Different levels of trust can be placed in different providers for different types of data. Oracle is however at the bottom of the list with regard to trust.
Sufficiently different that you wouldn't backup your data at more locations? I don't think there is a single provider I'd trust that much, at least for data I really need to be still exist while I'm alive.
Yes, some paid ones that encrypt the data and have been in business for many years. They're not publicly listed in the stock market, and so they don't have to put up with the self-destructing demands of shareholders
Interesting, you're certainly more brave than me :) One of the places I used for backups been around for 2 decades, I still wouldn't trust them enough to store my only copy of something.
I use mirroring and version control for the most important files, just not for files that I can possibly do without, but yes, it would be good to have.
Famously, the most litigious and generally obnoxious to deal with enterprise software company on the planet. Or ale doesn’t have customers, they have hostages.
I find that Oracle has tremendous generosity on individual level. That's how people become familiar with their products and services.
It's when you're in production and particularly as a billion+ dollar company that screws get properly tightened!
But from the time I was a student in 90s to occasional dabbler now, I find their free / personal / individual / non-prod offerings to in fact be extremely generous.
I was a happy "customer" of Oracle always free instances until they locked me out of my account. My instance is still running for now, but I can't change the firewall anymore.
And per many anecdotes on HN it's not just a "may" - I recall reading about people who had been prompted to upgrade to some paid tier, and upon declining their free tier account was closed.
From what I've seen, there's actually two different levels of free tier. There's the one where you make an account and don't give them your payment info, and are on a free trial (availability of Ampere servers is severely limited in this, and they deactivate your account if you don't sign in often enough or use the servers you create), and the other where you give them payment information and set up a real account and get credits towards 200GB storage and the free tier compute.
My guess is that people who complain about their stuff being deleted are on the former.
When signing up for free tier the first month is actually a trial. After 30 days trial ends and you are downgraded to free tier. That causes the VMs to be destroyed. BUT! The storage with data stays and you simply recreate the VMs attach the disks and and everything continues to work.
Another possibility is that Oracle wants the machines to be used. So a simple `stress -c 1` in a screen is enough.
Also good luck creating an account in the first place. Their shitty fraud checking partner keeps rejecting perfectly legit credit cards even after they've been verified with 3D secure check.
I do still get their email invitations to participate in various OCI webinars and developer conferences. Which is, you know, what I really wanted all along.
This is a bit alarmist. They are one of the biggest web hosts in the world, whole companies run on their servers and cloud without issues. Accidents happen and you always need to have backups, ideally in another DC.
They burned down two DCs, by the way. I advise to read analysis first as it shows utter blatant negligence when planning their DCs to reduce cooling costs, note the air tonnel effect "EcoRoom" design (at least the two DCs that burned down, but not limited to them), and operational issues like firefighters inability to turn off the AC, so they just stand there watching the firestorm.
Wow, pairing a 9 year old processor with 64GB ram and 100Mbps. What are common use-cases that require much ram but not processing power, disk space or a higher bandwidth?
I apologize to all of you, but the interest in this blog post exceeded my expectations and unfortunately, due to the number of entries, the blog simply exploded and you can't enter the article...
They successfully charged my card for $1 like a dozen times as I tried and failed to get past their check. At the time I wasn't even interested in the free stuff, I wanted to pay for an ARM VPS, and their verification system just wasn't satisfied with something. After getting frustrated I tried to sign up for Hetzner instead and they allowed me to register and spin up a VPS without even having any payment information on file, they just trusted that I would pay the invoice at the end of the month. Funny how different the two companies treat this stuff.
I contacted them by email and was eventually able to create an account. Had to contact them again at another point where their system once again checks for something with a credit card and again rejected me. I can't remember exactly for what.
It worked eventually and I use the free tier server for small things, but of course it means I can't ever consider using their service for anything serious.
Yes, I sent them an email, I tried 3 debit cards and a credit card over a span of 1 year. They told me they cannot resolve the issue or process the transaction. They refused to provide any extra information.
A guide describing how to create your own (and most importantly free) cloud storage with a capacity of nearly 200GB. Step by step about how to get a free VPS from Oracle (4xOCPU, 24GB RAM and 200GB storage), install Docker on it, run Portainer, NGINX Proxy Manager and Nextcloud (with MariaDB database). In addition, it describes how to connect a domain via Cloudflare or FreeDNS:42 with SSL connection encryption.
