Table of Contents
What Always Free includes, from the documentation
| Resource | Always Free allowance (Oracle docs, September 2026) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| AMD micro instances | Up to 2 × VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro | Created in one availability domain only |
| Ampere A1 (Arm) instances | 1,500 OCPU-hours and 9,000 GB-hours a month; "equivalent to 2 OCPUs and 12 GB of memory" | One 2-OCPU instance or two 1-OCPU instances |
| Block and boot storage | 200 GB combined | Minimum boot volume 47 GB, so four instances use the whole allowance |
| Outbound transfer | 10 TB a month | Inbound not counted |
| Region | Home region only | Volumes created elsewhere are billed |
| Also included | Autonomous Database, load balancer, networking, monitoring | Outside this review's scope |
| Trial credit | US$300 for up to 30 days in select countries | Separate from Always Free; expires |
Two things make the table different from every other provider on this site. There is no monthly price for the row you will actually use; the A1 allowance is a pool of OCPU-hours and GB-hours, which is why Oracle expresses it as an equivalent. And the free tier is permanent: Oracle's Free Tier page says Always Free services "are available for an unlimited period of time" and that after the 30-day trial "you'll continue to get Always Free services".
What changed: 2 OCPUs and 12 GB
The number that made Oracle's free tier famous was 4 Arm OCPUs and 24 GB of memory, enough for a serious server at no cost. Oracle's Always Free documentation in September 2026 states the A1 allowance as 1,500 OCPU-hours and 9,000 GB-hours a month and adds: "For Always Free tenancies, this is equivalent to 2 OCPUs and 12 GB of memory." This page reports the documented figure. If your existing tenancy shows a larger allowance, that is what you have until Oracle changes it; if you are signing up now, plan around 2 and 12. Even at that size, 2 Arm cores and 12 GB for nothing is more than any paid plan under $10 on this site offers.
The rules: idle reclamation, capacity, one account
Idle reclamation. From the documentation: "Idle Always Free compute instances may be reclaimed by Oracle. Oracle will deem virtual machine and bare metal compute instances as idle if, during a 7-day period, the following are true: CPU utilization for the 95th percentile is less than 20%; Network utilization is less than 20%; Memory utilization is less than 20% (applies to A1 shapes only)." A personal site, a Discord bot or a VPN endpoint for one person can meet all three conditions for a week. Reclaimed means gone, with its boot volume, unless you kept a backup. The documented ways around it are to keep the instance busy or to upgrade to Pay As You Go, which Oracle's free page says keeps the Always Free amounts while billing only usage above them.
Capacity. The same documentation warns that an "out of host capacity" error when creating an instance "indicates a temporary lack of Always Free shapes in your home region", and suggests trying a different availability domain. Free A1 capacity in popular regions is contested, and your home region is chosen at signup and cannot be changed for Always Free resources.
Accounts. Oracle's Free Tier page states that one Free Trial or Always Free account is permitted per person, and that accounts "left idle for 30 days or more may be deemed abandoned and become eligible for suspension or termination". Pay As You Go accounts are, per the same page, subject to different capacity limits than Always Free accounts.
Email. Outbound port 25 is blocked by default across tenancies. Use an email service over its API or port 587.
US regions
Oracle's public regions page lists four commercial US regions: US East (Ashburn), US West (Phoenix), US West (San Jose) and US Midwest (Chicago), plus separate US Government and Department of Defense regions that are not open to the public. Ashburn puts a free server in the same Northern Virginia market as OVHcloud, Hetzner and netcup; Chicago is a central location that few budget providers offer; Phoenix and San Jose cover the West. Your Always Free instances live in whichever of these you chose as your home region at signup.
Beyond the free tier
Paid compute is priced per OCPU-hour and per GB of memory per hour by shape family (Ampere A1, AMD Standard E4 and E5, Intel X9, and others), with block storage, outbound transfer above 10 TB and other services billed separately. Oracle's compute pricing page renders the figures with scripts rather than in the page text, so this review does not quote them; use Oracle's cost estimator for the shape and region you want. In practice, a Pay As You Go account on Oracle is a cloud platform bill, with the usual per-resource line items, not a VPS price. If what you want is a fixed-size server for a fixed monthly amount, the providers in the next section are the simpler purchase.
Getting a free instance and keeping it
- Choose the home region deliberately at signup; it cannot be changed for Always Free resources. Pick the US region nearest your users.
- Create the A1 instance first (2 OCPUs, 12 GB, or split into two) with the default 47 GB boot volume, leaving storage for a second volume or backups. If you get "out of host capacity", retry in another availability domain or at another time; the documentation says it is temporary.
- Add the micro instances only if you need them. Two E2.1.Micro VMs are small, and every instance consumes 47 GB of the 200 GB.
- Open only the ports you use in both the VCN security list and the instance's own firewall; a port must be allowed in both before traffic reaches your service.
- Give the server real work or upgrade. If its 95th-percentile CPU, network and memory will all sit under 20% for a week, decide now whether to keep it busy or move the account to Pay As You Go.
- Back up off Oracle. The idle rule and the abandonment rule both end with the instance gone; keep a copy of anything that matters elsewhere.
Against a paid $3 to $6 VPS
| Option | Monthly | CPU / RAM | Storage | Transfer | US locations | Rules that can end the server |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oracle Always Free A1 | $0 | 2 Arm OCPUs / 12 GB (docs equivalent) | Up to 200 GB | 10 TB out | Ashburn, Phoenix, San Jose, Chicago | Reclaimed if idle 7 days; account abandoned after 30 idle days; one account per person |
| InterServer 1 slice | $3 | 1 core / 2 GB | 40 GB SSD | 2 TB | New York City, Los Angeles, Dallas | None beyond paying the bill; no refund |
| OVHcloud VPS-1 | $5.35 | 2 vCores / 4 GB | 40 GB NVMe | Unlimited | Virginia, Oregon | None beyond paying the bill |
| Vultr vc2-1c-1gb | $5 | 1 vCPU / 1 GB | 25 GB SSD | 1 TB | Nine regions | None; hourly |
| Contabo Cloud VPS 4 | $6.60 | 4 vCPU / 8 GB | 100 GB SSD | Unlimited on 200 Mbit/s | Carlstadt NJ, St. Louis, Seattle | Introductory price ends after 24 months |
On hardware, the free Arm instance beats every paid row. On certainty, every paid row beats it: a $3 server stays up because you paid for it, and nothing in its terms depends on how busy it is. That is the whole comparison, and it is why this site sends people to Oracle for sandboxes and side projects and to the paid hosts for anything with a user who will notice downtime.
Verdict and rating
Oracle Cloud's Always Free tier is a genuine, permanent free server in a real US region, and at 2 Arm OCPUs and 12 GB it is still larger than anything under $10 a month on this site. Everything that keeps it from being a VPS recommendation is written in Oracle's own documentation: the 7-day idle rule, the capacity errors, the one-account and 30-day abandonment rules, the closed mail port, and a paid tier that is a cloud bill rather than a plan. Rating as a VPS: 3.7 out of 5. Credit for the allowance, the four US regions, 10 TB of transfer and the permanence; held down by every rule above and by a documented allowance that is now half what most pages still promise.
Choose Oracle Cloud if you want a free server to learn on, to run a project that is genuinely busy, or to try an Arm build, and you will keep a backup elsewhere. Choose a paid VPS if anyone depends on the server: InterServer at $3 for the smallest reliable option, OVHcloud at $5.35 for 4 GB, Contabo at $6.60 for 8 GB.