Wanted to write a few words praising Oracle Cloud's VPS free tier.

January 12, 2025

For a grand total of $0 a month, you get:

An Ampere Arm-backed instance with: – 4 cores (technically vCPUs which may be oversubscribed, but I haven't pushed them hard enough to notice a difference) – 24 GB RAM – 4 Gbit (!) networking – 20 TB/month of total ingress/egress traffic

Is that not a screaming deal?

It's out of capacity all the time so you have to play the “install a script to auto-acquire one when it's availalbe” metagame. However, once you have it and you've upgraded to a pay-as-you-go plan, Oracle seems to be pretty good (fingers crossed!) about keeping it working.

Thanks Mr Ellison :)