Most "free" cloud servers expire after 6 to 12 months. Oracle's has run since 2019 and doesn't. The trade-off is a more complex enterprise console and regional A1 availability, but for a permanent free server with real resources nothing else comes close.

Free tier at a glance

What You Get — Forever

• Compute: Ampere A1 ARM — 2 OCPUs + 12 GB RAM total (halved from 4/24 on 15 June 2026), split however you like (one 2-core/12 GB VM, or two 1-core/6 GB VMs). Plus 2 tiny AMD micro instances (1 GB RAM each).
• Storage: 200 GB block, 20 GB object (S3-compatible), 20 GB archive.
• Networking: 10 TB/month outbound, 1 load balancer, 2 VCNs, 2 public IPs.
• Database: 2 × 20 GB Autonomous Database.
• Other: OCI Vault, 500M monitoring datapoints/month, 100 emails/day.

The cut nobody was told about

Two details about the June 2026 halving are worth more than the headline number.

The quota is hours, not cores. Oracle meters Always Free compute as 1,500 OCPU-hours and 9,000 GB-hours per month, down from 3,000 and 18,000. "2 OCPUs and 12 GB" is what that buys if you run one instance flat out for a whole month — but the budget is yours to spend. A 4-OCPU/24 GB machine running half the month costs exactly the same allowance, which is a better deal for anything bursty: a nightly build box, a weekend project, a batch job. Nothing stops you resizing between the two.

Oracle never announced it. There was no blog post, no email to account holders, and no changelog entry. The documentation was updated and users discovered the change when instances above the new limit stopped working, as InfoQ reported in July 2026. If you are depending on a free tier, this is the argument for re-reading the limits yourself rather than trusting any write-up, including this one — check the date at the bottom of this page against today's.

One open question. Oracle support has told users by email that pay-as-you-go accounts may still run 4 OCPUs and 24 GB at no charge. Oracle has published no confirmation of this, and its documentation does not distinguish between account types, so treat it as unverified rather than as a way to keep the old allowance.

Oracle vs Other Free VPS Options

Oracle's A1 still dominates: 12 GB RAM is 12× Google's always-free e2-micro, and enough to run a Dockerized app, a small Kubernetes cluster, a self-hosted AI inference server, or a private VPN.

Getting Started

Sign up at oracle.com/cloud/free. You'll provide a credit card (identity verification only — a temporary $1–$2 hold, reversed in days; no charge unless you manually upgrade). Choose your home region carefully: it can't be changed later, and US regions like Ashburn and Phoenix tend to have the most A1 capacity.

Create the A1 instance: Compute → Instances → Create Instance → Change shape → Ampere → VM.Standard.A1.Flex, set 2 OCPUs and 12 GB RAM (the current Always Free max — going higher risks auto-termination), add your SSH key, Create. Ready in 1–3 minutes.

# Connect (default Ubuntu user is "ubuntu")
ssh -i ~/.ssh/your-key ubuntu@YOUR_PUBLIC_IP
uname -m        # -> aarch64 (confirms ARM)

Open firewall ports — OCI blocks all inbound by default, in two places. In the console: Networking → VCN → Security Lists → Add Ingress Rules (80, 443, etc.). On the instance:

sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT
sudo netfilter-persistent save

What to Run on 2 Cores + 12 GB

Even halved, 12 GB handles real workloads. A few quick starts:

# Docker (ARM)
curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com | sh
sudo usermod -aG docker ubuntu

# Self-hosted AI with Ollama — Llama 3.2 3B fits easily
curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh
ollama pull llama3.2
OLLAMA_HOST=0.0.0.0 ollama serve   # API on :11434

# k3s (lightweight Kubernetes)
curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | sh -

Models are CPU-only on ARM (no free GPU tier), but Llama 3.2 3B, quantized Mistral 7B, or Gemma 2 2B run fine for low-traffic endpoints. You can also host Node/Nginx web apps or a WireGuard VPN. Once it's up, an agent like OpenClaw can SSH in and run deploy/maintenance tasks for you.

Common Issues

• "Out of capacity" on A1 — the top complaint. Try a less popular region, retry at off-peak hours (2–5 AM UTC), script a poll-and-retry via the OCI CLI, or create smaller 1-core/6 GB instances (easier to allocate).
• Reclamation — Oracle may reclaim an Always Free compute instance it deems idle. Per Oracle’s docs an instance counts as idle only if, across a 7-day period, all three of these hold: CPU utilization at the 95th percentile below 20%, network utilization below 20%, and — on A1 shapes only — memory utilization below 20%. The common advice to “keep a daily cron ping running” does not help: one request a day moves the 95th-percentile CPU figure barely at all. Clearing any single one of the three thresholds is enough, and on a 12 GB A1 the memory criterion is usually the easiest to stay above, because anything genuinely resident keeps it there.
• Bandwidth is the only real billing risk — 10 TB/month is huge, but overages are charged per GB. Set a Budget Alert (Billing → Budgets) if you run high traffic.

Is It Worth It?

Yes, if you want a permanent free VPS with real resources to self-host Docker apps, AI models, or databases, and you can handle OCI's enterprise-grade console. Skip it if you need free GPU compute (there is none), managed databases at scale, or you're a complete beginner who'd be happier on DigitalOcean or Render.

Even after the 2026 cut, no other provider gives 2 cores, 12 GB RAM, 10 TB bandwidth, and 200 GB storage that truly never expires. The signup friction is annoying but worth it — and if A1 capacity is unavailable in your region, a different region or an off-peak retry usually solves it.

When it doesn't — some regions have been out of A1 stock for months, and instances sized above the new 2/12 limit are being terminated rather than resized — the realistic fallback is a small paid VPS. A 1-core box with a couple of GB of RAM costs a few dollars a month and has none of Oracle's capacity lottery. This site runs on a budget host rather than a hyperscaler, and I wrote up what that is actually like to live with — including the parts that are worse — in this JustHost review.