As you may or may not know about me, I am a nerd who likes hosting nerdy things in nerdy places. In the past year or two I have become a big self-hosting nut, and am always looking for ways to optimize my presence.
Traditionally, I like using Hetzner for this kind of thing. (It’s a referral link, to be clear, but I would have recommended it even without one.) It’s a pretty solid service, inexpensive compared to numerous other services of its type, and has worked well for me for pushing my site onto the internet. But I host other things on a home server, and I’ve been wondering if I should perhaps host some of those things offsite, just in case the power goes out.
I simply want to ensure that things don’t go down, possibly creating a bad experience for the small handful of users that have to access them. (Or if, perhaps, I’m not at home to restart the server if it goes offline.)
So looking around, I spotted this offering from Oracle that sounds too good to be true: “Always Free” hosting, either on AMD chips or ARM chips. Hey, the idea of experimenting with running on ARM sounds intriguing, let me sign up!
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Don’t let its unassuming looks fool you. You will be at your wit’s end within minutes.
One problem: When I signed up, I found that the form was particularly unfriendly. I tried putting in my address, and the form tried fighting me when I tried to finish the home address. It threw errors at me left and right. And when I tried putting in my card, it didn’t accept it the first time and yelled at me afterward.
I tried again, changing a couple of things that I thought might be making it mad. I tried another card. And, no, nothing. When I tried contacting the chat, they told me to fill out the form. Filling out the form guarantees a response only in, like, 48 hours. Sorry man, you’re not going to have your fun mess-around-with-servers night on Oracle’s watch.
I was wondering: Was anyone else having problems with this form? I looked on Reddit, and the answer is yes—very much so. In fact, it’s so yes that someone created a video on YouTube with nearly 50,000 views, explaining that you need to ensure that your address matches your credit card info exactly. But no matter. I did this, and it didn’t work.
At this point, I am convinced that Oracle intentionally makes this form bad and useless, putting the weight of trying to get through on its customer support team. The reason? It is expensive to run a service of this nature and to make it freely available.
Oracle, the king of the relational database, has a broken, barely functioning form on its primary way of advertising its offerings to developers. The irony.
But I want to point something out: If Oracle is in fact doing this, they’re stupid. The reason for this is that Oracle promotes this form as using Cybersource, a close partner of Oracle. This form is advertising the quality of Oracle’s technology, and the advertising is bad. The form is so frustrating that I imagine many users faced with this ugly pushback have no desire to use an Oracle product ever again.
Oracle is a large company and deeply seated in too-big-to-fail territory. But small-scale devs putting together experiments eventually pull out their pocketbooks to buy things. But instead, those users are probably going to go with hosting platforms that don’t waste their time. Hetzner is pretty good; maybe I’ll just stick with that. (In fact, I just kicked on an ARM machine on the Hetzner cloud. It’s hosted in Finland. Woot.)
Now, to be clear, it is not unheard-of for services that offer access to free things to have particularly convoluted signup processes. People who have signed up for unemployment? You probably know this all too well.
We are a society with too many forms that do not function the way they should because of organizations that want to force people to work for access. It’s cruel, unusual, and we should not put up with that.
So, let me pose the question to you, dear reader: Can you think of any similarly terrible examples of online forms that seemed designed to destroy the will of the user?
Form-Free Links
Should QWERTY be QWDFGY? A site called QWERTY-Flip makes a convincing case that some top-row keys should be on the home row, and vice-versa. It might be worth a stab.
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Shout-out to Canva, which has decided to pull an Adobe overnight. Please don’t touch Affinity, thanks.
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Find this one an interesting read? Share it with a pal! And if you like your cloud providers without endlessly frustrating forms, I recommend Hetzner.
