Introduction

This post is meant to share my past experience with Oracle Cloud free tier. I am in no way trying to steer anyone away from using any of Oracle’s services, this is purely to shine some light on a specific incident that occurred.

There are parts of this post that I will be intentionally leaving out, as I do not feel comfortable releasing that information. I will also try and keep dates and times as accurate as possible, which shouldn’t be hard considering how recent this was.

Now, the good stuff

Earlier on in the year, I was sitting alone in my college dorm room a few weeks after celebrating my birthday back at home. I had a bright idea to try and take a shot at getting a VPS and doing some stuff with it with Minecraft servers and Discord bots and all that stuff. It worked, and honestly it worked flawlessly even if I was using Oracle’s Linux distribution because it wouldn’t let me pick Ubuntu or Debian. I had zero complaints about the VPS itself, the only complaints I really had at the time were related to dashbaord navigation, but that’s not really important here.

Now, I did not do all of the setup myself, I did have some assistance during the initial setup process as well as setting up the Minecraft server panel and other stuff. I also made sure that I stayed within the “Always Free” limits that were set at the time (this is important) which I believe was 150GB of storage and 24GB of RAM. Again, this is both relevant and insanely important.

But gamingto, you’re not telling us what happened… chop chop!

Hold on, I just had to get some stuff out of the way, gosh…

The servers were running well, I even made it a network of servers and proxy servers and it was a lot of fun….kinda. It wasn’t fine and dandy when I would go out to eat and there’s something that requires my immediate attention. Anyways, the relief that everything was working perfectly and I could eventually go to bed was a very good feeling (I did all of that stuff at like 2 AM lol). Oracle made it very easy for someone like me who knows a fair amount about computers, but not enough to where I can not bite my nails in fear while doing something. Their service was great and I didn’t have to worry about a thing.

Or so I thought.

The email

On Monday May 11, 2026 I received an email at approximately 1:30 AM EST saying that my Free Trial to Oracle Cloud has ended. Cool, that doesn’t sound bad since my account would still be limited to the Always Free limits, right? WRONG!!! Not only was my Free Trial over, but apparently my cloud instance was also over too! They suspended my instance with zero notice at all, this infuriated me because I had a lot of important things on there and there was absolutely zero warning about anything. Now, you might be looking at this and going “wow, this idiot didn’t read the documentation”… Oracle’s documentation on the “Always Free” limits made zero sense at all and explained nothing about what the limits actually are. I had to resort to a Reddit thread to get my information. After the suspension of my instance, I immediately went into a panic because I did not know how long I had before my files would be wiped and the instance be removed. I had 30 days… that is plenty of time. I definitely should’ve been a little bit smarter when initially making my instance, but I can’t remember the last time I made a smart decision on the internet.

What did I end up doing? Do I still recommend Oracle? Will I use it again?

After all that was over, I bought a Hetzner VPS. To this day I still use it for server hosting and all that stuff, and I really like it. Looking back at it, the Oracle Cloud VPS was really just a 30d tutorial before stepping into the real world and getting something like a Hetzner VPS. I definitely still recommend Oracle to anyone who wants to either host a Minecraft server or do anything, but either don’t have the money for a service like Hetzner or they don’t want to use a “free” hosting service like Minehut, Minefort or Minekeep. I could very well see myself using Oracle Cloud again, not sure what for, but I’d 100% use it again. I think having an Oracle Cloud Free Tier VPS would be good for me to use it for some of the less important things that I have, or maybe try something new.

Conclusion/Final Thoughts

Oracle as a service isn’t all that bad, people may have their reasons for not liking it but I don’t care that much to debate. If I’m only going to use a service for a singular product, then I see no reason to argue. I highly recommend using it if you’re someone who either cannot afford game server hosting, or just want to get your hands dirty with the terminal and do some cool stuff. This post is not meant to steer someone away from using a product, the point of this post is to share my thoughts about my time using Oracle Cloud. That’s all!