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Can you run a small business on this, indefinitey, for free?
Indefinitely? Mmmmmmm probably not. This is clearly a loss-leader for them to draw in more customers, so you can’t guarantee it won’t change
This might be the first Oracle product I use. That means down the line I might have an informed opinion to share in business decisions where Oracle provides a solution. Pretty smart.
Or they are just totally failing in the cloud and this is an indication of that.

Also not hard to imagine the whole cloud getting shut down and/or sold to Salesforce (and shut down)

They’re definitely not doing well in the “casual cloud user” space, which hurts them because nobody is familiar with their console and APIs. Everyone knows how to do stuff on AWS because we’ve all done personal throwaway projects there. Somewhere else in this thread someone posted their notes on the confusing console, and reading through it, it doesn’t look any more complicated than AWS to me, but familiarity is valuable. Maybe this is a play for that type of usage.
"Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. Think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawn mower"
That's not a great comparison. Lawnmower salesmen don't actively try to persuade you to stick your hand into the moving blades.
Ellison isn't the salesman, he's the lawnmower.
And don't assume you're the operator of said lawnmower. You are, in fact, the grass.
There's absolutely no way Oracle will continue giving this away free indefinitely. With the rush they're likely to get just from this being on HN, I'd be surprised if it wasn't at least temporarily disabled because of over-subscription.

As an aside, I've looked at Oracle Cloud before, and pricing definitely seems favourable compared to the big 3, and IIRC they even include a good chunk of bandwidth for free. But... I just don't trust Oracle. Now, it might well be that Oracle Cloud is completely separate from the rest of Oracle, in which case I might be more tempted - anyone here work at Oracle Cloud and can share, even with a throwaway if you're too embarrassed to admit to it? :P

I worked for an adtech business unit at Oracle until recently (my choice to leave). It's a massive organization of over 100,000 employees (not to mention contractors AFAIK). Every business unit is run kinda like separate companies with their own cultures and practices and whatnot.

There are better and worse orgs and managers as you would expect of a company of that size.

As far as I can tell there was literally no specific "Oracle" culture. Some of the well-known cultures attributed to "Oracle" may be true of specific business units like Oracle database or ERP but it's hard to say without having been in every one of those business units. But my adtech business unit was nothing like the nightmare/FUD stories you hear online.

Yeah it's ten terabytes of data transfer out per month for free. That would cost like $900 on AWS
It's free because no one would choose them over AWS, GCP, etc if it cost anything. The second they think they no longer have to dangle free things in front of developers in order to get their business, it will no longer be free.
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.
There is more money in treating customers even just slightly better.

    "He gives the kids free samples
    because he knows full well
    that today's young, innocent faces
    will be tomorrow's clientele"
If you are a startup and using Oracle, then your are NGMI

Use common sense

"Not Going To Make It", for people who are not into the latest trendy acronyms.
Thanks. I'd expanded it to "Not Getting My Investment", which might also be fitting.
Free, you say? Oracle, you say? No, no, the price is too high.
The large print giveth.

The small print taketh away.

Thus is the way of the Oracle
I love how HN is extremely skeptical towards Oracle.
Lest folks not read the actual article, STH is pretty happy about this offering:

> To us, this is a big deal. This is perhaps one of the best “free” instances that one can get. Something that we really like about Oracle’s Always Free tier is that one can use it without being as worried about overages as with Amazon’s offering. AWS has a size advantage, but Oracle has a great Always Free Tier offering.

I don't notice anything in the STH article about the license terms. (Sorry if I'm just missing it.)

Given Oracle's reputation, no evaluation is complete without a thorough examination of those terms, ideally by a competent lawyer.

You have to manually upgrade your account to get charged.
I bet you don't need to upgrade your account to receive nastygrams from Oracle legal, though.
I've had an account for a couple of years and I might have received a survey email once, but otherwise I have received only things like notifications about infrastructure changes and there haven't been many of those.
If you are running a business sure. But personally I just would like a beefy cloud instance to run some things off of for personal use.

Kinda perfect for that.

Nice. I assumed cryptocurrency fraudsters would stop these kinds of offerings for the near future.
You have to provide a valid credit card in order to sign up for the free account, which probably helps stymie abuse.
That's a sweet deal. How much is 100GB extra disk space per month?
2.55 dollars/month for an extra 100GB -- you get 200GB free but they are hard to come buy because of where they are located. I ended up getting the entire free tier as expected, except for the storage which wasn't available in the region I selected.

I'm _very_ happy with the setup, and here's a silly github workflow to deploy to oracle cloud: https://github.com/matthewaveryusa/oracle_actions

Block storage is $0.0425 / GB / month with ”balanced” I/O performance level whatever that means, file storage is $0.30 / GB / month.

Block volumes are attached to a specific virtual machine which views that thing as a local disk.

File storage is deployed on the virtual network, that thing is visible to all VMs in the network as an NFS server.

Enticing, but a part of me is still very hesitant to get in bed with Oracle. They've gained a reputation of trying to lock customers in so that their legal department can "innovate" more ways of squeezing money out of them. The common joke remains that Oracle is actually just two law-firms in a software-company trenchcoat.

Until this reputation changes, any offer they present smells suspiciously like a baited hook.

Never invite a vampire into your home is timeless advice.
Had IBM Cloud account for a while. At some point, they started to attach a notice to a monthly $0 bill along the lines: if you card gets declined, we will fine you $25 and if you don't pay in 7 days, we will fine you further $50. Easiest account termination decision I have ever had. I guess the first email from Oracle "we are making routine changes to the T&Cs and our privacy policy" will be the end of my account.
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.

It's not a government fine. It's just an agreement in the contract specifying a payment is due if your card declines.
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.

> IANAL

That much is clear.

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

GP referred to "civilised jurisdictions", by which most of us snarkily mean "outside the US". Since you refer to cheques, I presume you're in the US. If that is correct, then it's kind of beside the point whether or not it's legal there.

In any case, their point is valid. This would certainly not be legal in my jurisdiction. The company can write it in the contract all they want, but the law on collecting payments trumps that and is the only thing that matters. You wouldn't have to pay.

æøå

Edit to add: "Lov om inkassovirksomhet" § 17, which according to § 3 can't be voided by agreement. Short version is that you can't demand fees covered unless the client fails to pay within the 14 day deadline of the payment reminder.

LOL @ the guy replying to you acting like collection costs ("§ 17. The debtor's responsibility for costs of extrajudicial collection") is somehow relevant... :)
And LOL @ you not understanding that law :)
> IANAL But AFAIK in civilised jurisdictions if I offer a service for money, and you offer money, I must offer the service.

First off, you need to stop using the (incredibly loaded) word "civilized".

Second, I am not aware of ANY jurisdiction in which businesses are required to provide their services or products to anyone.

Third, THIS IS NOT AN "OUT OF CONTRACT CHARGE". This is a charge which IS IN THE CONTRACT.

Fourth, anti-discrimination laws have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with charging someone a fee when they don't pay you in a timely manner and/or cause you to incur higher costs (such as decline fees or NSF fees).

When selling to consumers, you can't force an arbitrary contract on them and demand that they pay you in various tangential circumstances. Neither you are a bank neither them are your insurer.
In Europe, we don't use chargebacks in most cases. Unless the payment was truly fraudulent (i.e. you cannot get hold of someone who issued the payment or they are not in business of doing things they charged for), you have to use proper legal means of settling the dispute. As you may imagine, the life is too short for things of such kind, especially with multi-billion corps. Anyway, dug up the email:

Please note that all payments are due in full on the monthly anniversary date. Failure to remit payment for services on the monthly anniversary date will result in a $20 late fee. If full payment has not been received within five (5) consecutive days, including the anniversary date, termination of public access to Customer services and a $50 reconnect fee will be incurred. Failure to remit payment for services within seven (7) consecutive days, including the anniversary date, shall result in termination of access to the service network and all services shall be reclaimed.

And the T&Cs link: https://www.ibm.com/support/customer/csol/terms?id=Z126-6304... To my pleasant surprise, the T&Cs are quite a readable document. As you see, they call them fees, not fines.

The https://www.ibm.com/cloud/pricing page also says they offer loans, leasing, and other kinds of financing.

You don't have to use "proper legal means". Which are rigged against you anyway.

Use secondary bank accounts and cards. IBM loses a thousand yoyos, no one even farts. You do, it's a major loss.

Unless you're rich and somewhat of an idiot, of course. It's really hard to get rich playing by the rules.

I always thought that chargeback was the rule of Visa and MasterCard networks, so if you used that for the transaction, you are eligible for it. I wonder what's the extent of my confusion here.

It is also a proper legal procedure.

You are right, even the consumer protection agency says as much: https://www.hallakonsument.se/en/articles/card-complaints/

However, I think now I have a better idea why: debit cards have a major share in Europe and the page above says "When you pay with a debit card, you have no right by law to turn to the bank to demand a refund."

But thanks for a reminder, and I will think about using a credit card for online purchases in some cases rather than a debit.

But here in Europe, we also have consumer protection departments that have teeth. As a company, you’d rather not get onto their radar too much.
Sure, but Oracle can probably send it to collections and at the very least waste your time getting things fixed at the credit reporting agencies. At most, they'll sell your "debt" to one of those lowlife collections agencies that keeps calling until they get through to family members and then makes veiled threats. It's not legal, but with an unlimited supply of overseas "agents" that isn't really their problem, and it most certainly isn't Oracle's problem.
If someone has contractually agreed to pay a certain amount if an event happens, and that event happens, then yes, that person has to pay that amount if that event happens.
It does not work that way when selling services or goods to a person. In most jurisdictions, anyway.

It is highly regulated and it should be so.

You can only charge for things that you have delivered and only the ones which were requested/consumed.

You can repeat that as many times as you want but it won't make it any more relevant.
I can't speak for other jurisdictions, but Norwegian law explicitly says that you can't demand payment in that case, even if you have a contract that says otherwise.

æøå

The Norwegian law you referenced appears to say you can't charge for debt collection (unless conditions are met). This has nothing to do with debt collection. In fact it has nothing to do with debt. But you know what man, go ahead, try and scam someone with an NSF or decline and see how it goes.

(Disclaimer: I don't speak Norwegian or any of the other languages)

But I do speak Norwegian, so how about assuming I know what the law is about? It is not just about debt collection, it is about any kind of failed payment, including a declined card for a service you're subscribed to.

In the event that your card is declined, they are obliged to give you a written notice with at least a 14 day deadline (§9) and they can't charge extra for that, or anything else beyond what they would for normal billing (§18), as long as you pay within that deadline (§17). Any agreements or contracts you enter that state otherwise are explicitly null and void (§3).

coo' coo', go try and scam someone with an NSF, see how it goes my man.
> 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!

It was pretty clearly plain language and clear notification.

I have no intent to purchase anything from you, unlike the customers (i.e. people who have and continue to purchase) who this thread is discussing.

An actual analogy would be more like "You all owe me $100 for reading this, if you want to purchase something else from me". Which is completely legal. In any jurisdiction. If you don't like it you're free to go buy from someone else.

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I played around with Oracles free tier. When you first sign up, you must choose a “home” region. You cannot add another region on the free plan.

These awesome free instances are very limited stock. You have no way of knowing if the region you choose has stock of the desired instances before you select the region. You may not change your “home” region.

You will get sales phone calls. Caveat emptor.

If you wait a bit, you can get what you want to try.
You can change the zone within the region. There were no free Ampere instances in the Frankfurt AZ1, I found them in AZ2. Though it only works for the Ampere. 1vCPU x86 VM can only be spun up in AZ1.
Gotcha. I had signed up in a US region and there was nary an ARM server to be found. I was quite disappointed. Then sales people reminded me of my disappointment weeks after.
I signed up months ago so I could get enough virtual crap to start a "working" k8s cluster for messing around with, doing CV KA etc. Haven't used it yet (doing other stuff) but am planning on kicking off next month. I got a single salesy email, and I replied that the account is for personal use, I have no money and no intention of monetising my tire-kicking, so it's forever free-tier. That was the end of it. You also have to explicitly flip a switch so they are allowed to charge you. If you don't, you simply can't deploy anything beyond the free tier. That's my understanding of their documentation of the free tier, but that was made clear enough.
So when i sign up I should the phone number of my nemesis? Noted.
Until your nemesis says “Yeah upgrade my account for all that cool stuff!”
that's when things really start heating up between my nemesis and my other nemesis (and people talk about the equifax leak like it's a bad thing!)
They verify the number in the sign up process.
Yeah, I signed up specifically to try out the Ampere instances (and when chosing the home region it said x, y, z were at capacity so I chose w), but wasn't able to actually create an Ampere instance because of lack of availability. I ended up just using a free x86 instance for a different project, but it was pretty disappointing.
I've been using it for a year for one of their Ampere instances and haven't received any phone calls. Might be because I'm in the UK (region UK South (London)), I imagine they're much more call happy in countries where the laws are looser.
In the US. When you first sign up you are initially placed in a free trial. After the free trial period ends you fallback to the free tier. While in the free trial period I received one phone call which I let go to voicemail and besides the emails welcoming me to Oracle Cloud and regarding account creation I received 3 or 4 reminding me that the trial was ending and I would revert to the free tier. Since then, which has been months, I haven't received either calls or emails.
You have to keep trying. Capacity renews every so often. Save the VM as a job and try to run it every day or so, or there's a script floating around that you can run on one of the tiny standard free VMs to attempt until it works
1) The article is from May 2021

2) When I checked today the free Ampere instance was a 1 core, 6GB of memory, 1 Gbps network bandwidth, and up to 2 virtual NICs.

Edit: I spoke too soon. After selecting it I was able to increase the CPU count to 4 and 24GB of memory. I provisioned with Ubuntu 20.04, logged in and I see 4 CPUs and 24GB of memory. Cool.

The free x86 instance is 1 core, 1GB of memory, 0.48 Gbps network bandwidth, and up to 1 virtual NIC.

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 card expired- then they finally cancelled the account and I paid the last bill manually. They then added another 0.1SEK charge (which is not payable, as 1SEK is the lowest denomination of currency).

I still get extremely high quantities of A4 paper through the mail box, at one point it was 29 pages of the same invoice.

I could have done something wrong here, but there is a distinct dark pattern on sign up and there are definitely bugs in the billing system.

Caveat Emptor.

EDIT: in case someone thinks I am joking. This was one of the packs: https://imgur.com/0fbsR3E

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.
accounts get cancelled after a few weeks!
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.
Signed up with Revolut disposable cards, will see
Some might think this is a joke, but the IT manager at one place I worked was almost fooled into thinking he had to pay licenses for our MariaDB databases running on AWS after Oracle had got his name from a web form.

This is a different company than the other one I mentioned elsewhere where we resold Oracle and they still tried to extort us.

Late, but I should mention he is a seriously bright guy, Oracle just is that good at scaring people.
I figure that info is out there in the wild in the hands of criminals after countless data breaches.

And I'm less worried about those criminals having my data than Oracle. I think they only see the world in two colors: 1) Current customers 2) people to sue. And lots of #1 are in the second category as well.

Man this is exactly the kind of dystopian bullshit I would expect from Oracle.
They ruin everything they touch IMO (Java came to them ruined already to be fair)
And they do an excellent job as Java’s language steward. Java was revived and has many excellent research and development going for it. Project Loom, Panama, Valhalla came to mind. They also made a low-latency GC.

Oracle is not a homogeneous entity.

Except while building the language into a nicer language, they also took the time and effort to rebuild the licenses around it so that it is harder to feel safe using it
> rebuild the licenses around it

Isn't it all GPL?

The code is GPL, but the official Oracle binaries are not (since Oracle owns the copyright, they are free to release under multiple different licenses) and they use Oracle's predatory "free" licensing - you când download and run for free for 6 months, but you owe them money if you keep running those binaries after the moment the new version is released. There is no explicit enforcement mechanism - it's up to you to be careful, otherwise their lawyers will notice at some point and bill you for all the times you weren't.
So it can be avoided by compiling the code yourself?
Or just using a package manager like a normal person.
> The code is GPL, but the official Oracle binaries are not (since Oracle owns the copyright, they are free to release under multiple different licenses) and they use Oracle's predatory "free" licensing...

And once they started doing that, everyone switched to some flavor of OpenJDK, many distributions of which are backed by organizations of at least Oracle's size.

https://adoptopenjdk.net/

https://aws.amazon.com/corretto/

https://developers.redhat.com/products/openjdk/overview

https://www.microsoft.com/openjdk

So build it yourself or get someone else to build it for you.
For the past 2-3 ( may be 4 ) years there is a narrative / movement that Open Source doesn't just mean the sourced code are opened, open source means the "community". And the result of that community must be both free in beer and free as speech.
Did you miss the part where they tried to burn the entire computing industry to the ground so they could get a few bucks out of Google? I wouldn't touch anything related to Oracle with a fifty foot pole, that shit is radioactive.
> Java was revived

Java probably should have had a DNR on file.

Sorry, Java is outdated, young people aren’t even interested in learning Java anymore. It’s the “old language”.

Try React. Angular. Anything NPM is sexy. Leave Java for the generation Y.

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Java is disgusting. So is all the stuff you just mentioned.
What are good technologies then?
Rust, obviously.
Kids these days and their toys.

You've never programmed until you program in assambler. Only than can you start contemplating the path to true mastery, imputting software into tha machine as binary using switches.

"Linux sucks it just sucks less" before that it was something else. Java is a wonderful language, Rust is a dumpster fire of upgrade hell, all are correct. As is the point that they all suck and make our life hell.

Never trust the evangelists they are always too narrow minded.

I tried writing my last project in React but its Postgresql libraries are basically non-existent.
NPM has less reason to exist than Java

React and Angular are out of date already, surely, being JS frameworks?

Goodness, for those who don't know, 1 USD ~ 10 SEK. They printed a page to charge someone 10 öre or 1¢. Maybe I don't need that free account after all.
if they only print on one side of the A4 paper you may never need to buy paper for rough notes again
We were a paying customer, and the same thing happened. I expect it was lack of competence more than dark patterns, although strategic incompetence is always possible with O. Oracle is not a credible cloud vendor.
I've been using it for about 3 years without issue, but you're right - you do have to be careful to set it up properly. I've also never gotten any related (or unrelated) physical mail from them about my account.
What is shape? Reading the doc doesn't make it clear why it is a paid thing. I just signed up for oracle cloud for free account and how to check if I accidentally bought anything?
Shape just means instance sizing.

I was presented two options:

1: 1vCPU 2GiB ram

2: 2vCPU 8GiB ram

(Or something, my memory is awful and it was a long time ago now. I remember a friend of mine who works at oracle was walking me through.)

Oh. So can't you delete the VM after being charged once?
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Similar problem to me when they acquired apiary. I was in a free tier of apiary which became a paid tier under oracle. They then charged me for months. I finally had to write a letter (yes snail mail) stating that we were going to report them for deceptive trade practices to the attorney general of Texas. They got back to me after a few weeks. They promised a refund…never got that and it’s just not worth fighting.

I will never choose to do business with oracle directly.

It's almost as if now that SCO is fully defunct, they are trying really hard to take the crown of most litigious and absurd *nix related software company in the USA.
I worked for a company that brought Oracle customers.

Didn't prevent them from trying to extort us too.

whenever you sign up for some one-time use trash, use support@oracle.com as your email to get them back :)
I had the same experience with AWS ec2 free tier that ran out after a year and started billing me. They bill me $17/mo now even though the machine was shut down and AWS account was closed 2 months ago
Was the machine shut down, or was the instance deleted?
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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.

I have wanted this.
Privacy.com offers this service. It's good! Combine that with Firefox Relay for the emails and you're good to go!
I have mentally trained myself so that whenever I see the name "Oracle", related to any new product, I think "Larry Ellison needs a bigger yacht".
This is SOP for Oracle. Company I work for got stung by them to the tune of a couple hundred thousand dollars over a similar deal with Oracle DB licensing. I wouldn't enter into any kind of contract or license with Oracle at all, and if I had to, I'd hire a specialized consultant and a lawyer to go through everything with a fine tooth comb first.
Won't work, they have 5x the lawyers to sue you even if the contract is ironclad.

I wonder where they rank in the "largest staff of lawyers" in the fortune 500.

According to them, it's impossible to accidentally use something that's not free; you have to deliberately upgrade to a paid account. Freshness not guaranteed, salt to taste
Do you not need to provide card details to create an account? Serious question, as I thought you did for AWS, GCP and Azure (with some exceptions for "special" Azure account types).
If you want desperate salesmen calling and emailing you every day for months, this is your best option!
Been using it for months for a Minecraft server. Runs 10+ players with mods without much difficulty. I limited the RAM usage to 6GB though so that the Garbage Collector doesn't go nuts.
Wait, are you saying Java performs worse if you give it more memory to work with?
It can.

GC pauses cause stuttering. More memory is a longer GC pause.

This is only the case if you allocate and deallocate a lot.

Also: never go larger than 32GiB on heap else you’ll end up with 64bit inter pointers: that will seriously degrade performance.

This very much depends on the GC you're using. But yes, a full GC will take longer the more memory you have. Therefore you want to avoid full GCs like the plague.
No. More accurately: with very large heaps the default performance characteristics of the GC might be different than what you’d like it to be. For example you might get huge throughput but occasional long GC pauses.

But it’s all tunable.

No. A bigger heap means more work for a memory manager. If you just give it more memory, but your app doesn't use it, no harm done.

Honestly Java in 2021 can handle huge heaps pretty well. Not sure which GC they are running.

Of course, nobody really likes Oracle. But it is pretty cool and impressive that Ampere is able to trade blows favorably with something the size of Amazon.
"Oracle" and "free" in the same sentence raises alarms. I've seen many years of Oracle filling their "free" offerings with horrible trap doors into massive amounts of financial obligation that are way too easy to accidentally fall through.
How will any of these be available? If they're free and unrestricted, people will squat them and never give them up. Why would you ever give up any of these? And if you don't need payment details, you can just make multiple accounts to squat them.
If AWS can pull the plugs on paying customer earlier this year due to political reasons, why wouldn't Larry do so to free tiers for business reasons. Those squatters will get evicted easily just like any squatters in America. Since they have very limited means to engage lawyers, every courts in America will hand Larry a hall pass easily. As many have said, you just simply don't invite vampires in no matter how voluptuous and scantily-dressed or muscular Tom-Cruise-handsome.
"Instances". I thought they're getting rid of surplus.
Can't even sign up. Gives generic error about "payment / registration failed" - its a regular credit card that I use everywhere. Oh well...kinda glad to be honest.

Knowing Oracle it will eventually become a nightmare anyway (whoops, we accidentally billed you $70 for the free-tier, but you need to manually call this long-distance number between the hours of 9am-4pm to reverse the charge and this also happens to be our sales dept)

Had this exactly error couple of weeks ago. Tried multiple good CC and it never worked. Blessing in disguise.