How to Get a Free Linux Server in the Cloud - Oracle Cloud Free Tier

Here is how you can build, test, and deploy applications on a Linux server in Oracle Cloud - for free. Oracle's always free services include Linux compute virtual machines, databases, block storage, and much more. Find out how to get your free Linux server now!
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#garyexplains

[mskaarupj]

I have been using Oracle cloud for a year now and have not been charged as much as a penny on my credit card. I am very happy with it, much better than AWS. Apart from the periodic shutting down of servers that Gary mentioned (which doesn't happen if you have a paid account) I really don't have any complaints.

[appledore]

I have been using OCI for my personal projects, and it's been a blast.
Highly recommended.

[hotwings]

I'm in South Africa and it's saved me a lot of money on hosting charges. I run a php server on it and it's been great so far. I got free SSL keys as well installed so it's been great

[madmax]

I did this 20 days ago. I provisioned an instance with 12 ARM ampere cores and 72GB of RAM. Ended up using it to seed the most popular linux distro images, hosting a personal price checking application and my almost-empty website. A few days ago it started actually "costing" (it started using up the 250€ you get for free for the first month) so I reduced it to 4 cores and 24GB of ram. From what I understand that level should be maintainable "always-free".

Most annoying part of the experience was the firewall stuff for sure. The OCI tech mess basically has 3 firewalls on top of each other. Iptables (disable that!), the web UI thing (which has non-optional fields that no other rule configurator has), and the firewall-cmd CLI app. After fiddling with all those I finally managed to open some ports to get torrents and my website working.

The ampere cores have VERY rougly 50% of the single-thread perf as a core of 3900X.

P.S.: I learned of the existence of the GUI SSH client MobaXTerm during this. Having used a few clients like putty, solarputty, wsl cli as just ssh interface, I recommend this over any of them. Probably best feature is built-in seamless file browser that can even follow you as you navigate with cd

[Carolus_]

It was an year ago that another youtuber explained the same free tier service from Oracle. I followed the instructions but was not able to apply. I used my email account and a valid credit card that was verified with a charge of 1€ (don't remember the precise amount) but never got an access to my instance. I live in Italy, not in an obscure country. I attempted to contact Oracle support but without success, no answer from their side. I'll try again now after your video but I'm skeptical.

[chuckcrizer]

ALWAYS take advantage of these promos! IBM did one and I had free mainfame access for a year. Invaluable experience.

[jeasalb]

I don't trust Oracle in "free". See recent actions from Oracle regarding Java...

[leodsouza]

Getting Payment issues while signing up

Error processing transaction

We're unable to complete your sign up. Common sign up errors are due to: (a) Using prepaid cards. Oracle only accepts credit card and debit cards (b) Intentionally or unintentionally masking one's location or identity (c) Entering incomplete or inaccurate account details. Please try again if this applies to you. Otherwise, contact Oracle Customer Service.

[johnc]

I've been using the Always Free Tier for over a year now. I've set up one instance running Ubuntu Server as my main VPN server using Wireguard. All my mobile device data traffic (except phone calls) goes through this VPN. The only issue is that every two months they "reclaim" idle resources by stopping server instances they deem to be "idle". Despite ALL my data going through this server 24 hours a day, it still doesn't use enough resources to avoid being considered as "idle". It's not a big deal because they'll give you 7 days notice, then all you have to do is the restart the server and everything's back to normal; they don't actually delete any of your resources.

The Always Free tier (at least with the VM.Standard.A1.Flex shape) gives you:
- Up to 4 server instances (limited because each one needs at least a 47GB boot volume, and there are a maximum of 200 GB allowed).
- 4 CPUs total.
- 24 GB memory total.
- 1 GB/s bandwidth.
- 10 TB/month outbound data transfer.
- Unlimited inbound data transfer.

And I've never been charged for anything.

[joey]

Thank you for this. I was paying $30 a year for a racknerd VM instance with only marginally better resources. I'm going to transition my stuff to this because it's just easier to not have to worry about having to pay for server renewals and things like that.

[pothi]

For users in India, the main issue is in charging of credit cards that have specific requirements in India. I converted my free tier account into PAYG account (pay as you go) and used some paid services. Oracle is yet to charge for that usage even after over 6 months. I stopped using the paid and free services since then. I don’t want to risk keeping important resources over there. Anyway, it applies only to users in India and for individual users. Business customers may not face such issues as there are different ways to pay as a business from India and there are less restrictions while paying as a business.

[ryanwammons]

Will be using in the college Linux course I'm teaching so my students don't have to worry about getting credits for one of the big three cloud providers. Thanks!

[barrionomia]

its requesting a two step validation system in which one is forced either to download an app on the cel (thus sacrificing all your info) or using a FIDO authentication key... unfortunate

[ernstoud]

Excellent for running your own iPerf3 server. I have the Ampere 4 core, 24Gb RAM, 4Gbps ethernet Ubuntu server. Works a lot more reliable than an Ookla SpeedTest.

[charlykjoseph]

Past 1 year i'm trying to register it with different Email id's and different credit cards . But always the payment it fails

[BandanazX]

The Ampere offering is the only way to fly: 4 cores, 24GB RAM, 200GB storage, and 4Gbps

[morfer]

There's a catch... They will reclaim the resources if your usage don't match their terms. But you can start the VMs again, after they reclaim it.

[tatanyave]

I had it for about a month. When I came back the instance is gone. I selected always free image and arm processor. Was going to start some lessons on ncurses. Always back up your data.

[hanspolders]

Thanks for the video, I have very bad experience with the "always" free tier at oracle.
It was was all fine for 6-7 months or so. However suddenly I got a mail that my account was deleted.
That was that. No way to reactivate it, 0 response from support.

[thomaswerner]

Hey Gary,

that's pretty cool. I've used AWS and Azure before. But this is a nice reason to play with the Oracle Cloud as well.