Free VPS on Oracle Cloud: how Always Free works
Oracle Cloud offers one of the most generous free tiers on the market, with ARM servers of up to 24 GB of RAM and regions on every continent. But "free" comes with some conditions. Here's what you get, how to set it up and what the pitfalls are.
What Always Free includes
The permanent free resources include, among others:
- Ampere A1 (ARM) instances: up to 4 OCPUs and 24 GB of RAM in total, which you can use in a single VM or split across several.
- Two small AMD VMs (1/8 OCPU and 1 GB of RAM each), good for light tasks.
- Block storage of up to 200 GB in total.
- 10 TB of outbound traffic per month.
Limits may change; always check Oracle's official page before planning your usage.
Choosing your home region
Oracle has regions in the Americas, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Oceania. On a free account, Always Free resources live in the home region you pick at sign-up, and it cannot be changed later. Choose carefully: pick a region close to your users, but keep in mind that popular regions often run out of free ARM capacity.
How to create your free VPS
- Create an account at oracle.com/cloud/free. A credit card is required for verification; Oracle places a temporary pre-authorization but does not charge for Always Free resources.
- Choose your home region.
- In the console, go to Compute › Instances › Create instance.
- Under Image and shape, pick Ubuntu and the VM.Standard.A1.Flex shape, adjusting OCPUs and memory within the free limit.
- Upload your public SSH key or download the one Oracle generates.
- Create the instance and connect with
ssh ubuntu@PUBLIC-IP.
To open ports (80, 443, etc.) you must allow them in two places: the VCN Security List in the Oracle console, and the Ubuntu firewall itself, which on Oracle images ships with restrictive iptables rules.
Common problems
"Out of capacity"
This is the most frequent error: there are no free ARM machines available in your region at that moment. Your options are to try at different times, request a smaller configuration or switch availability domains (if the region has more than one).
Sign-up rejected
Many users report rejections without a clear explanation, especially with prepaid or virtual cards. Use a regular credit card and details that match the card exactly.
Instance reclaimed for being idle
Oracle may reclaim Always Free instances that sit idle for several days with very low CPU, network and memory usage. Servers that actually run an application are usually not affected.
What Oracle's free tier is good for
- Learning Linux, Docker and networking at no cost;
- Personal projects, bots and non-critical automations;
- Test and staging environments.
When to move to a paid VPS
If your project starts making money or serves customers, it's worth moving to a paid provider with support and guaranteed capacity. An entry-level paid VPS costs from about $5 per month and removes the capacity uncertainty and sign-up rejections.