No, it is really trash. It's down there with IBM cloud. I've worked with it (and IBM) extensively, and with AWS/GCP (but not azure too much yet, interestingly). Depending on what you want AWS/GCP/Azure are largely fungible, Oracle and IBM are really lacking just about everything you could want, and I would be hesitant to call them "cloud" except by the barest definition of the word. Also worked with another one, who I won't name, but scaling your instances required filling out paperwork and sending it in. Oracle wasn't quite that bad, but they're down there.

That's really unfounded, unless you're talking about an experience you had years ago when the platform was still in the early stages.

The current Gen 2 cloud (OCI) is very much capable. I would strongly suggest you either have a high level look at the products available (start here [1]), peruse the documentation [2], or have a go yourself with a free account [3].

Happy to continue this chat about actual products you thought were lacking, or your experience.

[1] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/ [2] https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/en-us/ [3] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free

Last worked with it maybe a year ago. I have a lot of SRE experience so deal with this stuff directly, and I'm giving you my experience and the experiences of my colleagues. It's anecdotal of course, but not unfounded.

Charter?

Nope, not familiar with them.

Yes, you can very much take a credit card and use.

There's a free tier [1] which gives you an initial $300 credit for the first 30 days, then if you don't convert to a pay as you go model (absolutely your choice) will drop you to an "always free" tier that gives you a bunch of resources at no cost (2 small VMs, 2 autonomous DBs, 100GB of storage etc.)

For committed spending there is a universal credits model (which comes with a 30% discount by default).

Doesn't cost your soul either - have a look at the price list [2] or run through the cost estimator [3]. Also, some resources are always free (e.g. first 10TB of egress, cloud shell, kubernetes cluster, developer cloud services etc.)

(disclaimer, I work at Oracle)

[1] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ [2] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/ucpricing.html [3] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/cost-estimator.html

Yes, we have a free $300 Credit and also Always Free Cloud Services just like other Cloud Vendors, give it a shot. (PS I work at Oracle). https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

I feel like it's relevant to mention that Oracle recently disabled all of the free tier virtual machines from every one of their cloud customers and after like a week of downtime with no public announcements, they were somehow restored.

So yeah, that should give everyone a pretty good idea of their reliability if they are not multi-million dollar customers.

I have lots of mini projects, so I am game to try it. Any cool things I might want to play with on there?

Try serveless function, how about moving your personal blog and website to always free tier?

I doubt you can do anything about it, but Oracle Cloud simply refuse to work with any of Russian credit cards. Registration simply fails at the end no matter what card is used and support send you to bank / payment provider and payment provider sent you back to Oracle.

I never had such problems with any other hosting company. I'm live between different countries so I registered it anyway, but still...

Please contact support or use the chat button to talk live to someone, this should be easily resolved. https://www.oracle.com/corporate/contact/

As I said in my post I just have access to cards from other countries too so I just registered that way. Though many of my clients are still in Russia and I guess they'll likely to have exactly same issue in case they decide to register account for their business.

OFC I'll try to do it again, but I wouldn't be posting on HN in first place if support would give anything like a useful reply.

One small technical question regarding free tier. As far as I get throttled bandwidth to both network and disk is only limitation. Is it right?

Also I found instances becoming unavailable randomly for no apparent reason so I keep my testing VMs on $5 Hetzner instances.

And yeah no way to run own mail server either because editing of reverse DNS records is not allowed on always-free tier.

Yes, I wouldn't recommend mail server on the free tier but bandwidth issue should not occur, which region are you provisioned for? That could be a factor. Anyways just contact support and someone should help you quickly https://www.oracle.com/corporate/contact/ (also try talk using the life chat on website)