This change is totally fair from my perspective. I see the "always free" as "you will never pay for this for as long as you keep it" as opposed to "this will always be available, and free". People who use free services like this should generally be aware that they are likely to go away or be reduced at some point. I got hit by this with PlanetScale and had to move my stuff to a self-hosted postgres.
The 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?
The 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...
I know we aren’t supposed to do meta comments but while this information is interesting, the link needs to be labelled as AI slop. HN needs this new LinkedIn feature.
I’m mostly fine with this. Their free teir was crazy generous. 24GB of ram for free is a lot. They were a very popular host for free Minecraft servers because of it.
Their communication about this change has been pretty awful. It began with a silent change to the docs a month or so back, and a lot of people worrying that they would suddenly be charged. It looks like there’s actually a date associated with the change now at least. This article mentions an email that went out? I haven’t gotten any such email. I’ve already reduced my instances to within the upcoming limit, so maybe that’s why? I don’t know.
If 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 resources (or even eliminate them entirely), but I did not get any notification that this was changing, nor that they would be terminating my instances that took the account above the Always Free limits. It would honestly have been _less_ sneaky (and potentially damaging) to simply start charging for resources above the new limit.
Interesting, I definitely haven't received an email from Oracle about this yet. Guess I'll have to move this server somewhere else now though. Maybe OVH?
For 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 subject to this lower limit, only Always Free users.
In other words, if you want the old provisioning limits for free you just have to put your credit card info in.
There are additional reasons that you would want to switch to PAYG - for instance, oracle will literally tear down your always free resources if you are idling them, they are watching CPU and memory and if they see them idled they will take them away. Also, even provisioning always free instances is a challenge - most people have to write bots that attempt on a regular basis, since they appear to only allow you to register when existing resources are freed up, either by the reaper referenced earlier or by someone deprovisioning their always free resources. Neither of these limitations apply on the PAYG tier
It's worth clearing up, because this amount of free resources is worth a nonzero amount of money, if you provisioned comparable resources on any of the tier 1 or tier 2 cloud's you would be paying well over $1k/year for what they are handing over for free. AWS + GCP free compute offerings are anemic in comparison. It's a significant amount of compute.
Compared to any normal hosting provider, you'd be paying 50 €/year for what Oracle is handing over for free. Plus you don't need to use the absolute trainwreck that is the OCI web console.
"Cloud" providers are not the only way and you get precisely none of their benefits if all you do is run a single instance, so they're really not a good comparison.
> afaik the PAYG subscribers are not subject to this lower limit ... In other words, if you want the old provisioning limits for free you just have to put your credit card info in.
Always Free can mean different things: to a tenancy like you're describing, or to resources, where it describes the amount of resources you can use for free before you start getting charged money.
> All Oracle Cloud Infrastructure accounts (whether free or paid) have a set of resources that are free of charge ... These resources display the Always Free-eligible label
> All tenancies get a set of Always Free resources in the Compute service ... All tenancies get the first 1,500 OCPU hours and 9,000 GB hours per month for free for VM instances using the VM.Standard.A1.Flex shape.
That's for all tenancies, and calculates to 2 OCPUs and 12GB per month.
So sure, the provisioning _limits_ go up for PAYG tenancies, but using them certainly ain't free! If you have a 4/24 VM you have to downsize it if you don't want to be charged for it.
I tried getting some free ARM oracle servers a couple months back. I ended up setting up a whole PAYG setup, eventually got tired of trying to get their cloud to actually provision me any of these supposed free ARM systems, and have been a customer for a couple months now paying ~80/mo for the couple VPS's I've been playing with.
Speaking as an Oracle customer, let me heartily disrecommend them to everyone. Terrible experience.
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.
To their credit their limits were historically crazy high compared to their competition. So I find it hard to fault them for this move.
...their tendency to delete accounts haphazardly with no obvious pattern as to who gets hit on the other hand is kind shitty. Mine's been good for years while others even with paid accounts don't fare so well
This will remove a non-insignificant chunk of Tor network capacity. Many of those OCI free-tier instances were set and forget Tor relay nodes, especially since they're de facto unmetered.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 8.7 ms ] threadThis change is totally fair from my perspective. I see the "always free" as "you will never pay for this for as long as you keep it" as opposed to "this will always be available, and free". People who use free services like this should generally be aware that they are likely to go away or be reduced at some point. I got hit by this with PlanetScale and had to move my stuff to a self-hosted postgres.
If this is the first casualty of the Ellisonpocalypse I'm fine with it. May they all whither and go away.
Their communication about this change has been pretty awful. It began with a silent change to the docs a month or so back, and a lot of people worrying that they would suddenly be charged. It looks like there’s actually a date associated with the change now at least. This article mentions an email that went out? I haven’t gotten any such email. I’ve already reduced my instances to within the upcoming limit, so maybe that’s why? I don’t know.
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 resources (or even eliminate them entirely), but I did not get any notification that this was changing, nor that they would be terminating my instances that took the account above the Always Free limits. It would honestly have been _less_ sneaky (and potentially damaging) to simply start charging for resources above the new limit.
But, Oracle gonna Oracle I guess.
The actual Oracle docs: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...
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 subject to this lower limit, only Always Free users.
In other words, if you want the old provisioning limits for free you just have to put your credit card info in.
There are additional reasons that you would want to switch to PAYG - for instance, oracle will literally tear down your always free resources if you are idling them, they are watching CPU and memory and if they see them idled they will take them away. Also, even provisioning always free instances is a challenge - most people have to write bots that attempt on a regular basis, since they appear to only allow you to register when existing resources are freed up, either by the reaper referenced earlier or by someone deprovisioning their always free resources. Neither of these limitations apply on the PAYG tier
It's worth clearing up, because this amount of free resources is worth a nonzero amount of money, if you provisioned comparable resources on any of the tier 1 or tier 2 cloud's you would be paying well over $1k/year for what they are handing over for free. AWS + GCP free compute offerings are anemic in comparison. It's a significant amount of compute.
"Cloud" providers are not the only way and you get precisely none of their benefits if all you do is run a single instance, so they're really not a good comparison.
Always Free can mean different things: to a tenancy like you're describing, or to resources, where it describes the amount of resources you can use for free before you start getting charged money.
https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...
> All Oracle Cloud Infrastructure accounts (whether free or paid) have a set of resources that are free of charge ... These resources display the Always Free-eligible label
> All tenancies get a set of Always Free resources in the Compute service ... All tenancies get the first 1,500 OCPU hours and 9,000 GB hours per month for free for VM instances using the VM.Standard.A1.Flex shape.
That's for all tenancies, and calculates to 2 OCPUs and 12GB per month. So sure, the provisioning _limits_ go up for PAYG tenancies, but using them certainly ain't free! If you have a 4/24 VM you have to downsize it if you don't want to be charged for it.
Speaking as an Oracle customer, let me heartily disrecommend them to everyone. Terrible experience.
You’ll spend hours upon hours trying to get a free spot. And like anything free it’s full of spam.
Your free server will likely have a blacklisted ip address.
Oracle is exceptionally frustrating to use in the first place. Pay the 5$ a month and use AWS or Digital Ocean
...their tendency to delete accounts haphazardly with no obvious pattern as to who gets hit on the other hand is kind shitty. Mine's been good for years while others even with paid accounts don't fare so well