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by hedora 1081 days ago
It's interesting that they had two different accounts specifically in case one got borked, and then Oracle simultaneously closed both without warning.

As far as I can tell, the site is just a youtube frontend, so it's unclear if this was some sort of pseudo-DMCA thing, or if Oracle Cloud just sometimes intentionally scorched-earths paying customers.

3 comments

Projects like this usually run off of Oracle cloud to take advantage of the free tier. Reclamation of resources on the free tier is not unheard of, especially if abuse or high resource usage is detected, and other cloud providers like AWS will do it too.
It's sort of the opposite. If you're on a free account with free tier and under utilize resources below a certain threshold it may get reclaimed after a while.
It's both. Create a server but never login it will be reclaimed. Try to use that 10T up and the account will be banned.
It was almost certainly over-utilization of a low revenue tier that did it.

Cloud companies all make certain claims around bandwidth/CPU/memory/etc. on low tiers, but if you actually fully utilize the tier, they'll almost invariably make your life miserable.

Normally they won't outright boot you (this seems surprising), but your instances will suddenly always be limited to what the Cloud Company considers to be "proper" for the low tier you are paying for--which magically is always much smaller than what they advertise.

It was probably easy for Oracle to identify that both accounts were being used to serve this site of questionable legality. And having multiple accounts is probably against Oracle's ToS anyway.
AFAIK there is nothing illegal about YouTube frontend sites.

While they may in some way violate Google TOS, that is not a legal matter.

In the United States violating the TOS of a web site is technically a criminal offense under the CFAA, although the government is choosing currently not to prosecute most of these offenses[0]; but beware as that is simply a policy that can be ignored at any time it is useful.

[0] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-announces-...