I recently upgraded to an iPhone 16 Pro and am delighted with its camera and its service as an iPhone: unfortunately I did not anticipate something: Oracle!
At the end of 2024 I got a pestering e-mail from Oracle about account changes, followed it, logged-in with my password and was prompted to acknowledge a notification on my iPhone via Oracle Authenticator, and I no longer have access to the erased iPhone which I had the app installed on. After much research I have discovered that there is no alternative way to login to my Oracle Cloud account and I cannot get support on the Free Tier. Knowing that my web host virtual machine could fail leaving me with no way to start it again I decided urgently to backup this WordPress and my upcoming trainsandwellbeing.blog site and look for another host. I am now my own host.
My HPE micro server has RHEL 8, and I decided determinedly to ditch VirtualBox and move to QEMU/libvirt. I now have my NetSUSLP appliance fully migrated and I have a new LAMP server virtual machine with RHEL 9 which this site lives on now.
With recent changes to VirtualBox documentation and the website it feels like Oracle are in the process of ruining VirtualBox, so my first resolution on the new year, or more importantly Merlin (the cat’s) 16th birthday, I am moving away from all things Oracle. Whilst I can’t complain about the stuff I use freely I do think that the locking out of my Cloud account with no working support options is an influencer on how I would feel about recommending Oracle services to potentially paying customers; I would not recommend Oracle!
Here’s to a self managed and hosted fresh start!