1. Sign Up for Oracle Cloud
- Go to the Oracle Cloud Free Tier page and click Start for free or Try OCI for free.
- Enter your name, email, and country.
- Choose your Home Region carefully. Pick a region close to you that has high capacity for ARM instances (some regions run out of Ampere capacity faster than others). [1, 2, 3]
- Provide a valid credit card for identity verification. Oracle will place a temporary small authorization hold that is automatically refunded. You will not be billed unless you manually upgrade to a paid account.
2. Create the Free VPS Instance
- Log in to the Oracle Cloud Console.
- Open the navigation menu and go to Compute > Instances.
- Click Create Instance.
- Name your instance.
- Under Image and shape, click Change Image and select your preferred operating system (such as Ubuntu or Oracle Linux).
- Click Change Shape, select Ampere (ARM-based processor), and choose the VM.Standard.A1.Flex shape.
- Use the sliders to configure up to 4 OCPUs and 24 GB of RAM (the maximum Always Free tier limit). You can use this all on one machine or split it across multiple instances.
- Select the option to Save private key and Save public key to download your SSH key pair. Keep these safe; you cannot download them later.
- Click Create.
3. Connect and Configure Firewall
- Wait for the instance state to change to Running and copy its Public IP address.
- Connect via your terminal using SSH:
ssh -i /path/to/private-key ubuntu@your-instance-ip
- Open inbound ports (like 80, 443, or 22) in both your Oracle Cloud Virtual Cloud Network (VCN) Security Lists and your operating system's internal firewall (iptables / ufw) if you plan to host web servers.
Signup at https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
This video may help, I havent watched it
