said:
    You're speaking as if you had an account here for years... that's all.

    ???

    Plus if you had cared to hit the search option, this thread would not be needed.

    Feel free not to contribute to the thread if you think it's a waste of time. So far, some people have contributed some actual, recent experience, so I believe it's useful.

    I surely didn't expect Oracle OCI to be such a sensitive subject around here...Clearly, some people not keen to have it discussed at all, leading to some imbalanced/extreme views.

    Its not a sensitive thing. It's subjective. Plus it's echoed multiple times on dedicated and separate threads here.

    Use search, more often.

  • @plumberg said:
    Use search, more often.

    Maybe follow your own advice, search for "oracle always free" and let me know if you find much recent, relevant content...

  • @tedtomato said:

    @plumberg said:
    Use search, more often.

    Maybe follow your own advice, search for "oracle always free" and let me know if you find much recent, relevant content...

    https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/160260/oracle-cloud-free-tier#latest

    Literally the thread on Frontpage of this forum.

  • @tedtomato said:

    @jmaxwell said:
    Reason 1: they love to terminate free accounts randomly without any apparent reason or warning with no way to recover.

    Reason 2: Read reason 1

    That would be annoying indeed. So far, I have read that they reserve the right to stop some VPS running.

    They do and since it is free, they don’t care enough to let you know or appeal

    Thanked by 1tedtomato
  • Do note that I am not talking on behalf of Oracle when I am replying. This is my personal experience.

    Oracle Cloud is free to "test". But if you are looking for long term solution, this isn't it.

    If you aren't doing anything illegal, you can test OCI for a month or two. After that, depending on demand at your chosen location, your account may get terminated without notice. So choose a location with low load for a long term experience but do not complain if your account gets terminated without notice.

    Thanked by 1tedtomato
  • I run OCI for 3 months now. Nightscout application. No issues. Also Wireguard as a second instance. Spinning solid. Hope to keep it like this at least 5 years.

    Thanked by 2tedtomato pepa65
  • For me rock solid, except one issue with unknown charges, but they solved it.
    My wireguard VM:
    ubuntu@vpnvm:~$ uptime 13:10:18 up 103 days, 18:52, 1 user, load average: 0.36, 0.20, 0.16

    Uptime would be higher, but I screwed up and had to reinstall the whole VM. Been with them for more than 1 year, no issues with stability and performance so far.

  • hcuk94hcuk94 Member
    edited November 2022

    Mine has been great for over a year - you hear reports of accounts being terminated but my approach is to take that no differently to paying a small provider and them going bankrupt.
    Build in redundancy, test your (off site) backups, and run your infrastructure across multiple providers.
    Personally I use the free OCI VMs, have a semi-mirrored environment on paid OVH VMs, and have a SoYouStart hypervisor as a DR/backup environment - from which backups are copied to Backblaze storage.

    Thanked by 1tedtomato
  • tedtomatotedtomato Member
    edited November 2022

    I have just upgraded my account from trial to "Pay as You Go".

    As per other people experience, they took a payment of $100 (to be refunded within a few days).

    I have then created a standard storage object containing 15GB of data. Since 10GB is free per month (10GB for standard, 10GB for archive type), they should only charge me for 5GB per month, or a very negligible amount (like $0.10).

    I think that, if the account is PAYG and they have to charge something, they won't at least delete the account without notice, particularly if there is user data stored.

    To create some CPU activity once an hour (on top of normal activity), and prevent the server being at risk of being stopped because idle, I have put in Cron:

    timeout 30s sha1sum /dev/zero

    Which forces one core to go at 100% doing some calculations for 30 seconds.

    Thanked by 2pepa65 iqbal
  • In some regions, there's no available capacity for new ARM instances, indeed, when ARM variants are introduced, it took weeks for me just to get a 1-core ARM instance with 6 GB, then about a month to be able to upgrade it to 4 cores with 24 GB.

    Is it amazingly performant for the price of zero? Obviously. While I didn't get random termination like anyone else after running for years, the lack of assurance if one can even register in the first place, picked a region with available capacity, risk of random termination etc... Even someone making minimum wage would make enough in an hour to get a better experience elsewhere.

    Thanked by 2tedtomato pepa65
  • It may be okay for hobby projects or for testing. I cant imagine anyone having their production projects hosted on any "FREE" service.

  • My problem is I opened my account in Singapore and now live in South America, but you can't change regions...so that's that...it's still useful, but 300ms ping changes a lot...

  • @hampered said:
    My problem is I opened my account in Singapore and now live in South America, but you can't change regions...so that's that...it's still useful, but 300ms ping changes a lot...

    Isn't it possible to convert to paid account and then request change?

  • @plumberg said:
    Why make an account to ask? Aren't you happy with the free OCI instance?

    Who pissed in your Corn Flakes?

  • @tedtomato said:

    @Otus9051 said:
    You are missing the fact that it is ARM.
    Another thing you are missing is the fact that they randomly delete VMs and terminate accounts.

    What difference does ARM make when running Ubuntu/Debian? Everything I have tried so far is running fine.

    I don't know about randomly deleting VMs, so far has been running 24x7 for 2 weeks.

    To the OS, not much. But some software just isn't available on ARM natively. Not sure if Docker is a workaround to that or not.

  • tedtomatotedtomato Member
    edited November 2022

    @arifur said:
    Is it amazingly performant for the price of zero? Obviously. While I didn't get random termination like anyone else after running for years, the lack of assurance if one can even register in the first place, picked a region with available capacity, risk of random termination etc...
    Even someone making minimum wage would make enough in an hour to get a better experience elsewhere.

    I think it would probably cost $15+ per month to get something equivalent elsewhere, particularly for that type of performance and a 4Gbps network connection (tested), with a 10Tb allowance each month (apparently not enforced).

    So probably $180 per year, and therefore not just one hour of minimum wage...

  • tedtomatotedtomato Member
    edited November 2022

    @TimboJones said:
    To the OS, not much. But some software just isn't available on ARM natively. Not sure if Docker is a workaround to that or not.

    Isn't already a lot of Linux software running on ARM CPUs, even before those Ampere CPUs (specifically designed for cloud workloads)?

    Like Raspberry Pi, video streaming boxes, routers etc.?

    Given the cost/performance of those Ampere CPUs compared to Intel or AMD, I can only assume we are going to see a lot more of this.

    Thanked by 1pbx
  • For personal use it is fine but I would never put data / clients on top of it... Bug caused my instance to get inaccessible...

    But for building packages for opensource it is "fine"

  • @tedtomato said:

    @arifur said:
    Is it amazingly performant for the price of zero? Obviously. While I didn't get random termination like anyone else after running for years, the lack of assurance if one can even register in the first place, picked a region with available capacity, risk of random termination etc...
    Even someone making minimum wage would make enough in an hour to get a better experience elsewhere.

    I think it would probably cost $15+ per month to get something equivalent elsewhere, particularly for that type of performance and a 4Gbps network connection (tested), with a 10Tb allowance each month (apparently not enforced).

    So probably $180 per year, and therefore not just one hour of minimum wage...

    I think you messed up someone else's quote as mine @arifur . No big deal, just pointing it out.

  • So, recommendation to upgrade to paid tier just "to be on the safe side"?

  • @arifur said:

    @tedtomato said:

    @arifur said:
    Is it amazingly performant for the price of zero? Obviously. While I didn't get random termination like anyone else after running for years, the lack of assurance if one can even register in the first place, picked a region with available capacity, risk of random termination etc...
    Even someone making minimum wage would make enough in an hour to get a better experience elsewhere.

    I think it would probably cost $15+ per month to get something equivalent elsewhere, particularly for that type of performance and a 4Gbps network connection (tested), with a 10Tb allowance each month (apparently not enforced).

    So probably $180 per year, and therefore not just one hour of minimum wage...

    I think you messed up someone else's quote as mine @arifur . No big deal, just pointing it out.

    Sorry, not sure what happened there. Quote about minimum wage was from @martheen

  • tedtomatotedtomato Member
    edited November 2022

    @LTniger said:
    So, recommendation to upgrade to paid tier just "to be on the safe side"?

    Well, if you upgrade to a PAYG account, you keep your "always free" allowances anyway.

    With a PAYG account, I assume they are less likely to delete your account without notice, particularly if you make sure you have data stored too. You would have access to support too.

    My plan is just to make sure there is a minimal charge each month (so intentionally slightly going over the free limits) and see what happens, as a "paying customer".

    Putting 15GB in an storage object should do the trick, as free allowance is 10GB. This should cost me less than $1.5 a year.

    They may still stop the VMs occasionally, so creating some artificial load periodically on the server may reduce the risk of the VM being seen as idle.

    As far as I am concerned, if my VM runs 99% of the time and doesn't get deleted, I would be very happy to pay $1.5 a year, given the spec/performance.

    If I was expecting something available 99.9% of the time, then I wouldn't use that solution anyway (nor anything costing less than $50 a month).

    If I was doing something illegal or heavy (BitTorrent, mining etc.) then I wouldn't use Oracle for that.

    Clearly, some people have had VMs running fine for months/years (without account suspensions or VMs being stopped), so it probably also depends on the usage (e.g. illegal or excessive activities) and region used (spare capacity or not).

    Thanked by 3Levi Patriarch kkrajk
  • nocloudnocloud Member
    edited November 2022

    wrong thread :)

  • rm_rm_ IPv6 Advocate, Veteran

    @plumberg said: Isn't it possible to convert to paid account and then request change?

    They only provide free resources in the "home region" chosen when signing up, and it is very unlikely they will (or even able to) change your home region on request.

    Should be possible to sign up for another account though. Even if they call you on the phone for verification (like they sometimes do, like they did for me), you can explain the situation and it should be approved.

    Thanked by 2plumberg tedtomato
  • @tedtomato said: So probably $180 per year

    Experience <> Raw performance. The average hobbyist can be well served by a decent VPS with a $5 monthly package, which an hour of the minimum wage would cover each month. No worrying if Oracle suddenly changes their mind, if they woke up with the VPS wiped out, if they need to take down an instance and whether they can put it back up with enough capacity etc. Just one hour each month in return for peace of mind for the rest of the month.

    Imagine getting offered a free room in a hotel, except there's no guarantee they actually have a room available when you arrive, that people apparently get kicked out in the middle of the night, the front desk randomly give worrying announcements, etc. It's probably worth it for some, but not everyone and I'm tired of recommending OCI to others just for them to tell me they can't even register/create an instance.

  • tedtomatotedtomato Member
    edited November 2022

    @martheen said:

    @tedtomato said: So probably $180 per year

    Experience <> Raw performance. The average hobbyist can be well served by a decent VPS with a $5 monthly package, which an hour of the minimum wage would cover each month.

    Good analogy regarding the hotel.
    However, where can I get a 4 dedicated cores (3 Ghz), 24GB ram, 200GB storage, 4Gbps bandwidth for $5 a month?

    I can't, can I? I think we are looking more at $15-$20 a month, but probably a lot more.

    For instance, a Hetzner CCX22 (4 dedicated cores) at...45 EUR per month.

    I wouldn't bother to use Oracle OCI (with its degree of uncertainty) just to save $5 per month.

  • @plumberg said:

    @hampered said:
    My problem is I opened my account in Singapore and now live in South America, but you can't change regions...so that's that...it's still useful, but 300ms ping changes a lot...

    Isn't it possible to convert to paid account and then request change?

    I think you can change to paid and deploy in any region, but you can't actually change your customer region which your free stuff is based on. I might be wrong though.

    Thanked by 1plumberg
  • @hampered said:

    @plumberg said:

    @hampered said:
    My problem is I opened my account in Singapore and now live in South America, but you can't change regions...so that's that...it's still useful, but 300ms ping changes a lot...

    Isn't it possible to convert to paid account and then request change?

    I think you can change to paid and deploy in any region, but you can't actually change your customer region which your free stuff is based on. I might be wrong though.

    Hmm. Will try upgrading and see. Worst case will signup for a new account?

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