20 ms·

Oracle Suspended My Account

400 points by stradiv 4y ago

kasajian 4y ago
efxz 4y ago
onli 4y ago
That sucks, but honestly, this is why I did not jump on the Oracle cloud offering with all its free resources. It's Oracle, it's a trap. I assume they saw an activity spike they did not like and thus blocked you. Of course they don't feel bound to their TOS, again, it's Oracle... Maybe someone here knows a fitting alternative? 1GB is not much data, but it might be over the limit for free tiers.
- antifa 4y ago
  The author is apparently in Turkey, so I can tell myself maybe it won't happen to me...
kouteiheika 4y ago
It's interesting to see that they also adopted the current industry standard of automatically banning people at random, not telling them why and not giving them any way to rectify it. But then, well, I mean, it's Oracle. What did you expect? Normally something like this would put them on my "will never use any of their products nor work with them" shitlist, but it's Oracle, so they were already there since, like, ever. Also, obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  I think if you're making a list of big tech companies that will sometimes randomly shut-out customers due to automated monitoring, then that's all of them isn't it? I've seen a story about every one of them I'm sure. It's not a problem with individual companies, it's a general societal problem.
  - Closi 4y ago
    Eh, even if it happens everywhere it’s frequency is different and some companies are easier to resolve it than others - I much prefer my chances with Microsoft than with Google for example.
    - rch 4y ago
      I've found that both are pleasant to work with, on the cloud side at least. That pleasant demeanor doesn't always translate into getting immediate results, but how could it really?
      - tedivm 4y ago
        I found working with Google people impossible, which includes on the account side. They are rude and unhelpful. I had an issue where the domain verification system Google uses was broken. There was a backend issue on their side where the Google Webmaster Verification worked fine but their Cloud Run product couldn't read it. Rather than help me their product manager said that Cloud Run was a preview service so it was my fault for using it- and then he preceded to recommend another service instead, although that service was also in preview. This is just one example of many. GCP is the only service I've used where product managers will straight up insult and lie to users, and they'll do it publicly too (following their accounts on twitter is almost hilarious for how rude they are). Unless your company has nine figures in revenue GCP will happily crap all over you.
        alasdair_ 4y ago
        > I found working with Google people impossible, which includes on the account side. They are rude and unhelpful. I ran a business on GCP and paid for the $150/month support option. I was honestly pretty amazed at how good the support was (like, multiple google engineers stepping through my code line by line to find the root cause of an issue). For $150 a month (and only a few thousand a month total GCP spend) this seemed like a really good deal and included 24/7 4-hour response times. This was at least five years ago however - no idea if they still offer this plan today.
- theta_d 4y ago
  Knew what that link was without clicking.
- jerf 4y ago
  Oracle being Oracle, I imagine that A: they're annoyed they didn't get to invent the process and B: they're very very annoyed that there's no way to ban people at random, not tell them why, not give them any way to rectify it, and keep their money, since it's free tier. That apex post-capitalism there.
  - wombatpm 4y ago
    He should be thankful he was just banned and not served with a lawsuit - Oracle's typical move.
- guywithahat 4y ago
  Yeah I'm not happy to read this, but this is basically what all big tech does nowadays. And small tech companies, even if they have better customer service will probably break your service by accident. In this case though he seems to be using the free tier which, if you need to use professionally, you shouldn't be using
- rustqt6 4y ago
  It is not an industry standard. ONLY Google does it. And now oracle. So if you decide oracle, remember to deride Google too.
- capkutay 4y ago
  It’s a free cloud service. If you rely on someone else to host your compute/storage at no cost, prepare for getting little or very delayed support. Ask all the YouTube creators or Instagram users that had their accounts randomly shut off and had to do a lot of work to get it back. This isn’t specific to Oracle at all. Or try AWS and get a surprise $10k bill that they won’t refund.
  - supermatt 4y ago
    Have you had a surprise 10k AWS bill they wont refund? My understanding is that they are (or were) pretty good at writing those off.
    - mywittyname 4y ago
      There is some criteria you have to meet first. I believe your project must have monitoring in place for billing alerts.
l30n4da5 4y ago
I have never trusted Oracle with anything important.
bombcar 4y ago
I have no clues beyond what's in the article, but I suspect that a combination of being from Turkey (author spells it that way) and being on the free tier triggered some sort of auto-script that attempts to detect crypto-mining or something. Attempting to use a VPN to distract from the access from Turkey would probably also trigger some other auto-detector. Free tiers give free tears; they're always fraught with danger.
- metayrnc 4y ago
  Why would being from Turkey have an effect in this situation?
  - dimitrios1 4y ago
    For the exact same reason being from Russia would. Hostile, unpredictable, militaristic country, ran by a wanna-be dictator, committed to an active invasion of another country's sovereign territory. (My point is those two tend to go hand and hand: higher percentage of unwanted traffic originates from authoritarian lands still engaging in 19th century style barbarism.)
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Unlikely any of that, and more likely that a large percentage of their "unauthorized usage" comes from the country. Companies find it easier to simply block or restrict access from certain countries because it's "more hassle than it's worth".
      - stunpix 4y ago
        I would like to support your opinion here. I’ve been a beta-tester for one bank as well as I've been reading it’s CEO's blog where he was occasionally explaining what stays behind their decisions as a bank and I had learned a bit from their back stage. When you as a company (especially financial one) is serving thousands or millions of customers you must have/rely on statistics with a heuristic to detect fraudulent or an abusing customers. Also you have to decide whether you will have any troubles by giving a loan to a particular person. Such heuristic systems are scoring using hundreds (if not thousands) parameters like age, marriage status, sex, whether you believer or not, what is your smartphone (e.g. according to bank's statistics Android users are tending to not return credits more ofter) and so on… What’s most important: banks will never disclosure what has lead them to their decision like to decline in a credit line. Just to avoid further cheating with their heuristic systems. I believe the author had become a victim of such heuristic which is likely had detected something unusual, then it considered his profile + recent connections (perhaps he had specified a different country than Turkey), and finally «free tier» had added some alarming amount to scoring. Otherwise I can't explain why support had wrapped up a chatting so quickly and unfriendly. For me everything points out on that there was a distinct reason for them to cease his account and they won't like to disclosure it in any way.
OrangeMonkey 4y ago
There is a pattern in technology companies and user reports of them: * User does thing that appears to be fine. * User is banned * User has no way of fixing this, ask for redress, they are just cut out now. I think this pattern is something that should be held in contempt and is eventually thrown away. If I had to guess, though, it won't be.
- mooreds 4y ago
  Don't forget step 4 and 5: * User posts on HN (or reddit or someplace else) * If post gets attention, issue is resolved via manual, backchannel efforts. If post doesn't get attention, issue remains unresolved.
  - OrangeMonkey 4y ago
    I always forget step 4 and 5 - the most important steps as its the only thing that helps the user.
    - notlukesky 4y ago
      That does not work for Oracle because they are not on these forums to the extent of say Stripe or FAANG engineers.
      - nixcraft 4y ago
        Well, I tweeted the link, but my experience shows that Oracle is not a darling company for most solo developers. Typically solo devs go with DigitalOcean, Linode and co (or free stuff from AWS, even Lightsail offer some support). Either way, I hope they get some help.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - soco 4y ago
      I tried that for my Tumblr account termination. But because Tumblr is not Google, nobody cared.
_fat_santa 4y ago
Hmmm. It almost sounds like some hidden egress cost limit got reached and when he didn't have payment on file, it nuked the account.
- blfr 4y ago
  Their free tier is 10 TB of outbound traffic. Hard to reach.
zorg42 4y ago
It's always the same: you get what you pay for. No company offers something for free: If it doesn't cost anything, you're the product: They will use usage-data to optimize their commercial offerings, they will try out features in non-critical (aka: free) accounts first - so not to offend the paying customers. In some cases (e.g. free web-mailers like gmx, Instagram, FB etc) the free versions are mainly vehicles for advertising. Why should Oracle be any different? I cannot see their motivation to offer anything for free... they are *only* money-driven.
- xuki 4y ago
  > I cannot see their motivation to offer anything for free. Oracle is not alone. AWS/Google Cloud also have free tiers. They want you to get to know the system and might grow out of the free tier. But Oracle's offer is significantly more generous than Amazon's or Google's.
- bombcar 4y ago
  The free tiers are marketing (and quite powerful at that) - I'm surprised Amazon doesn't match it, but AWS is the big fish in the pond. If you start playing with a free tier cloud and decide to "go big" you're almost certain to keep using that cloud and begin to pay. (This is the reason that Google will give out nearly infinite "credits" to startups for their cloud, I hear).
iameli 4y ago
Oracle sales has been all over us for many months to try and move over to their cloud offering but all I ever hear are stories like this. Pass.
- tomrod 4y ago
  Oracle offers worse products than open source and gives you that privilege you pay for and can never use fully. I'm bitter about their KB documentation being paywalled. Their community ecosystem is nightmare fuel. Burleson Consulting is right until they are deprecated or were wrong to begin with -- but at least it is accessible. AskTom is retired. And for the past several years their attempts at "us too!" cloud offerings look like the slow recognition that its best days are far behind it. Hard pass with all the invective thoughts I can muster.
  - miniwark 4y ago
    > Burleson Consulting Still most of the time they are the one stop solution to my Oracle database problems. Tanks to them!
    - tomrod 4y ago
      Right? What a wonderful maven trap. I love their stuff for when I face the Oracle dragon!
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
At this point, if you trust companies with terrible, terrible track record and you get bitten, what do you expect us to say? People keep repeating "vote with your wallet", and almost nobody does. It's already hard to make peace with that, but we learned to. However if most of the IT community place billboards saying "don't go into the bear cage" for years, and you still do, what can we do?
- bombcar 4y ago
  It's hard to vote with your wallet on a free tier, to be fair.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    If you think these free tiers of offerings are not making money because you don't pay them, then you are confused on who the company's customers really are. The free service you are using is the bait to get you the product to offer yourself to their customers without being the wiser. It's as shady as shady can be, but hey, it's free!!!
  - N19PEDL2 4y ago
    Well, one day this Turkish student will have money (I wish him/her that) and will be willing to purchase a paid service, and he/she will not choose Oracle because of this bad experience.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Radim 4y ago
    I read "vote with your wallet" as a shorthand for not giving resources to offending entities. It doesn't have to be literally banknotes out of your wallet. Not spending your attention or time or future on Google / Oracle / abusive digital platform of the day counts too. I'm with BiteCode_dev here: if people manifested their business preferences clearly and consistently, by such peaceful but proactive "voting", the world would be a better place. Once you accept you have no power, you truly don't. Actions speak louder than words, and companies listen. "Do as I say, not as I do" is not a successful recipe in general.
throw_m239339 4y ago
> Well. I guess that's how Oracle works. After trial period ends they shut down random accounts that are using their 'Always Free (not for long)' services. End of the discussion, Oracle suspended your free tier and while it sucks, it's a free tier and Oracle can suspend it as they wish, it's in their TOS (edit: in case of suspected fraud). Do not rely on free tier for anything important, free tiers are here to test the service sure, not to build an app that is important to you. They will probably never tell you the real reason for legal reasons.
- smoothgrammer 4y ago
  The TOS says they will provide advance warning. Oracle is in breach of their own contract.
  - throw_m239339 4y ago
    > The TOS says they will provide advance warning. Oracle is in breach of their own contract. Not in cases of suspected fraud, they won't. Connecting these services with a VPN is the very definition of shady.
    - jkaplowitz 4y ago
      > Connecting these services with a VPN is the very definition of shady. I don't think OP mentioned using a VPN. But even if they had: really, managing a cloud infrastructure via VPN is so far from shady that it's often recommended or required by many tech companies' security policies for people working from public wifi locations among other circumstances, as an added layer of protection against local eavesdropping and sometimes also for specific predictable networking routing within a cloud network perimeter. I realize that OP is acting as a student/hobbyist, but there's no inherent reason why someone immersed in best-practice tech culture would necessarily be shady if they applied this VPN recommendation to their own personal tinkering. Many of the benefits of using one still apply. It would, of course, be shady if Oracle intends to deny service to people in Turkey and the VPN use is to circumvent that restriction. But I don't believe that there is such a restriction on place.
locutous 4y ago
OCI it's pretty confusing. They have two free tiers, the expanded initial time based and the always free tier. As far as I can tell, when your time runs out on the expanded free tier they turn everything off and you have to re provision into always free or do an account upgrade. They deny a lot of credit cards they should accept. I have been unable to upgrade on any of my cards. Since provisioning always free tier a second time I've not had any issues with them turing off resources.
- matt_heimer 4y ago
  Having different tiers that are free is pretty typical. AWS has three free tiers - https://aws.amazon.com/free/ https://aws.amazon.com/free/ MS Azure has two free tiers - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/free-services/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/free-services/ Google Cloud has two free tiers - https://cloud.google.com/free https://cloud.google.com/free OCI has two free tiers - https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
  - locutous 4y ago
    The only cloud service I've had pro actively turn off provisioned resources is OCI. I've used all but Google cloud. That's a pretty distinctive difference IMHO. My post attempts to describe when and why. Though I have only used time based free credits on the other providers. Despite my always free having been up a year now I'm still reluctant to put production critical resources on it because of the experience. I'd be more willing if they would take one of my cards for an account upgrade as I otherwise generally like the service.
- ricktdotorg 4y ago
  > when your time runs out on the expanded free tier they turn everything off and you have to re provision into always free or do an account upgrade yes, this is exactly it! nailed it
  - antifa 4y ago
    This didn't happen to my single ARM VPS instance, so it might depend on what you were using.
pure_simplicity 4y ago
I have a similar experience. Recently my account got suspended for no reason. I have been logging in and reading up on the tutorials / documentation to see how to use Oracle Cloud and I hadn't even started using any of the free resources yet, but my recently created account got suspended nonetheless. Unless my account was hacked (which I would like to be notified of) I cannot have violated any ToS. I got the same non-response when I asked why my account was removed. To me it looks like Oracle isn't being honest about their "always free" tier and they just shut down non-paying accounts to cut costs if they don't foresee them converting into paying customers any time soon. If it were a bug / mistake, then I would have expected better support (restoring the account or providing a new account if that's not possible), but being ghosted by a big corporation when you know for a fact that you did nothing wrong is pretty frustrating. I have not had such a bad experience with any cloud company ever. I sincerely hope Oracle changes, but as it stands I will never spend a dime with Oracle and I will dissuade anyone from using their services, because of how unreliable they have demonstrated themselves to be.
- YetAnotherNick 4y ago
  Same. Though I created one instance with one ARM core just to test and forgot about it. Oracle must have used some model to see I wasn't going to pay or something.
- yonixw 4y ago
  I guess I'm the lucky one. Still has my free VM from Aug 2021. They DID remove the public IP suddenly some time ago...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- deepspace 4y ago
  That is so incredibly short-sighted of them. The same thing happened to me. Twice. I guess there was no way for Oracle to know that I was 'kicking the tires' in my personal time, to see if it might be worth migrating some of my previous company's millions in cloud spending to them. Oh, well.
- 4y ago
hestefisk 4y ago
Very annoying for you. Is it correctly understood that Oracle offer a free tier instance with 24 gigs memory? That sounds too good to be true comparing to other vendors.
- antifa 4y ago
  The caveat is that you must be able and willing to use an ARM processor. Their x86 based always free offering is only 2GB. GCP'S always free x86 is only 1GB.
- stradiv 4y ago
  Yes. 24GB of RAM and 4 OCPU. Source: https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/#always-free https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/#always-free
  - hestefisk 4y ago
    That sounds crazy desperate from Oracle’s side to lure in customers from larger cloud providers and avoid getting sucked further into irrelevance. Better to pay up and get a proper dedicated instance that you control (I use Hetzner dedicated servers and they are great).
    - hestefisk 4y ago
      Disclaimer - I don’t work for Hetzner.
- toyg 4y ago
  They moved late into the game, and have to compensate their tardiness and generally low appeal with incredibly generous allocations. They can always pull that back later when they feel like, after all, like OP found out today...
- ptman 4y ago
  Yes: https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/ https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/ . But keep backups and switch to e.g. hetzner if oracle doesn't want you leeching.
josephcsible 4y ago
Why is the cloud still so popular even though stories like this one are so common now?
- dylan604 4y ago
  Because it's free and provides some what of a convenience. It doesn't need to be any more complicated than that.
speedgoose 4y ago
I don’t understand how Oracle can convince companies to sign with them considering their behaviour.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  Same way that lawn mowers convince people to stick their hands into the blades, despite common sense and all the warning stickers screaming at you to not do that. It seems expedient in the moment, you're not thinking about long term consequences and just want to fix a problem fast right now.
- zaarn 4y ago
  Because it integrated with OracleDB.
  - speedgoose 4y ago
    But if you are still stuck with OracleDB, you are probably not happy about that and you can get it in other clouds providers anyway.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      If someone is "stuck with OracleDB" then it sounds like they don't make the purchasing decisions.
- dsr_ 4y ago
  Oracle doesn't sell to you. Oracle sells to your vice-president, on the golf course. The reason they have this free-tier at all is to be able to say "yes, your engineers can go in and evaluate this for free".
  - speedgoose 4y ago
    Can’t a CTO say « no »?
  - metadat 4y ago
ohCh6zos 4y ago
If you don’t own it then you can be cut off at someone else’s whim. The cloud is to the cloud provider’s benefit not yours.
nojito 4y ago
Free tier user and no statement if he had a payment method attached to his account.
- pure_simplicity 4y ago
  in order to sign up you have to provide credit card details, so you automatically have a payment method attached to your account
  - jwilk 4y ago
    My understanding is that's only used for identity verification, not as a payment method.
    - nix23 4y ago
      Correct, you have to attach it a second time to use it as a payment method.
tomcam 4y ago
I would instantly vote for a federal politician (senator, congressperson, president) who authored a bill clearly stating that there would be transparency in the suspension process, and a defined set of actions for recourse, appeal, etc. But it's not likely to happen. All the tech companies have virtually all these slimeballs (both parties) in their pockets. Plus many of the pols and their staff are rotating in and out of positions at these companies as employees or lobbyists.
Erlangen 4y ago
I remembered I had a similar experience with IBM cloud last year. I created an account, created several VMs and deleted them. Then after half an hour, boom, my account was banned, telling me something like "violated our policy". Interestingly, I just tried to log into my IBM cloud account and it was successful. I don't know how and when I was un-banned. I received the email about the ban but not the unban.
- l0ngyap 4y ago
  [dead]
rexreed 4y ago
The more this keeps up, the more we'll be back to where we were in the 1990s - self-hosted apps on non-cloud infrastructure that are owned and managed by the companies and orgs who build on them, and not held hostage by cloud companies who have built rent-seeking businesses and eliminated any sort of human support while automating functions with unaccountable and flawed algorithmic decision-making systems. Don't get me wrong, I see the economic benefit of the cloud and the freedom of not having to manage your own infrastructure, but increasingly the cost and risks associated with being beholden to an organization's arbitrary behavior with lack of recourse is not something you can depend on for the long-term. We're coming back full cycle to decentralized systems.
- moreira 4y ago
  > We're coming back full cycle to decentralized systems. You say this as if it's something that's happening, but it's not. There's a few pockets of self hosted bits here and there, but that's not new. We are not coming back to decentralised systems, and we will -never- go back to that in any significant number. Most people are not going to give up the cloud to go back to bare metal. Most people are not going to give up their zero-maintenance SaaS app to go self-host something. All of it is just too convenient, and you then also have the inertia working against you; there's a whole generation of developers now that has grown up without ever administering a server. They're not gonna give up their Lambdas and drop down to a lower level, just like I'm not gonna give up my interpreted languages and drop down to C, even though it'd perform a hell of a lot better. I'm with you - I like self-hosting, and I run everything I can on bare metal, and I hate everything costing money every month. But there's no future in which people decide "oh I'll give up the convenience and the extra money I can make from this" and go back to the old way of doing things.
  - rexreed 4y ago
    Of course nothing is inevitable. Things never go back to the old way, but things do revert. Just look at some of the replies here and you'll see comments such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32319989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32319989 and others. Is decentralization an inevitability? No. But as I said above, the more that cloud companies do these sorts of customer-adverse actions, the more we'll see this movement to decentralization.
beefee 4y ago
I was never even able to sign up. "Customer service" just repeats the same thing on a loop. Tech companies will slowly put themselves out of business with fraud detection algorithms.
bityard 4y ago
I host personal stuff on the OCI always free tier and did a lot of research on this before deciding to go down this road because we know what kind of reputation Oracle has. From what I found, people using the free tier often get their instances terminated and other resources removed and reclaimed. The suspicion is that there are some automated systems that when capacity falls below a certain threshold, they will take back resources from the "freeloading" users. (For the humor-impaired, that is tongue-in-cheek.) This is well within their right and ToS say they can do this. Nobody should be surprised or annoyed that they do. I've read reports that entering your billing details to sign up for a pay-as-you-go account will reduce but not eliminate the likelihood of this happening. You still get the always-free resources but Oracle's systems see you as a paying customer, on paper at least. This is what I did and I haven't seen any disruptions in the 6 months I've done so. In this case, however, since the whole account was suspended it sounds like the author probably got caught as a false positive in some kind of automated fraud-prevention system.
- benedicthw 4y ago
  I can also testify that upgrading my account to pay-as-you-go has resulted in no issues for the last 6 months. One minor issue: I had to use my older email to pass through their fraud detection (cybersource?) to successfully upgrade the account. I was even able to get Oracle Support to unblock port 25 for me! Use a declarative management system, setup billing alerts, and be very very cautious about the "always free" database offering. The latter is the real faustian bargin in my humble opinion. If we're talking compute only, OCI's pricing is very attractive. I sympathize that combating abuse -- made worse by just how much Oracle's free offering trumps anything else out there -- while generating goodwill must be a very thin line to walk. Condolences for the Turkish student as well; once bitten , twice shy.
dncornholio 4y ago
I don't think there's much to see here because I suspect we aren't seeing the total picture. When it's suspected fraud, it's not smart to give out details on the suspension. What's odd in this post is that he goes into detail on what steps he did. Too much detail on something that's irrelevant. So I'm not making any assumptions about OP or Oracle.
upupandup 4y ago
I tried to use their free tier but when I tried to provision a VM it would say not allowed. Seems like the coke and women got to Larry Ellison's head and he's not really focused anymore
thrtythreeforty 4y ago
Wow, that Oracle Cloud customer support transcript the author found is particularly damning. What a terrible customer experience. I guess this is Oracle-ese for "you're not rich enough for us to care." > Customer: Can you help me to see what happen with my Oracle Cloud account please? > Agent: let me check it . one moment > Customer: Sure. It says in the Tenancy details that my user is inactive. Even if I try to upgrade and manage payment it says I don't have access to perform that operation :( > Agent: thank you for waiting. Unfortunately, we are unable to .resolve this issue Sorry, this is all the information we can provide. thank you for contacting us > Customer: Wait, who can help me? Please, provide me at least another way to contact the proper support team. > Agent: we would be the correct department for this issue, but unfortunately we are unable to help further with this issue > Customer: But why? You didn't tell me what was the problem, or what I did wrong... This is very disappointing > Agent: I am afraid I am unable to advise you further. Thank you for contacting us . bye
- dessant 4y ago
  I wait for the day that this conduct becomes illegal, because it can destroy people's lives. It is actually surprising that consumer protection laws do not yet address the issue of due process.
  - mpol 4y ago
    I would assume it is contract based and thus falls already under contract law. You could start a civil case. There is no need to make something illegal that already has ways to get resolved. Part of the problem in the US is that a civil courtcase is a horrible thing. At least in Europe the loser pays the court costs of the winner. That already makes this kind of behaviour less likely. In the US you have to spend lots of money on a court case and they will just drag it out and bleed you dry. The court system is designed to protect the rich minority from the poor majority. Also, do not throw away the baby with the bathwater. A shop owner should have ways to get rid of a bad customer. And yes, even if it is just based on a face that you don't like.
    - 4y ago
nix23 4y ago
I made a account a year ago and some friend's (around 4) too, we never had any problems...just saying, maybe something else is going on here.
tlogan 4y ago
On the other hand, I run a very small SaaS and I can tell you that abuse is really a big problem. Stolen CC and similar things are so common.
rob_c 4y ago
yup, you let the free tier get into a suspended state without a VM for more than 24hr. happened to 2 people I know and myself. Nice in principle, free gets no support or nobody to shout at and it's Oracle so, yeah, sucks if you put anything important on it :P
rambojohnson 4y ago
Oracle who?
helpfulmandrill 4y ago
Got the same thing with Ebay. I created an account. I attempted to sell a Linguistics textbook. I was immediately banned. They wouldn't tell me why. My account will still let me BUY from ebay. But I'm not going to.
- kube-system 4y ago
  eBay is really aggressive with fraud prevention for sellers because there's a bunch of scammers making fake listings trying to make a quick buck and eBay will always reimburse the end customer. I know that if you share any address/payment method/IP address/etc with someone who previously flaked out as a seller, they'll ban your account. It sucks but I don't really know what they could do to improve it.
  - helpfulmandrill 4y ago
    Maybe they could let me prove that I'm not the guy who used to live at my address. I could prove that really easily, they just don't care.
  - FateOfNations 4y ago
    Actual KYC so they don't base guilt on spurious associations based on dynamic IP or physical addresses that someone else might have used?
    - kube-system 4y ago
      Fair, although given their global reach and the relatively low value of most transactions there, it’s understandable why that isn’t an easy solution. Meaningful KYC as fraud prevention on eBay would probably practically result in them limiting service to a handful of countries. Global banks don’t find it financially worthwhile to serve the entire world with KYC for customers with millions of dollars of deposits.
bob29 4y ago
midislack 4y ago
Google did the same to me recently. Face it, Cloud was a stupid idea all along
TheMagicHorsey 4y ago
OP, I would suspect you have been flagged by some US agency for investigation. In these cases the vendor does not have much leeway in telling you what is going on, as revealing the details of an ongoing investigation is likely forbidden. What kind of content is in the app? Do you have any user generated content like comments, etc.? Could be a user of yours posted something that flagged your app.
- kube-system 4y ago
  Unlikely, unless OP is lying about doing sketchy stuff. Free-tier services are notoriously abused, and notoriously unsupported. It's more likely that it tripped up some compliance/fraud business rule. Front line support at any large corp will stone wall you in this case.
jordemort 4y ago
I tried to sign up for a developer account with them to try out their ARM servers and met a similar brick wall. They won't activate my account and support won't talk to me, except to tell me that they won't talk to me. I tried hitting up sales and didn't get any luck there either. Too bad for them, I probably would have ended up paying for some servers if things worked out.
numpad0 4y ago
Same behavior is reported by a lightly-paid individual user previously(use translators). Same story, account gets suspended, Oracle be “you take our words seriously and understand what you’ve done to us” and paths end there. 1: https://zenn.dev/shinshin86/scraps/022e44712274fd https://zenn.dev/shinshin86/scraps/022e44712274fd
sneak 4y ago
Why do people who pay nothing feel entitled to a) service and b) customer support (neither of which is free to provide)? This makes no sense to me.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  Imagine someone offers you a free 1-year lease of a storage unit. You accept and go put some stuff in it, Six months later, you go to get something, and find that they put an extra lock on it and now you can't get to your stuff anymore. Should you just accept that your stuff is gone now, since the unit was free in the first place?
  - sneak 4y ago
    I would not expect any rights to the storage unit if I didn’t pay anything for it. “Consideration” is an important element of a contract; I am not sure a $0 lease is even a valid legal instrument.
- jjnoakes 4y ago
  > Why do people who pay nothing feel entitled to service Because the service was offered for free...
password4321 4y ago
If you want a VC-funded "free" PostgreSQL db (500MB, 2GB egress/mo, paused after 1 week inactivity), check out Supabase.
lgxz 4y ago
Amazon suspended my Kindle Paperwhite a week ago. I was reading a book when it suddenly said that my kindle had a critical problem, and gave me 3 choices: 1. Unpair my Amazon account with the kindle. 2. Sign out my account 3. Contact customer service I tried choice 2 but it didn't work. I contacted customer service and they told me their engineers will investigate the issue. Then I got a phone call from Amazon. They told me their engineers had fixed the problem and I only need to reboot it. I rebooted it. The "critical problem" gone. Still don't know what's wrong with my kindle.
chimprich 4y ago
One of the many infuriating things about this story is the useless "contact your administrator for help" message beloved of many orgs with multi-user accounts set up. It would be nice if they didn't trigger that for admin accounts, because that only adds to the annoyance when you're trying to figure out what has gone wrong. It's just a lazy way of saying "we haven't bothered to figure out exactly what's gone wrong here; we've just hit a generic try/catch, so we're going to pass the buck! Good luck searching through our inadequate documentation and guessing what's wrong, sucker!"
Havoc 4y ago
I’m pretty much just using mine for testing sandbox purposes. Unlike my other cloud accounts it doesn’t have a billing card so has utility in the billing footgun sense - but build anything on top of it hahaha nope Oracle is really harming their rep with the seemingly random closures and killing all the goodwill created via the exceptionally generous allowances
dontbesquare 4y ago
Why not just host your own? Why rely on Oracle for anything at this point?
deleted 4y ago
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Animats 4y ago
Here's Oracle's marketing pitch for their free tier.[1] "Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's Free Tier includes a free time-limited promotional trial that allows you to explore a wide range of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure products, and a set of Always Free offers that never expire." Their FAQ:[2] "When you've reached the end of your 30-day trial or used all your Free Trial credits (whichever comes first), you’ll be notified and will have a grace period of 30 days, starting from the expiration date, to upgrade to paid. You will no longer be able to create new paid resources, but your account will remain active. Your resources will continue to exist for a few days, allowing you to upgrade your account and keep your resources before they're reclaimed by Oracle. If you do not upgrade to paid by the end of the grace period, your Free Trial service instances and data will be deleted." Which is reasonable enough. I can't find their terms of service or EULA. Most web sites have a "legal" or "terms" link at the bottom of pages, but Oracle does not. Google can find their web site terms of service.[3] But that's for the web site only, not their cloud services. [1] https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier.htm https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier... [2] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/faq/ https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/faq/ [3] https://www.oracle.com/legal/terms.html https://www.oracle.com/legal/terms.html
- gurchik 4y ago
  They differentiate between Free Tier and Always Free. The disclaimer that your instances will be deleted after 30 days seems to be worded specifically to not apply to the Always Free, isn't it?
bebrws 4y ago
How does Facebook stand here? Haha I have an account I tried to go through the reset account process more times than I can count. No reset email was evvvvver sent. Don’t waste ur time adding the friends that can reset your account. But hey, maybe Facebook does favors. And maybe it’s all just one big dumpster fire. Who’s to say
ivlivs 4y ago
This happened to me too, earlier in the year. Fortunately I wasn't doing anything important with the single instance in my account. It was comically impossible to find any information about what had happened. And then a few weeks later, the account re-activated - again, without explanation. I don't think you unknowingly violated some ToS. The best I could figure, there's a periodic automated internal process that accidentally sets some accounts to an invalid state. Accounts with paid support can complain and get fixed manually. The rest of us need to just wait for some other automated sweep to come along and fix all the broken accounts. Needless to say, I wouldn't use OCI free tier for any kind of production workload. And I'm not sure I'd trust that this type of issue is limited to free tier accounts. It seems like stuff in OCI... just breaks sometimes.
rldjbpin 4y ago
joke's on you! my card gets debited and reversed but never gets validated to even get started lol
petilon 4y ago
The ironic thing about Oracle and Larry Ellison in particular, is that they invented both cloud computing and chromebooks back in 1996. They called it Network Computing and Network Computer respectively. Ellison talked about centralizing complexity (what we today call the cloud) and having simple end-user computers that he called network computers (realized today as chromebooks). Back in 1996 this was an outlandish idea. All this should have given Oracle a tremendous lead. Oracle squandered away that lead, and today they are a nobody in cloud computing. Ellison recently appeared in a joint video with Satya Nadella where they announced a collaboration to make Oracle RDBMS available on Azure.
- metadat 4y ago
  This is a good story! Maybe the wave wasn't ready to be caught in 1996, hypervisors like VMWare and Xen weren't a thing yet (IIRC Amazon leveraged Xen to get AWS started in the late 00s).
mark_l_watson 4y ago
I was a little confused about the author of the article talking about running large resource free services. I signed up for an ‘always free’ Oracle Cloud account, and I have had a small 700MB VPS running for a very long time, never any problems. Admittedly, my CPU utilization probably averages down around 5%. Perhaps OC has an automated system in place to detect “greedy free users?” It probably makes very good economic sense for OC and GCP to provide one ‘always free’ micro VPS because when I need something larger for myself or a customer, it is natural to use their services because I am familiar with them.
roastedpeacock 4y ago
Glad to see I am not the only one who gives pause to the recent aggressive marketing of Oracle Cloud services. Oracle is the epitome of rug-pulls.
sswaner 4y ago
One constant in my 20+ year tech career is: Never trust Oracle, work to eliminate their presence wherever possible. They consistently prove themselves to be predatory and extortionist in all transactions. Want proof: Ask them if you can convert to a paid service to make your "TOS violation" magically disappear.
mfkp 4y ago
My related experience on Oracle Cloud from 5 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30507846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30507846
deleted 4y ago
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systemvoltage 4y ago
Free tier is for evaluation purpopses, what do you expect otherwise?
jdubz79 4y ago
Why would anyone use Oracle Cloud? The company has proven themselves to be incompetent and useless time and time again.

400 points by stradiv 4y ago

efxz 4y ago

onli 4y ago

That sucks, but honestly, this is why I did not jump on the Oracle cloud offering with all its free resources. It's Oracle, it's a trap. I assume they saw an activity spike they did not like and thus blocked you. Of course they don't feel bound to their TOS, again, it's Oracle... Maybe someone here knows a fitting alternative? 1GB is not much data, but it might be over the limit for free tiers.

antifa 4y ago
The author is apparently in Turkey, so I can tell myself maybe it won't happen to me...

kouteiheika 4y ago

It's interesting to see that they also adopted the current industry standard of automatically banning people at random, not telling them why and not giving them any way to rectify it. But then, well, I mean, it's Oracle. What did you expect? Normally something like this would put them on my "will never use any of their products nor work with them" shitlist, but it's Oracle, so they were already there since, like, ever. Also, obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m

chrisseaton 4y ago
I think if you're making a list of big tech companies that will sometimes randomly shut-out customers due to automated monitoring, then that's all of them isn't it? I've seen a story about every one of them I'm sure. It's not a problem with individual companies, it's a general societal problem.
- Closi 4y ago
  Eh, even if it happens everywhere it’s frequency is different and some companies are easier to resolve it than others - I much prefer my chances with Microsoft than with Google for example.
  - rch 4y ago
    I've found that both are pleasant to work with, on the cloud side at least. That pleasant demeanor doesn't always translate into getting immediate results, but how could it really?
    - tedivm 4y ago
      I found working with Google people impossible, which includes on the account side. They are rude and unhelpful. I had an issue where the domain verification system Google uses was broken. There was a backend issue on their side where the Google Webmaster Verification worked fine but their Cloud Run product couldn't read it. Rather than help me their product manager said that Cloud Run was a preview service so it was my fault for using it- and then he preceded to recommend another service instead, although that service was also in preview. This is just one example of many. GCP is the only service I've used where product managers will straight up insult and lie to users, and they'll do it publicly too (following their accounts on twitter is almost hilarious for how rude they are). Unless your company has nine figures in revenue GCP will happily crap all over you.
      - alasdair_ 4y ago
        > I found working with Google people impossible, which includes on the account side. They are rude and unhelpful. I ran a business on GCP and paid for the $150/month support option. I was honestly pretty amazed at how good the support was (like, multiple google engineers stepping through my code line by line to find the root cause of an issue). For $150 a month (and only a few thousand a month total GCP spend) this seemed like a really good deal and included 24/7 4-hour response times. This was at least five years ago however - no idea if they still offer this plan today.
theta_d 4y ago
Knew what that link was without clicking.
jerf 4y ago
Oracle being Oracle, I imagine that A: they're annoyed they didn't get to invent the process and B: they're very very annoyed that there's no way to ban people at random, not tell them why, not give them any way to rectify it, and keep their money, since it's free tier. That apex post-capitalism there.
- wombatpm 4y ago
  He should be thankful he was just banned and not served with a lawsuit - Oracle's typical move.
guywithahat 4y ago
Yeah I'm not happy to read this, but this is basically what all big tech does nowadays. And small tech companies, even if they have better customer service will probably break your service by accident. In this case though he seems to be using the free tier which, if you need to use professionally, you shouldn't be using
rustqt6 4y ago
It is not an industry standard. ONLY Google does it. And now oracle. So if you decide oracle, remember to deride Google too.
capkutay 4y ago
It’s a free cloud service. If you rely on someone else to host your compute/storage at no cost, prepare for getting little or very delayed support. Ask all the YouTube creators or Instagram users that had their accounts randomly shut off and had to do a lot of work to get it back. This isn’t specific to Oracle at all. Or try AWS and get a surprise $10k bill that they won’t refund.
- supermatt 4y ago
  Have you had a surprise 10k AWS bill they wont refund? My understanding is that they are (or were) pretty good at writing those off.
  - mywittyname 4y ago
    There is some criteria you have to meet first. I believe your project must have monitoring in place for billing alerts.

l30n4da5 4y ago

I have never trusted Oracle with anything important.

bombcar 4y ago

I have no clues beyond what's in the article, but I suspect that a combination of being from Turkey (author spells it that way) and being on the free tier triggered some sort of auto-script that attempts to detect crypto-mining or something. Attempting to use a VPN to distract from the access from Turkey would probably also trigger some other auto-detector. Free tiers give free tears; they're always fraught with danger.

metayrnc 4y ago
Why would being from Turkey have an effect in this situation?
- dimitrios1 4y ago
  For the exact same reason being from Russia would. Hostile, unpredictable, militaristic country, ran by a wanna-be dictator, committed to an active invasion of another country's sovereign territory. (My point is those two tend to go hand and hand: higher percentage of unwanted traffic originates from authoritarian lands still engaging in 19th century style barbarism.)
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Unlikely any of that, and more likely that a large percentage of their "unauthorized usage" comes from the country. Companies find it easier to simply block or restrict access from certain countries because it's "more hassle than it's worth".
    - stunpix 4y ago
      I would like to support your opinion here. I’ve been a beta-tester for one bank as well as I've been reading it’s CEO's blog where he was occasionally explaining what stays behind their decisions as a bank and I had learned a bit from their back stage. When you as a company (especially financial one) is serving thousands or millions of customers you must have/rely on statistics with a heuristic to detect fraudulent or an abusing customers. Also you have to decide whether you will have any troubles by giving a loan to a particular person. Such heuristic systems are scoring using hundreds (if not thousands) parameters like age, marriage status, sex, whether you believer or not, what is your smartphone (e.g. according to bank's statistics Android users are tending to not return credits more ofter) and so on… What’s most important: banks will never disclosure what has lead them to their decision like to decline in a credit line. Just to avoid further cheating with their heuristic systems. I believe the author had become a victim of such heuristic which is likely had detected something unusual, then it considered his profile + recent connections (perhaps he had specified a different country than Turkey), and finally «free tier» had added some alarming amount to scoring. Otherwise I can't explain why support had wrapped up a chatting so quickly and unfriendly. For me everything points out on that there was a distinct reason for them to cease his account and they won't like to disclosure it in any way.

OrangeMonkey 4y ago

There is a pattern in technology companies and user reports of them: * User does thing that appears to be fine. * User is banned * User has no way of fixing this, ask for redress, they are just cut out now. I think this pattern is something that should be held in contempt and is eventually thrown away. If I had to guess, though, it won't be.

mooreds 4y ago
Don't forget step 4 and 5: * User posts on HN (or reddit or someplace else) * If post gets attention, issue is resolved via manual, backchannel efforts. If post doesn't get attention, issue remains unresolved.
- OrangeMonkey 4y ago
  I always forget step 4 and 5 - the most important steps as its the only thing that helps the user.
  - notlukesky 4y ago
    That does not work for Oracle because they are not on these forums to the extent of say Stripe or FAANG engineers.
    - nixcraft 4y ago
      Well, I tweeted the link, but my experience shows that Oracle is not a darling company for most solo developers. Typically solo devs go with DigitalOcean, Linode and co (or free stuff from AWS, even Lightsail offer some support). Either way, I hope they get some help.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - soco 4y ago
    I tried that for my Tumblr account termination. But because Tumblr is not Google, nobody cared.

_fat_santa 4y ago

Hmmm. It almost sounds like some hidden egress cost limit got reached and when he didn't have payment on file, it nuked the account.

blfr 4y ago
Their free tier is 10 TB of outbound traffic. Hard to reach.

zorg42 4y ago

It's always the same: you get what you pay for. No company offers something for free: If it doesn't cost anything, you're the product: They will use usage-data to optimize their commercial offerings, they will try out features in non-critical (aka: free) accounts first - so not to offend the paying customers. In some cases (e.g. free web-mailers like gmx, Instagram, FB etc) the free versions are mainly vehicles for advertising. Why should Oracle be any different? I cannot see their motivation to offer anything for free... they are *only* money-driven.

xuki 4y ago
> I cannot see their motivation to offer anything for free. Oracle is not alone. AWS/Google Cloud also have free tiers. They want you to get to know the system and might grow out of the free tier. But Oracle's offer is significantly more generous than Amazon's or Google's.
bombcar 4y ago
The free tiers are marketing (and quite powerful at that) - I'm surprised Amazon doesn't match it, but AWS is the big fish in the pond. If you start playing with a free tier cloud and decide to "go big" you're almost certain to keep using that cloud and begin to pay. (This is the reason that Google will give out nearly infinite "credits" to startups for their cloud, I hear).

iameli 4y ago

Oracle sales has been all over us for many months to try and move over to their cloud offering but all I ever hear are stories like this. Pass.

tomrod 4y ago
Oracle offers worse products than open source and gives you that privilege you pay for and can never use fully. I'm bitter about their KB documentation being paywalled. Their community ecosystem is nightmare fuel. Burleson Consulting is right until they are deprecated or were wrong to begin with -- but at least it is accessible. AskTom is retired. And for the past several years their attempts at "us too!" cloud offerings look like the slow recognition that its best days are far behind it. Hard pass with all the invective thoughts I can muster.
- miniwark 4y ago
  > Burleson Consulting Still most of the time they are the one stop solution to my Oracle database problems. Tanks to them!
  - tomrod 4y ago
    Right? What a wonderful maven trap. I love their stuff for when I face the Oracle dragon!

BiteCode_dev 4y ago

At this point, if you trust companies with terrible, terrible track record and you get bitten, what do you expect us to say? People keep repeating "vote with your wallet", and almost nobody does. It's already hard to make peace with that, but we learned to. However if most of the IT community place billboards saying "don't go into the bear cage" for years, and you still do, what can we do?

bombcar 4y ago
It's hard to vote with your wallet on a free tier, to be fair.
- dylan604 4y ago
  If you think these free tiers of offerings are not making money because you don't pay them, then you are confused on who the company's customers really are. The free service you are using is the bait to get you the product to offer yourself to their customers without being the wiser. It's as shady as shady can be, but hey, it's free!!!
- N19PEDL2 4y ago
  Well, one day this Turkish student will have money (I wish him/her that) and will be willing to purchase a paid service, and he/she will not choose Oracle because of this bad experience.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Radim 4y ago
  I read "vote with your wallet" as a shorthand for not giving resources to offending entities. It doesn't have to be literally banknotes out of your wallet. Not spending your attention or time or future on Google / Oracle / abusive digital platform of the day counts too. I'm with BiteCode_dev here: if people manifested their business preferences clearly and consistently, by such peaceful but proactive "voting", the world would be a better place. Once you accept you have no power, you truly don't. Actions speak louder than words, and companies listen. "Do as I say, not as I do" is not a successful recipe in general.

throw_m239339 4y ago

> Well. I guess that's how Oracle works. After trial period ends they shut down random accounts that are using their 'Always Free (not for long)' services. End of the discussion, Oracle suspended your free tier and while it sucks, it's a free tier and Oracle can suspend it as they wish, it's in their TOS (edit: in case of suspected fraud). Do not rely on free tier for anything important, free tiers are here to test the service sure, not to build an app that is important to you. They will probably never tell you the real reason for legal reasons.

smoothgrammer 4y ago
The TOS says they will provide advance warning. Oracle is in breach of their own contract.
- throw_m239339 4y ago
  > The TOS says they will provide advance warning. Oracle is in breach of their own contract. Not in cases of suspected fraud, they won't. Connecting these services with a VPN is the very definition of shady.
  - jkaplowitz 4y ago
    > Connecting these services with a VPN is the very definition of shady. I don't think OP mentioned using a VPN. But even if they had: really, managing a cloud infrastructure via VPN is so far from shady that it's often recommended or required by many tech companies' security policies for people working from public wifi locations among other circumstances, as an added layer of protection against local eavesdropping and sometimes also for specific predictable networking routing within a cloud network perimeter. I realize that OP is acting as a student/hobbyist, but there's no inherent reason why someone immersed in best-practice tech culture would necessarily be shady if they applied this VPN recommendation to their own personal tinkering. Many of the benefits of using one still apply. It would, of course, be shady if Oracle intends to deny service to people in Turkey and the VPN use is to circumvent that restriction. But I don't believe that there is such a restriction on place.

locutous 4y ago

OCI it's pretty confusing. They have two free tiers, the expanded initial time based and the always free tier. As far as I can tell, when your time runs out on the expanded free tier they turn everything off and you have to re provision into always free or do an account upgrade. They deny a lot of credit cards they should accept. I have been unable to upgrade on any of my cards. Since provisioning always free tier a second time I've not had any issues with them turing off resources.

matt_heimer 4y ago
Having different tiers that are free is pretty typical. AWS has three free tiers - https://aws.amazon.com/free/ https://aws.amazon.com/free/ MS Azure has two free tiers - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/free-services/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/free-services/ Google Cloud has two free tiers - https://cloud.google.com/free https://cloud.google.com/free OCI has two free tiers - https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
- locutous 4y ago
  The only cloud service I've had pro actively turn off provisioned resources is OCI. I've used all but Google cloud. That's a pretty distinctive difference IMHO. My post attempts to describe when and why. Though I have only used time based free credits on the other providers. Despite my always free having been up a year now I'm still reluctant to put production critical resources on it because of the experience. I'd be more willing if they would take one of my cards for an account upgrade as I otherwise generally like the service.
ricktdotorg 4y ago
> when your time runs out on the expanded free tier they turn everything off and you have to re provision into always free or do an account upgrade yes, this is exactly it! nailed it
- antifa 4y ago
  This didn't happen to my single ARM VPS instance, so it might depend on what you were using.

pure_simplicity 4y ago

I have a similar experience. Recently my account got suspended for no reason. I have been logging in and reading up on the tutorials / documentation to see how to use Oracle Cloud and I hadn't even started using any of the free resources yet, but my recently created account got suspended nonetheless. Unless my account was hacked (which I would like to be notified of) I cannot have violated any ToS. I got the same non-response when I asked why my account was removed. To me it looks like Oracle isn't being honest about their "always free" tier and they just shut down non-paying accounts to cut costs if they don't foresee them converting into paying customers any time soon. If it were a bug / mistake, then I would have expected better support (restoring the account or providing a new account if that's not possible), but being ghosted by a big corporation when you know for a fact that you did nothing wrong is pretty frustrating. I have not had such a bad experience with any cloud company ever. I sincerely hope Oracle changes, but as it stands I will never spend a dime with Oracle and I will dissuade anyone from using their services, because of how unreliable they have demonstrated themselves to be.

YetAnotherNick 4y ago
Same. Though I created one instance with one ARM core just to test and forgot about it. Oracle must have used some model to see I wasn't going to pay or something.
yonixw 4y ago
I guess I'm the lucky one. Still has my free VM from Aug 2021. They DID remove the public IP suddenly some time ago...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deepspace 4y ago
That is so incredibly short-sighted of them. The same thing happened to me. Twice. I guess there was no way for Oracle to know that I was 'kicking the tires' in my personal time, to see if it might be worth migrating some of my previous company's millions in cloud spending to them. Oh, well.
4y ago

hestefisk 4y ago

Very annoying for you. Is it correctly understood that Oracle offer a free tier instance with 24 gigs memory? That sounds too good to be true comparing to other vendors.

antifa 4y ago
The caveat is that you must be able and willing to use an ARM processor. Their x86 based always free offering is only 2GB. GCP'S always free x86 is only 1GB.
stradiv 4y ago
Yes. 24GB of RAM and 4 OCPU. Source: https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/#always-free https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/#always-free
- hestefisk 4y ago
  That sounds crazy desperate from Oracle’s side to lure in customers from larger cloud providers and avoid getting sucked further into irrelevance. Better to pay up and get a proper dedicated instance that you control (I use Hetzner dedicated servers and they are great).
  - hestefisk 4y ago
    Disclaimer - I don’t work for Hetzner.
toyg 4y ago
They moved late into the game, and have to compensate their tardiness and generally low appeal with incredibly generous allocations. They can always pull that back later when they feel like, after all, like OP found out today...
ptman 4y ago
Yes: https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/ https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/ . But keep backups and switch to e.g. hetzner if oracle doesn't want you leeching.

josephcsible 4y ago

Why is the cloud still so popular even though stories like this one are so common now?

dylan604 4y ago
Because it's free and provides some what of a convenience. It doesn't need to be any more complicated than that.

speedgoose 4y ago

I don’t understand how Oracle can convince companies to sign with them considering their behaviour.

MichaelCollins 4y ago
Same way that lawn mowers convince people to stick their hands into the blades, despite common sense and all the warning stickers screaming at you to not do that. It seems expedient in the moment, you're not thinking about long term consequences and just want to fix a problem fast right now.
zaarn 4y ago
Because it integrated with OracleDB.
- speedgoose 4y ago
  But if you are still stuck with OracleDB, you are probably not happy about that and you can get it in other clouds providers anyway.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    If someone is "stuck with OracleDB" then it sounds like they don't make the purchasing decisions.
dsr_ 4y ago
Oracle doesn't sell to you. Oracle sells to your vice-president, on the golf course. The reason they have this free-tier at all is to be able to say "yes, your engineers can go in and evaluate this for free".
- speedgoose 4y ago
  Can’t a CTO say « no »?
- metadat 4y ago

ohCh6zos 4y ago

If you don’t own it then you can be cut off at someone else’s whim. The cloud is to the cloud provider’s benefit not yours.

nojito 4y ago

Free tier user and no statement if he had a payment method attached to his account.

pure_simplicity 4y ago
in order to sign up you have to provide credit card details, so you automatically have a payment method attached to your account
- jwilk 4y ago
  My understanding is that's only used for identity verification, not as a payment method.
  - nix23 4y ago
    Correct, you have to attach it a second time to use it as a payment method.

tomcam 4y ago

I would instantly vote for a federal politician (senator, congressperson, president) who authored a bill clearly stating that there would be transparency in the suspension process, and a defined set of actions for recourse, appeal, etc. But it's not likely to happen. All the tech companies have virtually all these slimeballs (both parties) in their pockets. Plus many of the pols and their staff are rotating in and out of positions at these companies as employees or lobbyists.

Erlangen 4y ago

I remembered I had a similar experience with IBM cloud last year. I created an account, created several VMs and deleted them. Then after half an hour, boom, my account was banned, telling me something like "violated our policy". Interestingly, I just tried to log into my IBM cloud account and it was successful. I don't know how and when I was un-banned. I received the email about the ban but not the unban.

l0ngyap 4y ago
[dead]

rexreed 4y ago

The more this keeps up, the more we'll be back to where we were in the 1990s - self-hosted apps on non-cloud infrastructure that are owned and managed by the companies and orgs who build on them, and not held hostage by cloud companies who have built rent-seeking businesses and eliminated any sort of human support while automating functions with unaccountable and flawed algorithmic decision-making systems. Don't get me wrong, I see the economic benefit of the cloud and the freedom of not having to manage your own infrastructure, but increasingly the cost and risks associated with being beholden to an organization's arbitrary behavior with lack of recourse is not something you can depend on for the long-term. We're coming back full cycle to decentralized systems.

moreira 4y ago
> We're coming back full cycle to decentralized systems. You say this as if it's something that's happening, but it's not. There's a few pockets of self hosted bits here and there, but that's not new. We are not coming back to decentralised systems, and we will -never- go back to that in any significant number. Most people are not going to give up the cloud to go back to bare metal. Most people are not going to give up their zero-maintenance SaaS app to go self-host something. All of it is just too convenient, and you then also have the inertia working against you; there's a whole generation of developers now that has grown up without ever administering a server. They're not gonna give up their Lambdas and drop down to a lower level, just like I'm not gonna give up my interpreted languages and drop down to C, even though it'd perform a hell of a lot better. I'm with you - I like self-hosting, and I run everything I can on bare metal, and I hate everything costing money every month. But there's no future in which people decide "oh I'll give up the convenience and the extra money I can make from this" and go back to the old way of doing things.
- rexreed 4y ago
  Of course nothing is inevitable. Things never go back to the old way, but things do revert. Just look at some of the replies here and you'll see comments such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32319989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32319989 and others. Is decentralization an inevitability? No. But as I said above, the more that cloud companies do these sorts of customer-adverse actions, the more we'll see this movement to decentralization.

beefee 4y ago

I was never even able to sign up. "Customer service" just repeats the same thing on a loop. Tech companies will slowly put themselves out of business with fraud detection algorithms.

bityard 4y ago

I host personal stuff on the OCI always free tier and did a lot of research on this before deciding to go down this road because we know what kind of reputation Oracle has. From what I found, people using the free tier often get their instances terminated and other resources removed and reclaimed. The suspicion is that there are some automated systems that when capacity falls below a certain threshold, they will take back resources from the "freeloading" users. (For the humor-impaired, that is tongue-in-cheek.) This is well within their right and ToS say they can do this. Nobody should be surprised or annoyed that they do. I've read reports that entering your billing details to sign up for a pay-as-you-go account will reduce but not eliminate the likelihood of this happening. You still get the always-free resources but Oracle's systems see you as a paying customer, on paper at least. This is what I did and I haven't seen any disruptions in the 6 months I've done so. In this case, however, since the whole account was suspended it sounds like the author probably got caught as a false positive in some kind of automated fraud-prevention system.

benedicthw 4y ago
I can also testify that upgrading my account to pay-as-you-go has resulted in no issues for the last 6 months. One minor issue: I had to use my older email to pass through their fraud detection (cybersource?) to successfully upgrade the account. I was even able to get Oracle Support to unblock port 25 for me! Use a declarative management system, setup billing alerts, and be very very cautious about the "always free" database offering. The latter is the real faustian bargin in my humble opinion. If we're talking compute only, OCI's pricing is very attractive. I sympathize that combating abuse -- made worse by just how much Oracle's free offering trumps anything else out there -- while generating goodwill must be a very thin line to walk. Condolences for the Turkish student as well; once bitten , twice shy.

dncornholio 4y ago

I don't think there's much to see here because I suspect we aren't seeing the total picture. When it's suspected fraud, it's not smart to give out details on the suspension. What's odd in this post is that he goes into detail on what steps he did. Too much detail on something that's irrelevant. So I'm not making any assumptions about OP or Oracle.

upupandup 4y ago

I tried to use their free tier but when I tried to provision a VM it would say not allowed. Seems like the coke and women got to Larry Ellison's head and he's not really focused anymore

thrtythreeforty 4y ago

Wow, that Oracle Cloud customer support transcript the author found is particularly damning. What a terrible customer experience. I guess this is Oracle-ese for "you're not rich enough for us to care." > Customer: Can you help me to see what happen with my Oracle Cloud account please? > Agent: let me check it . one moment > Customer: Sure. It says in the Tenancy details that my user is inactive. Even if I try to upgrade and manage payment it says I don't have access to perform that operation :( > Agent: thank you for waiting. Unfortunately, we are unable to .resolve this issue Sorry, this is all the information we can provide. thank you for contacting us > Customer: Wait, who can help me? Please, provide me at least another way to contact the proper support team. > Agent: we would be the correct department for this issue, but unfortunately we are unable to help further with this issue > Customer: But why? You didn't tell me what was the problem, or what I did wrong... This is very disappointing > Agent: I am afraid I am unable to advise you further. Thank you for contacting us . bye

dessant 4y ago
I wait for the day that this conduct becomes illegal, because it can destroy people's lives. It is actually surprising that consumer protection laws do not yet address the issue of due process.
- mpol 4y ago
  I would assume it is contract based and thus falls already under contract law. You could start a civil case. There is no need to make something illegal that already has ways to get resolved. Part of the problem in the US is that a civil courtcase is a horrible thing. At least in Europe the loser pays the court costs of the winner. That already makes this kind of behaviour less likely. In the US you have to spend lots of money on a court case and they will just drag it out and bleed you dry. The court system is designed to protect the rich minority from the poor majority. Also, do not throw away the baby with the bathwater. A shop owner should have ways to get rid of a bad customer. And yes, even if it is just based on a face that you don't like.
  - 4y ago

nix23 4y ago

I made a account a year ago and some friend's (around 4) too, we never had any problems...just saying, maybe something else is going on here.

tlogan 4y ago

On the other hand, I run a very small SaaS and I can tell you that abuse is really a big problem. Stolen CC and similar things are so common.

rob_c 4y ago

yup, you let the free tier get into a suspended state without a VM for more than 24hr. happened to 2 people I know and myself. Nice in principle, free gets no support or nobody to shout at and it's Oracle so, yeah, sucks if you put anything important on it :P

rambojohnson 4y ago

Oracle who?

helpfulmandrill 4y ago

Got the same thing with Ebay. I created an account. I attempted to sell a Linguistics textbook. I was immediately banned. They wouldn't tell me why. My account will still let me BUY from ebay. But I'm not going to.

kube-system 4y ago
eBay is really aggressive with fraud prevention for sellers because there's a bunch of scammers making fake listings trying to make a quick buck and eBay will always reimburse the end customer. I know that if you share any address/payment method/IP address/etc with someone who previously flaked out as a seller, they'll ban your account. It sucks but I don't really know what they could do to improve it.
- helpfulmandrill 4y ago
  Maybe they could let me prove that I'm not the guy who used to live at my address. I could prove that really easily, they just don't care.
- FateOfNations 4y ago
  Actual KYC so they don't base guilt on spurious associations based on dynamic IP or physical addresses that someone else might have used?
  - kube-system 4y ago
    Fair, although given their global reach and the relatively low value of most transactions there, it’s understandable why that isn’t an easy solution. Meaningful KYC as fraud prevention on eBay would probably practically result in them limiting service to a handful of countries. Global banks don’t find it financially worthwhile to serve the entire world with KYC for customers with millions of dollars of deposits.

bob29 4y ago

midislack 4y ago

Google did the same to me recently. Face it, Cloud was a stupid idea all along

TheMagicHorsey 4y ago

OP, I would suspect you have been flagged by some US agency for investigation. In these cases the vendor does not have much leeway in telling you what is going on, as revealing the details of an ongoing investigation is likely forbidden. What kind of content is in the app? Do you have any user generated content like comments, etc.? Could be a user of yours posted something that flagged your app.

kube-system 4y ago
Unlikely, unless OP is lying about doing sketchy stuff. Free-tier services are notoriously abused, and notoriously unsupported. It's more likely that it tripped up some compliance/fraud business rule. Front line support at any large corp will stone wall you in this case.

jordemort 4y ago

I tried to sign up for a developer account with them to try out their ARM servers and met a similar brick wall. They won't activate my account and support won't talk to me, except to tell me that they won't talk to me. I tried hitting up sales and didn't get any luck there either. Too bad for them, I probably would have ended up paying for some servers if things worked out.

numpad0 4y ago

Same behavior is reported by a lightly-paid individual user previously(use translators). Same story, account gets suspended, Oracle be “you take our words seriously and understand what you’ve done to us” and paths end there. 1: https://zenn.dev/shinshin86/scraps/022e44712274fd https://zenn.dev/shinshin86/scraps/022e44712274fd

sneak 4y ago

Why do people who pay nothing feel entitled to a) service and b) customer support (neither of which is free to provide)? This makes no sense to me.

josephcsible 4y ago
Imagine someone offers you a free 1-year lease of a storage unit. You accept and go put some stuff in it, Six months later, you go to get something, and find that they put an extra lock on it and now you can't get to your stuff anymore. Should you just accept that your stuff is gone now, since the unit was free in the first place?
- sneak 4y ago
  I would not expect any rights to the storage unit if I didn’t pay anything for it. “Consideration” is an important element of a contract; I am not sure a $0 lease is even a valid legal instrument.
jjnoakes 4y ago
> Why do people who pay nothing feel entitled to service Because the service was offered for free...

password4321 4y ago

If you want a VC-funded "free" PostgreSQL db (500MB, 2GB egress/mo, paused after 1 week inactivity), check out Supabase.

lgxz 4y ago

Amazon suspended my Kindle Paperwhite a week ago. I was reading a book when it suddenly said that my kindle had a critical problem, and gave me 3 choices: 1. Unpair my Amazon account with the kindle. 2. Sign out my account 3. Contact customer service I tried choice 2 but it didn't work. I contacted customer service and they told me their engineers will investigate the issue. Then I got a phone call from Amazon. They told me their engineers had fixed the problem and I only need to reboot it. I rebooted it. The "critical problem" gone. Still don't know what's wrong with my kindle.

chimprich 4y ago

One of the many infuriating things about this story is the useless "contact your administrator for help" message beloved of many orgs with multi-user accounts set up. It would be nice if they didn't trigger that for admin accounts, because that only adds to the annoyance when you're trying to figure out what has gone wrong. It's just a lazy way of saying "we haven't bothered to figure out exactly what's gone wrong here; we've just hit a generic try/catch, so we're going to pass the buck! Good luck searching through our inadequate documentation and guessing what's wrong, sucker!"

Havoc 4y ago

I’m pretty much just using mine for testing sandbox purposes. Unlike my other cloud accounts it doesn’t have a billing card so has utility in the billing footgun sense - but build anything on top of it hahaha nope Oracle is really harming their rep with the seemingly random closures and killing all the goodwill created via the exceptionally generous allowances

dontbesquare 4y ago

Why not just host your own? Why rely on Oracle for anything at this point?

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Animats 4y ago

Here's Oracle's marketing pitch for their free tier.[1] "Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's Free Tier includes a free time-limited promotional trial that allows you to explore a wide range of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure products, and a set of Always Free offers that never expire." Their FAQ:[2] "When you've reached the end of your 30-day trial or used all your Free Trial credits (whichever comes first), you’ll be notified and will have a grace period of 30 days, starting from the expiration date, to upgrade to paid. You will no longer be able to create new paid resources, but your account will remain active. Your resources will continue to exist for a few days, allowing you to upgrade your account and keep your resources before they're reclaimed by Oracle. If you do not upgrade to paid by the end of the grace period, your Free Trial service instances and data will be deleted." Which is reasonable enough. I can't find their terms of service or EULA. Most web sites have a "legal" or "terms" link at the bottom of pages, but Oracle does not. Google can find their web site terms of service.[3] But that's for the web site only, not their cloud services. [1] https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier.htm https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier... [2] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/faq/ https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/faq/ [3] https://www.oracle.com/legal/terms.html https://www.oracle.com/legal/terms.html

gurchik 4y ago
They differentiate between Free Tier and Always Free. The disclaimer that your instances will be deleted after 30 days seems to be worded specifically to not apply to the Always Free, isn't it?

bebrws 4y ago

How does Facebook stand here? Haha I have an account I tried to go through the reset account process more times than I can count. No reset email was evvvvver sent. Don’t waste ur time adding the friends that can reset your account. But hey, maybe Facebook does favors. And maybe it’s all just one big dumpster fire. Who’s to say

ivlivs 4y ago

This happened to me too, earlier in the year. Fortunately I wasn't doing anything important with the single instance in my account. It was comically impossible to find any information about what had happened. And then a few weeks later, the account re-activated - again, without explanation. I don't think you unknowingly violated some ToS. The best I could figure, there's a periodic automated internal process that accidentally sets some accounts to an invalid state. Accounts with paid support can complain and get fixed manually. The rest of us need to just wait for some other automated sweep to come along and fix all the broken accounts. Needless to say, I wouldn't use OCI free tier for any kind of production workload. And I'm not sure I'd trust that this type of issue is limited to free tier accounts. It seems like stuff in OCI... just breaks sometimes.

rldjbpin 4y ago

joke's on you! my card gets debited and reversed but never gets validated to even get started lol

petilon 4y ago

The ironic thing about Oracle and Larry Ellison in particular, is that they invented both cloud computing and chromebooks back in 1996. They called it Network Computing and Network Computer respectively. Ellison talked about centralizing complexity (what we today call the cloud) and having simple end-user computers that he called network computers (realized today as chromebooks). Back in 1996 this was an outlandish idea. All this should have given Oracle a tremendous lead. Oracle squandered away that lead, and today they are a nobody in cloud computing. Ellison recently appeared in a joint video with Satya Nadella where they announced a collaboration to make Oracle RDBMS available on Azure.

metadat 4y ago
This is a good story! Maybe the wave wasn't ready to be caught in 1996, hypervisors like VMWare and Xen weren't a thing yet (IIRC Amazon leveraged Xen to get AWS started in the late 00s).

mark_l_watson 4y ago

I was a little confused about the author of the article talking about running large resource free services. I signed up for an ‘always free’ Oracle Cloud account, and I have had a small 700MB VPS running for a very long time, never any problems. Admittedly, my CPU utilization probably averages down around 5%. Perhaps OC has an automated system in place to detect “greedy free users?” It probably makes very good economic sense for OC and GCP to provide one ‘always free’ micro VPS because when I need something larger for myself or a customer, it is natural to use their services because I am familiar with them.

roastedpeacock 4y ago

Glad to see I am not the only one who gives pause to the recent aggressive marketing of Oracle Cloud services. Oracle is the epitome of rug-pulls.

sswaner 4y ago

One constant in my 20+ year tech career is: Never trust Oracle, work to eliminate their presence wherever possible. They consistently prove themselves to be predatory and extortionist in all transactions. Want proof: Ask them if you can convert to a paid service to make your "TOS violation" magically disappear.

mfkp 4y ago

My related experience on Oracle Cloud from 5 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30507846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30507846

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systemvoltage 4y ago

Free tier is for evaluation purpopses, what do you expect otherwise?

jdubz79 4y ago

Why would anyone use Oracle Cloud? The company has proven themselves to be incompetent and useless time and time again.