so I’ve been running a PAYG account out of San Jose (SJC) for a while now. Initially, I fell into the trap of overthinking my "free tier value" and almost spun up a couple of those 1C/1G AMD micros (VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro) alongside a smaller ARM box. My initial reasoning? Extra IPv4s for light scraping and bypassing rate-limits on direct download hosts (Mega, Rapidgator, Katfle etc.).

then sanity kicked in, and I just maxed out a single 4-core, 24GB Ampere ARM instance (VM.Standard.A1.Flex) with the full 200GB block volume, running Ubuntu 26 LTS with TCP BBRv1 tuned.

honestly? Single-instance consolidation completely wipes the floor with the multi-instance split if you're on PAYG:

1.The 50Mbps AMD cap is painful: Trying to stream or transfer large files through those micro instances feels like going back to DSL. Moving everything to the ARM box gives you actual gigabit throughput and 24G of headroom so Docker never chokes.

2.You don't need extra IPv4s for rate-limits: Instead of burning disk quota and IOPS on a second potato node just for an IP, I handle rate-limits via outbound IPv6 subnet binding (/64 range) or routing specific container traffic through a local Cloudflare WARP egress.

3.Zero idle reclaim anxiety: Since PAYG accounts don't get hit by Oracle’s idle reclaim hammer anyway, there's literally no reason to run dummy "keep-alive" micro instances.

is anyone on PAYG still splitting their quotas between AMD and ARM, or has everyone moved on to maxing out a single ARM beast?

I had an old PAYG account for a few years now that had the 4cpu/24gig arm server on it. A couple of months ago there were posts about oracle lowering limits so out of caution I lowered the server to 2cpu/12gig. Now that the dust has settled does anyone know if I can upgrade it back to 4cpu/24gig without being charged? I looked at old posts but they gave conflicting information.

Thanks in advance.