This is a follow up to my How to get a Google server free forever post.
In the comments selim13 let me know that Oracle was offering a similar deal but even better!
Oracle also gives free VDS instances.
oracle.com/cloud/free/#always-free
Each have 1Gb RAM, 1/8 of CPU core and 50 Gb of storage (witch is rather cool). The biggest limitation of those is bandwidth limit of 10 Mbps,still suitable for lots of tasks. I host some demo web sites and proxy on those.
The servers have twice the RAM that Google offers and more Hard Disk space plus 2 CPU cores compared with 1 on Google Cloud. And you get 10 TB outgoing traffic per month compared with 1 GB on Google! As for the 10 Mbps bandwidth limit, it seems that only applies if you enable a load balancer on your virtual network.
Seems like a great deal anyway. Here's how to do it.
Go here and click Start for free. Then enter your country, name, and confirm your email.
Note: my confirmation email went to spam so check there
Choose a username and password and make sure you choose a region that includes the always free cloud services.
Fill in your address, verify your mobile number, then hand over your credit card details.
Note: unfortunately payment info is required even though they won't actually charge you if you stay on the free tier
Pretty soon they'll send through your access details via email so you can log in. Then you'll get this screen.
Click on Create a VM instance and configure your machine.
I switched from Oracle Linux to Ubuntu Linux but other than that I just kept all the defaults. You can change the boot image by clicking Edit in the Configure placement and hardware section.
IMPORTANT: SAVE THE PRIVATE KEY
You will not get another chance to do this and will not be able to access the server without it
Click Create and your server will spin up!
Repeat this from Create a VM instance to get your 2nd free server.
That's it! You can connect to your new servers via ssh.
Have fun!
Oldest comments (9)
I'm pretty new to this cloud thing, can I deploy docker in this?
Definitely.
Thanks, how does it compare to heroku?
well, Heroku is a fully managed PaaS.
can we have dns rules for free too? In other words, could I start a website on this server and expose it on the interwebz, for free ? (even if the URL has oracle naming or whatever)
Yes you can point any domain to the server's IP address. Check out freenom.com for a free domain. Have fun!
Can we point a subdomain to this kind of instance? I have my .NET Core API running on the host but I can't find any document from Oracle that shows the way to point custom domain to the instance.
Yes you can. It's the same as any other Virtual Private Server. From your domain management you paste in the IP address of your Oracle server instance.
In case you wonder how to setup a webserver and never worked with a firewall before:
docs.oracle.com/en/learn/lab_compu...