Oracle's Free 4-Core 24GB Server: From Signup to Running

Oracle’s Always Free plan gives you a 4-core, 24 GB ARM server every month — no expiry, no charge. The same specs cost $80–100/month on AWS. This post strings together signup, pitfalls, instance creation, and keep-alive.

What You Get

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Oracle’s free tier is called Always Free. Not a trial, not a limited-time promo.

The core resource is an ARM virtual machine:

Oracle meters by hours: 3,000 OCPU hours + 18,000 GB memory-hours per month, exactly enough to allocate one 4-core 24 GB machine. It also comes with 2 small AMD x86 machines (about 1 core / 1 GB each) to use as spares or for light tasks.

Three Things to Prepare Before Signing Up

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A physical credit card: Visa or Mastercard logo — China Merchants Bank, ICBC, Bank of China, and SPDB all work. Virtual and prepaid cards are not accepted. About $1 is charged for verification when you bind the card and refunded within a few days.

An email address and phone number: a mainland +86 number works as-is.

Proxy off, switch to your phone’s hotspot: Oracle checks whether your IP’s origin matches your credit card’s issuing country. A proxy turns your IP into another country’s, and verification fails outright.

A Checklist for Signup Failures

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A red exclamation mark after submitting most likely means the IP origin, the card’s issuing country, and the billing address don’t line up.

The rules when registering with a Chinese credit card:

• IP from China (phone hotspot, no proxy)
• A Visa/Mastercard issued in China
• A Chinese billing address

When the exclamation mark appears, check item by item:

• Is the VPN/proxy fully off?
• Are you on a phone hotspot rather than WiFi?
• Is the card physical (not virtual, not prepaid)?
• Is the billing address in China?
• Tried the same card more than twice? Stop — switch cards or wait 2–3 days

This is the community’s reverse-engineered risk-control pattern; Oracle has never said anything officially. But working through this checklist does raise the success rate considerably.

The Region Can’t Be Changed Later — Stop and Think It Through

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During signup you pick a “Home Region”, and it cannot be changed afterward.

Popular regions have brutal competition for ARM instances; free accounts rarely grab one.

Running a server isn’t gaming — latency isn’t the top priority; actually getting the machine is. Phoenix recommended.

The Signup Process

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Once you’re ready, open a private browser window.

1. Open the signup page: go to oracle.com/cloud/free and click the start-for-free button
2. Fill in basic info: country China, name in pinyin, your email, then verify via the confirmation link
3. Set password and account type: 8+ characters with upper/lowercase, digits, and special characters; Customer type: Individual
4. Pick the home region: choose US West (Phoenix) from the dropdown
5. Fill in the address: the English address matching your credit card billing

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Street: 123 Renmin Road
City: Beijing
State/Province: Beijing
Postal Code: 100000
Country: China

6. Enter your phone number: +86 plus your number, receive the code
7. Bind the credit card: enter card details and submit. A $1 pre-auth, refunded within a few days

Landing on the welcome page means success. A red exclamation mark means work through the checklist above.

Creating the ARM Instance

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Log in to the console and go to Compute → Instances → Create Instance.

The key choices:

• Image: Ubuntu 22.04, the one tagged “Always Free Eligible”
• Shape: VM.Standard.A1.Flex, set to 4 cores / 24 GB
• Storage: custom boot volume, 200 GB
• SSH key: upload the .pub public key file

No SSH key? One command in a Mac/Linux terminal:

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ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -f ~/.ssh/oracle_key

On Windows, use the ssh-keygen bundled with Windows Terminal, or PuTTYgen. Upload the generated oracle_key.pub.

Click Create, wait a few minutes, and once the status turns green it’s up and running.

What If It Says Out of Capacity

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Seeing “Out of Capacity” isn’t your mistake — the region’s ARM pool is temporarily full.

Manual refreshing has a very low success rate. The community has auto-grab scripts that retry every few dozen seconds and create an instance the moment capacity frees up:

• GitHub Actions edition (runs on GitHub, no computer to leave on): oci-free-arm-instance
• Python edition: oracle-freetier-instance-creation

Usually succeeds within hours to a few days. Just let the script run.

Keep-Alive: Don’t Let the Machine Get Reclaimed

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Oracle checks for idle instances. If CPU, memory, and network utilization stay below 20% for 7 straight days, it may reclaim the machine (per the latest official policy; the threshold has been adjusted historically).

The simplest approach — a lightweight request on a cron timer:

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# Generate a bit of CPU and network activity every hour
* */1 * * * curl -s https://www.oracle.com > /dev/null

The community also has scripts like NeverIdle, but third-party scripts can break — if Oracle updates its detection, they may stop working.

Once you’re running real services on the server, you won’t need any of this. The ZRAM compression setup (https://blog.baifan.site/en/zram-memory-optimization-linux/) is also practical for low-memory situations and pairs well with it.

Is It Worth the Time

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A free 4-core 24 GB server is plenty for personal projects and small teams. Signup itself isn’t complicated — physical credit card + proxy off + phone hotspot + Phoenix region, and you’ll likely pass on the first try.

The only thing that takes patience is waiting for ARM capacity. Let a script keep watch instead of refreshing yourself.

For how to configure the server and what to install once you have it, see the VPS scene glossary (https://blog.baifan.site/en/vps-glossary-jargon-guide/) and the self-hosted AI API pipeline (https://blog.baifan.site/en/self-hosted-ai-api-pipeline/).