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Welcome!

An unfortunate story of trusting Oracle, and not having an adequeate backup system.

Oracle Cloud Hosting has a quite generous free tier for hosting. More than enough for a small Lemmy site. I thought this was a great deal, and if I grew enough I could start upgrading components to paid tiers. This is what I used initially, and as I had begun this as a personal project just for me (before deciding I had plenty of room for a small userbase), I hadn’t yet gotten proper backups setup.

Well yesterday I got an email that my Oracle account had been terminated. The server immediately shut off, and I couldn’t access anything. Their support was less than useless. My only backups thus far were using Oracle’s built in tools. Which I can’t access.

I suppose I can understand that these free tiers are probably heavily scrutinized to keep spammers, scammers, and crypto miners away. But I didn’t do any of that. So I have no idea what happened. Maybe they just realized I wasn’t likely to become some 6 figure enterprise account. There’s tons of other users who have experienced this exact thing, if you search. Support will basically just hang up on you if you try to ask about it.

So I moved to IONOS, and I’m now using paid (fairly cheap, and can be upgraded) servers. I have an actual contractual relationship with them so the situation with Oracle shouldn’t happen again. I sure hope Oracle doesn’t treat their paying customers that way…

Since starting a new instance with the same domain name doesn’t really work (other lemmy instances wouldn’t trust it), I had to pick a new domain. rogers-net was really a personal use thing. So I figured I’d get a better, more general name while I was at it.

I’m also now doing hourly backups, which get stored on a server I own seperate from IONOS. I’m working on maybe getting another copy on a different server - as they say one backup is none and two is one. Lessons learned the hard way.

I briefly thought about just throwing in the towel and joining lemmy.world or something, but I just can’t bring myself to. So after making a catastrophic amateur mistake I doubled down and spent actual money on another go, lmao. I really like what’s going on here in the Fediverse and Lemmy. I want to contribute and be right at the heart of things. Even if in just a small way.

TL;DR Oracle sucks. But also I failed to be production ready and have suitable backups for emergencies. Like the beehaw.org admins said - we’re flying by the seats of our pants here.