Was directed to an online chat by the Oracle email support and got this response. I'm not sure how true this is, people mentioned their support is outsourced, but it sounds nice. I still have not gotten any banners. I'll keep my instance active as is and we'll see what happens. I created it in 2023.
Thought it would be useful to share here, I documented how I backed up my free tier instance. Paranoia and all
I have a Free Tier account I made over 3 years ago with a 4/24 instance I made around the same time. All this time it has been working fine. It's not a trial account, it's not a PAYG account. I am well within the green zone on usage and it's not idle.
I just now discovered here on Reddit that they're slashing the Always Free resources in half. I checked my dashboard and I don't have any banners about that, but my limits page does have the new numbers, and funnily says that I'm in the negatives right now on them - like -12GB and -2 cores. Way to go, Oracle, to not notify anyone about it lol. It was buried in a big list of random metrics in the Governance section.
The instance is still active and works, though.
I don't want to do anything rash so I don't lose the instance, i.e. I should definitely not terminate it. So I'm very reluctant to resize it.
What's my course of action here? Keep it and pray it doesn't get term'd? Or is it safe to resize it without losing my allocated capacity? I have 0 Oracle support, as far as I'm concerned there are no human employees at that company, only a really cheap AI model, so the only other way is to ask Reddit.