this is a recent venture and i am glad i got it. oracle offers a free virtual private server through their always free tier. i saw a video about it and tried it out. the first steps were a bit intensive as they ask for card info and all that. even then, i was not able to create a virtual machine since their always free tier is saturated to the max. the specs allow for a four core ampere cpu, twenty four gigabytes of ram, and two hundred gigabytes worth of boot volume. you can split it up however you want, but i decided to just max out one server.

along with this free tier, you also get three hundred dollars free credit, so you can spin up other virtual machines as you would like. as long as you stay within the free tier after the thirty days, there is no charge to your account.

but since their always free tier is saturated there is a workaround. upgrade to a pay as you go account. this in itself is free as you just need to add a credit card and have them upgrade your account. but this gives your account priority and pretty much allowed me to spin up my virtual machine instantly. they do charge the card one hundred dollars, but it is to hold the money while they upgrade your account.

the setup was fairly simple, just make sure to stay within the always free tier specs. i used ubuntu as my image, make sure to have the private key as access is through ssh key authentication. choose your boot volume as you would like. once it is spun up, you can access it through the public ip address given.

if there are any issues with containerization and port forwarding, you can flush the iptables configuration in ubuntu with these:

running in OCI, ampere VM (arm64), ubuntu image

sudo iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT
sudo iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT
sudo iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT
sudo iptables -F