[freedomben]

Geez, thanks for sharing your experience. I run a number of things that I pay for myself and my cloud bill each month is becoming non-negligible. Even tho it kills me inside I considered looking at Oracle, but this is enough to steer me away. Thank you :-)

[terrywang]

Looks like you should have a good look at DigitalOcean to run your personal side projects or fun stuff, which has a much more simpler and transparent billing model (capped, no nasty hidden cost).

I've been a long time DO customer and overall happy for the past 7 years. I've write my personal experience [1] with DO in another post.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23016669

[Tostino]

I had the same experience on my trial, along with SUPER pushy sales people. In the end, after I gave them our setup on DO and they said they'd come up with a proposal for an equivalent setup in Oracle Cloud, they came back and said "can't do it" and their proposal was a little over 3x what our current bill was.