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Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

They have an excellent free tier for experimenting with some higher power ARM servers. As long as you're ready to give up when they decide they don't like you any more, that's a pretty cool deal. Just don't ever build anything with their hardware or software that you'd like to keep.

Edit: Java is usually pretty good, too. At least the open source stuff. Maybe stuff like GraalVM too but they had that locked down in licenses for a while and I don't trust Oracle at all.

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I've been trying to sign up to them for over a year, and it keeps failing. Support tickets remain unanswered.

They don't do support for free tiers, and their free tier is often overbooked, so from what I can tell they just silently drop people? Seems like terrible business to me, but so does most of what Oracle does.

Sadly, I have been unable to secure one of those higher power free servers. I’ve been trying for a couple weeks now.

That was literally the only reason I was willing to give Oracle a shot.

Yeah, I have a free-tier ARM VM, and it's great as a remote Nix builder for aarch64.

If I lost it, I'd just have to do building locally.

When did you manage to get that? I tried signing up for the ARM server several times but it always says it's unavailable at the moment in my region (East - Toronto) and I should try a different region... however you can't switch regions after you set up your account. I talked to their support and they said it's unavailable for the foreseeable future... choose a different configuration.

Are people still able to provision those instances in other regions? If so, which one(s)? I'm just using the legacy free one for now, the 2GHz AMD with 0.5GB RAM.

From what I can tell you need to be lucky. When I register my (European) account there are ARM resources left and they were easy to claim. I think I was lucky because they just expanded a data center somewhere nearby, though, I think there was info about it on a Reddit post somewhere.

I don't think the forever-free tier allows cross region instances. You may just need to register an account in another region where they have more resources, but it's anyone's guess where Oracle still has them.

It's a neat playground but as should be blatantly obvious it's not worth investing too much time into, because they can make it disappear without recourse for no reason without warning.

You’d need to upgrade the account to a paid one (there will be no charges anyway if you stay within free limits of the ARM offer), which unlocks a different pool to spin up a server in.

I found a script on GitHub that regularly tried to get one. It found one after 1-2 days.

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