They're okay. This isn't the place for a full review of their offerings (especially considering everyone's mixed feelings on Oracle), but I'm confident that it's better than most 1core/$5 deals you'll find elsewhere.

> Are they any good?

Yep, free tier allows you to spec up to 24gb of RAM without paying, which is cool. The bottleneck is really the disk speed, but that's not an issue with mmaped models. There's enough cached memory that it loads instantly, so it's good-ish for this use case.

> Is the free-tier time limited?

No, but there are a lot of strings attached:

- The cores are vCPUs, not dedi (duh)

- You can't create new instances when demand is high (unless you add a credit card)

- Technically Oracle reserves the right to shut down the instance if demand gets really high (although I haven't heard any stories about this personally)

Proceed with caution. It's still a great place to start before you shell out $1/hr for dedi GPU rackspace.

They will shut down the VPS if there's no activity on it, not sure how they detect this though

CPU idle % over a rolling time window (say, 15 minutes).