Apply for an always free aarch64 VPS (VM instance) from Oracle cloud infrastructure.

1. Prerequisite

An Oracle cloud account, which can be registered on https://www.oracle.com/cloud/.
Note:
1. You need a valid credit card to finish registration.
2. Choose your home region carefully. Some regions may have less functionalities and you can't change home region after registration.
A personal computer with git installed.

2. My Environment

MacBook Air 13 inch with M1 chip.
macOS Monterey 12.1.

3. Apply for an always free aarch64 VPS.

3.1 Apply directly (mostly not working)

After logging in your account, you can apply for a free VPS from the Oracle cloud console directly. Just choose the item below and follow the instructions. You can refer to https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier_topic-Always_Free_Resources.htm#resources for more information about an always free setting.

Note:

For Image and Shape selection, some tutorials say we can apply for two free amd VM instances and also aarch64 (Arm 64) instances. However, in my home region (Singapore), there is no free AMD instances. Only the aarch64 instance, VM.Standard.A1.Flex, is always free labeled. This may because of out of capacity of the specific free instances.

For VM.Standard.A1.Flex, resources no more than ~~4 cores with 24 GB memory~~ 3 cores with 18GB memory are always free. (It seems they have reduced the always free resources)

Don't forget to upload an SSH public key. If you are not familiar with SSH, please google for more materials.

For image selection, I would suggest Ubuntu 20.04 after encountering too many problems on Oracle Linux 8...

3.2 Out of capacity error and solutions

If you are not that lucky, you will encounter an out-of-capacity error when you click create for your VM instance:

To solve this, you can refer to this github project which can periodically submit the application for a VM instance. I got my VM.Standard.A1.Flex instance within one day after running the application script.

Note:

When I was following the github project instructions, the last step is problematic. The periodic execution of my script is not enabled on my MacBook Air m1. Crontab doesn't seem to work on my laptop. Finally, I used Keyboard Maestro to set up the periodic execution of the script. I also tested crontab on an Ubuntu machine, on which it works nice.

4. Postscript

After obtaining your always free VM instance, you can use it as a free server for your personal website. For example, my site https://www.highsund.com is hosted on my VM.Standard.A1.Flex instance which works quite good.

Good luck with your application! 🙂