this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
765 points (99.2% liked)

Programmer Humor

25180 readers
2006 users here now

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] bonn2@lemm.ee 77 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Where did you find a free server that is that good? Or is it just one of those 100$ free credit things?

[–] myersguy@lemmy.simpl.website 87 points 11 months ago (3 children)

They are for sure talking about the ARM servers from Oracle. You get 24gb of memory and 4 cpu cores that you can carve into virtual machines.

Issue is that the free stock is very limited, and there have been some claims of people having their free service resources reclaimed by Oracle.

Still, if you can get one, it is probably the best you can get for free.

[–] LostXOR@fedia.io 41 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yep, it's Oracle. It's a really great deal; I've been using their services for a couple years now and haven't had any problems.

[–] Dima@lemmy.one 30 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

Make sure you have backups, they randomly shut mine down after a couple of years

[–] LostXOR@fedia.io 7 points 11 months ago

Yep, it's all backed up locally. I figure eventually they'll shut it down as they're losing a fair bit of money.

[–] whyNotSquirrel@sh.itjust.works 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

sure it wasn't related to the server center that caught on fire due to an UPS update?

[–] Dima@lemmy.one 14 points 11 months ago (1 children)

They disabled my account without any notice, I tried to login to see why my VM wasn't responding and found they'd deactivated Oracle cloud services. It's also difficult to get in touch with support as there's multiple different portals and with the cloud services disabled I struggled to find a way to raise a relevant ticket. When they eventually responded they gave some generic BS about their ToS.

My suggestion for anyone using Oracle free tier is stay on it if you want, but be prepared for the eventuality that they shut everything down without notice or access to your data.

[–] willya@lemmyf.uk -3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Would be helpful to let everyone know the TOS you violated.

[–] Dima@lemmy.one 9 points 11 months ago

No idea, didn't do anything wrong and they were fine with it all until they suddenly closed my account. I too would like to know what I did wrong.

[–] starshipwinepineapple@programming.dev 17 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Yes, oracle will reclaim your server if it falls under certain thresholds for the resources you've signed up for. So it might be better to request less resources then you need but this will somewhat complicate things if you want more resources in the future since iirc you can't simply resize.

One way to get around all of this though is convert to pay as you go (PAYG). PAYG gets the same always free allocations and you only pay for use above that, and oracle won't reclaim PAYG (at least not my server for ~4 years). Just set up a budget of a $1 and then alerts to email you if you reach 1% of your budget. If you somehow go over your free resources it'll tell you.

Lastly in some cases oracle just straight up loses your data or disables your account. As always practice 3-2-1 backups (don't rely on the free rotating backups on their servers as your only backup).

It's some hoops to jump through but i was paying $5/ month for a digital ocean droplet and the oracle server has been running for 4 years now, and i also have scaled up one project and started a few others that wouldn't have all fit on my droplet. Other than the threat of reclaiming my resources before i switched to PAYG I've been pretty happy with it.

[–] LostXOR@fedia.io 6 points 11 months ago

Yeah I switched to PAYG to lessen the chance of that happening. So far I've managed to not accidentally spend $5000 in some dumb way, so it's basically equivalent to the free tier.

[–] SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org 41 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It's oracle. You can get up to 4 cores and 24gb ram on an arm vm from Oracle cloud for free when there are open slots. They get snapped up quick.

[–] sus@programming.dev 21 points 11 months ago (1 children)

are you sure there isn't small print somewhere saying you forfeit your eternal soul to larry ellison?

[–] db2@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

They probably get you in bandwidth fees over X amount. It would cost pennies for a small scale virtual server with big numbers as the hardware is shared, it would spend most of the time not doing anything. They could set up a machine and oversell a tier like that and make it all back with profit on their first bill.

[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 9 points 11 months ago

I bet they run these free accounts on their test infrastructure, not production. What they get from it is real-world user testing of changes to their infrastructure, similar to how Microsoft uses its Windows Home versions for testing new updates.