upvote
I signed up for Oracle Cloud. I couldn’t get any of the free trial options to work due to capacity limits. I couldn’t get my payment method added so I could pay for real servers.

Then they terminated my free trial early with no explanation. I tried to add a payment method again and it didn’t work.

It turned into a bigger joke when Oracle sales people started emailing me to ask how my trial was going. They must have been given a list of email addresses and no information about the accounts. I would ask them for help getting my account unlocked or adding a payment method, they would send me emails for a couple weeks saying they were looking into it, then they’d ghost me.

Then a month later a new sales rep would email me and start the process over.

I checked Reddit and there were dozens of stories with the same experience.

reply
Similar experience. It was surreal coming from the (relatively) simple waters of Azure and Digital Ocean.
reply
Every couple of years I try Oracle Cloud and nothing ever really works. It feels like it was built by people who literally cannot see the final result of what they work on. Signing up, adding cards, clicking links in e-mails -- nothing worked! Nothing has ever reliably worked!

I hate Oracle with a passion for everything they've done throughout the years, I hope they burn in hell. Of course I don't want that for most of the people working there, but those making the decisions? Kindly go the way of your cloud and vanish from relevance.

reply
Oracle Cloud sometimes feels like an elaborate prank that I'm not in on. I know people and companies on AWS (obviously), Azure, Google Cloud, Hetzner, CloudFlare's various PaaS offerings, etc., but I can't name a single thing running on Oracle Cloud. Somebody out there is clearly using but I'll be damned if I know who it is.
reply
We host more than 200 customers in OCI (because we have to). Its terrible. The service is terrible and they are breaking stuff all the time. Amsterdam down for a few hours today alone. We spend millions with them and can’t even get someone to join a bridge. It’s baaad
reply
TikTok for US users
reply
When your customers are government mandated, are they really customers or hostages?
reply
Uh, while the sale to the Oracle-led group was government mandated, the use of Oracle Cloud for hosting by the new US TikTok is just self-dealing by the new ownership.

Of course, when your “customers” are just self-dealing, that’s also not a great sign.

reply
Keep in mind that Oracle can be deliberately nebulous about what their cloud offering is (pun intended).

Any hosted service can be bent into the shape of a cloud. Large parts of Oracle Cloud balance sheet is probably just hosted PeopleSoft and similar.

They have this in common with IBM which, at least on paper, have a large cloud business.

reply
> I can't name a single thing running on Oracle Cloud

CrowdStrike and Uber

> Hetzner

I don't know of any upper market EMEA customers on Hetzner. I've met Scaleway, OVHCloud, and even STACKIT users but never Hetzner.

reply
I think the market for Oracle Cloud is the same for early GCP: companies with large enough needs and strong enough engineering teams that they can leverage "X runs on Oracle Cloud" into deep discounts. And then cover the gaps with engineering.
reply
A company I worked at knowingly bought very sub-par oracle products just to get discounts on the Oracle ERP and DB stuff.
reply
Partially. It's basically only enterprise and upper market organizations that were hit by billing re-negotiations by AWS, GCP, or Azure and want a high touch experience.
reply
zoom. uber. airbnb. openai. bunch of banks. samsung, apparently..
reply
I know at least one of those only uses Oracle for internal/HR "cloud" purposes, while their main customer-facing business is on AWS. Not sure about the others, but when I think of a business using "Oracle cloud" I don't interpret it as just their marketing/HR.
reply
A lot of internal stuff ends up on Oracle cloud since it’s easier, jira, confluence, etc
reply
That is crazy. One of the main rules of business is to always make it as easy as possible for customers to give you money.
reply
Enterprise companies typically don’t just add credit card forms, they push you through a sales process and don’t care much for small accounts.
reply
Good to know it's not only problematic on the free tier. I wanted to sign up to get the free credits but couldn't finish the setup. I tried again now and it accepted/charged my card ($1 verification test) but then after the account was created it said I need a credit card?
reply
For the longest time they were a piñata for free compute with people making multiple accounts for their free ARM instance, but with the AI crunch they're clamping down.

I'm guessing they don't care if actual business gets caught up in that because from their POV actual business comes from an account manager, and self-serve is just them cargo culting AWS/GCP

reply
They couldn't integrate a payment provider and expect to build out the data centers for AGI?

Uh, good luck guys.

reply