Yeah, but then you have to use Oracle

I've used Oracle Cloud, and it's actually pretty nice and well-designed at least from my point of view. It gives the AWS Dashboard a run for their m̵o̵n̵e̵y̵ egress fees.

But I still don't run anything important on it or push the limits of the free tier. Oracle doesn't have a good reputation. Also "Oracle Unbreakable Linux" is literally just RHEL rebranded, but it's not a community project and they don't like to acknowledge it so it feels particularly shameless; especially since they are selling "support" for it.

Bear in mind that premier support is included for free for cloud customers. So for example ksplice and dtrace are included. Ksplice is fantastic and it's really worth it.

I also have an arm machine hosted, good if you want to compile stuff, but the networking has been super flaky and unreliable. I would definitely not call their service nice, when quite often you can't login because network issues. Also their separate identity(legacy stuff)/cloud service dashboard was also confusing.

People have reported having their Oracle servers shut down without warning for the horrendous crime of... running IRC servers.

That's not an uncommon clause in terms of service; IRC servers tend to be DDoS magnets. Other common nonos are game servers and streaming hosts.

Hosting is one of those things you really ought to spend 10 minutes reading and find out what you are and are not allowed to do. It's basic due dilligence when you're renting someone else's hardware and bandwidth.

Let's not poo poo actual competition. If Oracle _wants_ to compete with AWS that's a pretty good thing for everyone.

Yet signing any contract with Oracle is risky, and i would rather pay more than risk dealing with Oracle itself.

but yeah, more competition is always good.

Yes, it's definitely good if it causes AWS, GCE, Azure, etc to increase allowances to compete, even if you (like me) plan to never touch that Oracle service with a ten foot pole attached to someone else's computer.

You're not the only one. Almost everyone that did significant deals with Oracle at some point has this opinion.

Plus they hired away a ton of AWS engineers to build their competitor right down the street from AWS headquarters. I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand.

People aren't dismissing the product, they're dismissing doing business with Oracle regardless of the product.

I want to compete in the Olympics, but whether that actually happens is a different question.

Can someone educate me on why Oracle is bad? I don’t have much experience with dealing with them as a company. Only used their database before.

They also have really questionable business ethics. At one startup, I caught them grabbing an unauthorized copy of our customer's source code when we were on-site at the Emerald City to tune it. It wasn't a rogue engineer, either; it was an order at least from their manager and probably higher. At another startup, we pitched a shared-cache idea to take advantage of our hardware. They declined to work with us, then included exactly that feature as a marquee element of their next major release. Then I worked at Red Hat, where anger over their re-badging of RHEL as OEL (among other deeds) ran deep. Over and over again, they've abused partners and customers and even employees. They were the most evil company in the industry before Facebook and others even existed.

See also: Bryan Cantrill's "lawnmower" talk about what happened to Solaris after the Oracle acquisition. https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc

https://ariadne.space/2021/07/14/oracle-cloud-sucks/ this person had their account terminated for the crime of running an IRC server.

They also have a track record of leaving dials in their software that are very easy to turn on but now mean you need to be on a higher license tier and will ding you in an audit and expect penalty fees for it (e.g. various flags in Oracle DB, Extensions Pack [1] in virtualbox, Java features[2] like Java Flight Recorder)

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/d1ttzp/oracle_is_...

[2]: https://upperedge.com/oracle/top-3-reasons-oracle-java-users...

They tend to have aggressive sales, high degree of lock in, and high license costs.

You basically get stuck paying lots for Oracle software and that doesn't directly equate to value the software provides

Plus Oracle's egress last time i checked was 10x cheaper.

They have terrible sign up experience, I'm far from only one who hasn't been able to sign up there because of some cryptic error. When I've tried to google that, there were reports of them requiring using email with full name in it. But changing to that didn't help, using different credit/debit cards didn't help. But prices are quite nice as far as I can tell from the outside.

My day to day browser is a hardened Firefox (plenty of about:config tweaks, resistfingerprinting, ublock origin, temporary containers etc). For signing up to Oracle Cloud I used a tmpfs based Chromium browser (ie: completely fresh, factory defaults) to avoid issues resulting in my hardened browser. Oracle cloud refused to accept my credit card with a bogus error message saying something about fraud and/or incomplete/incorrect personal details. I searched for the error message and someone on a random website mentioned about having issues with Chrome and to try Firefox. I found that quite unusual as it's usually the other way around but I tried using my day-to-day hardened firefox and instantly worked and account activated within minutes. Go figure.

Same here. My sign-up experience was a nightmare and it took 3 weeks (to create an effing account).

I was at a point where I just said "screw this, I don't care about the free trial, just give me an account where I'm supposed to pay for everything". For some reason you have to go through the free trial in order to get a regular account.

I didn't even try out the platform once I got my account. They managed to drain all my energy in the sign-up process.

I'd rather go bankrupt by AWS/GCP nefarious egress fees than having to deal with Oracle again. Serves me right for giving them a shot.

I second the recommendation to stay as far away from Oracle as you can, even if their OCI pricing seems incredible.

They've invested a lot into the signup experience since 2019 but offering a generous Free Tier like this means they also attract a LOT of people trying to exploit it for whatever the badness of the day happens to be.

Providers always have a false positive rate on signup experiences and last time I looked Oracle had provided a way to contact them and say "You got it wrong" (and they are reasonably good at fixing those situations).

This pretty much sums up my experience. After signing up and successfully getting an account then they cancelled the account with no explanation. I tried reaching out to them through several channels and had to create several more accounts just to try and get support. In the end the other answer I ever received was "The error you are getting is intended." Nothing more was ever said or given and I gave up on it ever working.

Is there a list of cloud providers that have a free tier somwhere?