Oracle Cloud: Exceptional Performance but Total Uncertainty

Last year I researched the Cloud hosting area, specifically the free tier services for development. As a pseudo-programmer and keen observer, I knew that Google and Amazon had such services, followed closely by Oracle.

Oracle had a promotion campaign for ARM-based services, offering, within reason and available resources, the possibility to register a VPS server with a maximum of 4 cores, 24 GB of RAM, and 200 GB of storage. Plus two classic VPSs, on the usual architecture, i.e. AMD CPU, with a maximum of 1 core each from the same storage space.

In practice, I could have three virtual machines, two on classic architecture, and one on ARM64 architecture, with 3 storage volumes. Let’s say 100GB and two of 50GB.

When I tested the services, I was very curious about the performance offered. First, I registered a classic architecture server, 1 core, 1GB RAM, and 50 GB storage volume.

After some tests, I saw that the network was limited to 480 Mbps, so I set up an OpenVPN, and I managed to get around 3-4 MB/s. Enough for browsing the web in case I had peering issues or simply wanted to use a VPN for security, privacy, or other reasons.

I repeated the same test on a VPS with ARM64 architecture, specifically Arm-based Ampere A1, where I managed to reach some absolutely fantastic speeds of almost 4 Gbps with servers in Frankfurt and almost 1Gbps with local OpenVPN. In practice, with that speed, I could consistently reach download and upload speeds of around 80 MBps from home, through the OpenVPN server.

I realized that this free tier and always free server could help me in three different ways.

First, I could use it as a server for web development. So I installed aaPanel on it for quick administration directly from the web interface. I set up a subdomain through Cloudflare, tested a WordPress, and the obtained performances were insane. Very good, very fast, and very consistent.

Secondly, I set up a range of passive ports for the FTP server through which all the sites I have, as well as those of the clients I have, automatically send backups to a dedicated /backup/clientx folder.

Thirdly, since I already had OpenVPN installed, it solved my peering problems with the internet at home. Some external sites do not work or work intermittently. I couldn’t figure out why this was happening, but using a VPN solved the problem.

So far, everything was good.

Here come the problems.

It happens very often that I can’t log in to Oracle Cloud. The client/portal part of Oracle works, but it doesn’t go further into Oracle Cloud or logs me in, but doesn’t see the instances. Eventually, I figured it out. There are some poorly thought-out things there, compartments, containers, etc.

After a while, I received an email from Oracle notifying me that one of the instances in my account would be terminated due to the use of less than 10% of the resources. It was about an instance with an AMD processor. I manually entered and deleted that instance. It didn’t make sense for it to be running since I wasn’t using it.

The Ampere A1 instance had an average utilization of around 10%, and that’s because I was constantly using the VPN, almost continuously.

Today, after more than 5 months of use, I woke up with the VPN server down. I tried to log in via ssh, but it didn’t respond. The web interface was down, nothing responded to commands. I tried to log in to my Oracle Cloud account, but I got an error.

Either it showed me a JSON with “not allowed” or that this account had been closed or deleted by the user. What the hell happened? I was literally using it this morning, and now I have no access.

I submitted a ticket through the only contact form I found on their site, and I received a generic message back, informing me that the form is no longer valid.

So, I cannot talk to anyone at Oracle about this because there is no official and easy way to get in touch with someone, only with the sales or support department for paying customers. The rest of the free tier users, who have validated the platform and developed software compatible with ARM64, can suck it up quietly. They don’t matter.

And that’s where my experience with Oracle Cloud ends. As I said, maximum performance but total uncertainty.

From what I’ve found on the internet, there are hundreds of other users who have had a similar experience, not just free tier users, but also paying customers.

Anyway, it’s very ugly to terminate/close a client’s account without specifying a reason, even a free one.

At the moment, I have set up an sFTP server on my TerraMaster NAS, set up port forwarding on my router, and migrated all the automated backups there. It took me a few hours of debugging and setting up each site, but at least I solved one of the problems.