this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2026
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Oracle has an always free tier which provides two x64 AMD based virtual machines. They are more or less cloud based calculators in terms of performance, but out of experience I can tell you it is more than sufficient for a few docker containers.
European locations are available.
yeah but then you're interacting with oracle
hard pass
Problem of free tier is just to entice devs in the hope that one of them likes the infrastructure and works at a whale
If you use the free tier too much they close it because you used it too much and exceeded their fair use policy
If instead you don't use it enough, they close it for inactivity
I'm using the Oracle free tier to host pangolin and it is down constantly.
One of my two machines crashed a lot until I moved two Containers to my local server. They are quite small in regards to RAM and at their limit quite fast. Maybe check that.
Also I read somewhere that you could enter credit card details and this kinda upgrades your account in their system though you still do not pay. Something to do with throttling free machines in favor of paid customers.
I thought the ram was fine (the shell is still accessible from their web ui, just non responsive from outside), but I'll double check.
That second possibility sounds like exactly the kind of nonsense I would expect from Oracle.
I tried that and my account got randomly deleted
I run one of these free cloud vms as a reverse proxy for my reverse proxy. It runs rathole, which my homelab rathole client connects to, and it patches traffic through ports 80/443 into my homelab to my caddy container. My home ip is never made public and I don't have to forward any ports at home or worry about traversing NAT. It's a neat setup, but rathole hasn't been updated in some time and I'm looking to replace it with an actively developed alternative like gost or connet.