[fariszr]

Honestly nothing compares to Oracle cloud free tier.

Its amazing, you have a better VPS than 15$ per month can get you on any VPS host, even if its ARM, its worth it.

As for CI/CD, I didn't know GiLlab gives you 50,000 minutes for public projects, the issue with gitlab is the recent limits make it really complex for an open source project to grow on GitLab, Yes I know there is the Gitlab Open source program, but its an unnecessary complications that doesn't exist on GitHub.

[nexle]

Even non-free tier burstable VM is super cheap. For example, a VM.Standard.E4.Flex (AMD x86) with 1 OCPU (2 vCPU) and 4GB RAM with burstable baseline 50% is just ~$13.05/month (($0.025*50% + 4*$0.0015)*730hr). With baseline 12.5% it is just ~$6.66/month.

In comparison, AWS t3a.medium (2vCPU, 4GB RAM, burstable baseline 20%) will cost ~$27.45/month ($0.0376*730hr). DigitalOcean's 2vCPU 4GB Droplet will cost $24/month.

[overlisted]

Hetzner deserves way more attention in the VPS space. They offer an equivalent configuration for just €5.32/month, and I'm not even rounding anything down.

And for about the same price that AWS offers for their weak boxes ("~$27.45/mo"), Hetzner will give you 8 vCPUs and 16 GB of RAM... Yes, the IPv4 cost is excluded, but it's only €0.61/month if you even want to have it.

[soperj]

My history with Oracle tells me that whatever you're getting from them can't be worth it.

[5e92cb50239222b]

I've been using the free tier for two years and am yet to run into anything shady. Saved me countless bucks in the meantime (before arguing that it's like two seconds of work for you, remember that other countries do exist, and even something like DigitalOcean is pretty costly for many of us). Unlike many other free tiers you are not able to create any paid resources unless you opt in into the paid tier.

[soperj]

The firm was build on digging its hooks into you. It could be great, and I'd still stay far far away.

[brnt]

When you sign up with Oracle, you need to provider a CC. How can you guarantee that you're not accidentally opting in into any paid tier?

[microbass]

I signed up with a virtual Revolut card for sign up. Once my account was active, I deleted the card. They can't get any money out of me.

[WordAWarning]

Oracle is not the kind of company you want to test with things like that.

Trust me, I've worked with Oracle. They'll assign sales assistants and lawyers to you. They'll chase you down for pennies. Doesn't matter if you actually owe the money, they'll get it.

They spent fourteen months chasing up me and my project manager for $220 that we didn't owe them. They just decided that we should pay it and they'll work out if we actually owe them anything afterwards. The credit card had expired years ago and we hadn't used their products at all since 2016. Doesn't matter, they still spent a year assigning more and more of their team.

Eventually we just paid because it was cheaper than letting them take our company to court. The time taken from me, my line manager, and the project manager answering calls/emails/letters probably added up to a lot lot more than $220.

[brnt]

Here that would not matter from a legal standpoint. They'd can and will get the money from you through small claims.

My question is: how can you be sure you're not billed, as the post I responded to implied, if you entered payment details?

[deltarholamda]

I've used the Oracle Free tier for a while as well, and it's been pretty good.

If I have a complaint, it's the really, really, really complicated management console. It's like they looked at AWS and said, "okay, like this, but somehow worse." I mean, it all makes sense, but you can smell the bad coffee and free donuts from all of the meetings with 192 separate corporate divisions on the invite list.

It took me a while to discover the free Public IP. I ran something on the free tier for most of a year, and at some point they did some kind of internal work, and my IP address changed for the first time. I didn't care before because it stayed up and unchanged for so long.

I have to say, it put Oracle on the map as a definite option for me. Even with the Bizarro World management console.

[pgm8705]

I agree. I have been using Oracle cloud for free for about a year now for a side project that is used in production with paying customers. I had my reservations at first, but figured it was worth a shot to save me the $15/month I was paying Digital Ocean. So far so good.

FWIW, I have a close family member who works for Oracle and they claim that they're sincerely trying to be developer/start-up friendly in hopes to gain traction in the cloud space. I get that the default is to assume there is always a hidden agenda with Oracle, but it is possible they're trying to show some good faith here.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

There's no contradiction there. Of course they want to be developer+startup friendly in order to get traction in the cloud space. How else would they get more people to extort in the future?

[zdragnar]

I'm less concerned that they're operating in good faith than that there are multiple competing interests within Oracle. Once (if?) their cloud offering gains traction, someone somewhere else in the org will decide that the free tier is costing them too much, and the screws start getting tightened.

They aren't unique among big companies to have offered utterly opaque and punitive pricing terms, but if they hope to use the free tier to attract developers into recommending Oracle to their employers, I have a hard time imagining it will be successful given what a terrible experience older folk have had with them.

Perhaps someday, people will forget the lawnmower analogy (and the reasons behind it) and they can start fresh, I guess.

[Etheryte]

Thanks a lot for this tip, I wasn't even aware they had an offering and it matches my hobby project requirements very nicely.