All fine and well, but oracle will threaten to turn off your instance if you don’t maintain a reasonable average CPU usage on the free hosts, and will eventually do so abruptly.
This became enough of a hassle that I stopped using them.
I assumed the same, but as long as you keep a credit card on file apparently they will let you idle it too. I went in and set my max budget at $1/mo and set alerts too, just in case.
Do you mean if it’s idle, or if it’s maxed out? I’ve had a few relatively idle free-tier VMs with Oracle and I’ve not received any threats of shutoff over the last 3 years I’ve had them online.