I’m looking to host my own website and mess around with some services but my current home server is already pushed to the max. Planning on getting some thin clients for proxmox when I have some more money, but for now I wanted to mess around on Oracles free tier to test some stuff. I heard they will randomly delete accounts / free cloud vps and was wondering if there was a way to mitigate this. Some post I’ve seen seems to be tied to not having a CC on file with them so after 30 days or so when it “charges” your account and there is no payment option, the vps will get deleted. Does anyone have experience dealing with this? I wouldn’t mind adding a card to the account as long as I won’t wake up to a huge bill one day because I went over the limit.
A lot of the issues people have with Oracle is caused by using not using a normal credit card or not keeping a valid card on file. A bunch of failed signup attempts will probably get your account flagged. When you sign up for free tier, you will be charged a couple of times, but it will be returned within a few days. You can’t do anything on free tier that will cost you money. You would have to upgrade to pay as you go, which requires re entering your credit card info, if you want to use anything that’s not free.
Don’t run any public proxies or VPNs. Your account will be gone as soon as they get a DCMA notice. If they get complaints about anything you are hosting, they will likely terminate your account as well. Don’t do anything even remotely related to crypto currency. Don’t do a bunch of port scans or ping a large nunber of IPs. Don’t stop or remove the Oracle services that come with their images either.
If your instances don’t have enough load on them, they will be stopped after about a week. You can always restart them, but that can be difficult with the ARM instances since they are in high demand.
I have heard that they do this but in about 2 years of having mine and doing nothing out of the ordinary they have left it alone. There was even a decent chunk of time where it was just sitting there idle. I have heard people say that having a credit card on file helps but I have never had any form of payment on file nor ever purchased anything from them.
These days I just have uptime kuma on it.
You could setup a “temporary” card with Privacy.com and set the spending limit to something low. Your bank might also offer a similar service.
Man, I was paying Oracle and I still got my account deleted. And no, I wasn’t spamming or something similiar. In fact, I couldn’t even use SMTP for my own domain, they couldn’t seem to find my tenant ID in order to open the port, but they sure knew how to charge me for my usage.
Oracle isn’t worth free.
I’m running a PBS instance (plus networking containers) for 4years now, cc on file for the first 2 years, now on file, but my usecase is operating within the free-forever tier.
My instance has not been deleted by them, though I’ve rebuilt the multiple times since.
The region you are on might be struggling with capacity issues, I use middle east region and never encountered account/vm deletions (yet). For my case, latency isnt an issue so i dont mind having it ona far away region.
