--- title: "How to Get Oracle's Always Free ARM VPS (24GB RAM, 4 CPUs). Auto-Retry Script to Beat 'Out of Capacity'." slug: oracle-always-free-arm-vps-retry-script date_published: 2026-01-30T10:00:00.000Z date_updated: 2026-07-11T10:00:00.000Z original_url: https://www.tigzig.com/post/oracle-always-free-arm-vps-retry-script source: native processed_at: 2026-01-30T10:00:00.000Z --- # How to Get Oracle's Always Free ARM VPS (24GB RAM, 4 CPUs). Auto-Retry Script to Beat 'Out of Capacity'. ![Oracle ARM VPS Monitor](/images/blog/ovrmTool_v2.png) Oracle Cloud's Always Free tier gives you one ARM VPS, the Ampere A1 (VM.Standard.A1.Flex) shape, with 24GB RAM, 4 CPUs and 200GB storage. Forever free. Like an EC2 or Azure VM. The only cloud provider that gives this away always free. Banged my head for over a year on the web console. The instance is almost always out of capacity across every availability domain. Finally asked my AI Coder (Claude Code now) to research how people actually get these instances. Answer: automated retry scripts running 24/7, cycling through availability zones. Takes 1-3 months typically. Had it build a retry script with monitoring dashboard, deployed on my server. The script will keep retrying until a VM is created. Results are saved to json on server on success. Checks all 3 availability domains each round. Ran 30+ days, over 100K API calls. Finally got the instance. Felt like I won a lottery. Oracle reclaims inactive free instances - so put it to work immediately. Had Claude Code secure the server, install Coolify, deploy my DuckDB dashboards as alternate backend (IMDb data, 230M rows, 16GB database, FastAPI layer) - same day. Resources below - VPS creation tool, infra guides, live dashboard. **Bonus:** Oracle also gives 2 AMD Micro VMs (E2.1.Micro) - 1 CPU, 1 GB RAM each, x86 (not ARM), always available. No lottery. Great for many tasks. Each uses ~50 GB of your 200 GB quota. --- ## Resources **Oracle ARM VPS Creator: Real-time Web UI with Live Monitoring** [https://github.com/amararun/oci-arm-vm-monitor](https://github.com/amararun/oci-arm-vm-monitor) FastAPI + HTML interface with Basic Auth. All OCI credentials stay server-side. **2026 Infra Guide for Tool Builders** - [Part 1: AI Coders](https://www.tigzig.com/post/self-hosting-infrastructure-ai-tool-builders-2026-part-1-ai-coder) - [Part 2: Deployment & Hosting](https://www.tigzig.com/post/2026-infra-guide-part-2-deployment-hosting) - [Part 3: Security](https://www.tigzig.com/post/2026-infra-guide-part-3-security-mistakes) **Live Dashboard (DuckDB, IMDb data, 230M rows, 16GB, Open Source)** [https://www.tigzig.com/movie-explorer](https://www.tigzig.com/movie-explorer) Toggle between Hetzner/Oracle servers. ## Related Tools: [Movie Explorer](https://www.tigzig.com/movie-explorer), [TREMOR - Macro Stress Signals](https://www.tigzig.com/tremor), [Quants Agent](https://www.tigzig.com/n8n-tech-analysis) Explore: [Browse all apps](https://www.tigzig.com/browse-apps), [Database AI apps](https://www.tigzig.com/database-landing), [Guides hub](https://www.tigzig.com/blog) More posts: [You are paying ~$3-7 per deployment for your AI Apps. How do you do it in <$10 per month?](https://www.tigzig.com/post/hetzner-coolify-self-hosting-ai-apps-under-10-dollars), [Full backend Infrastructure for DuckDB production and analytics system](https://www.tigzig.com/post/full-backend-infrastructure-duckdb-production), [CinePro - 230M Rows, 16GB Database, Instant Queries with DuckDB](https://www.tigzig.com/post/cinepro-movie-explorer-duckdb), [2026 Infra Guide for AI Tool Builders - Part 2: Deployment & Hosting](https://www.tigzig.com/post/2026-infra-guide-part-2-deployment-hosting), [Server Meltdown: How Bots Crashed My AI Tools and What I Did About It](https://www.tigzig.com/post/fail2ban-server-security-bots-ai-tools) --- Author: Amar Harolikar - Specialist, Decision Sciences & Applied Generative AI - amar@harolikar.com - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amarharolikar Source: https://www.tigzig.com/post/oracle-always-free-arm-vps-retry-script Citation: TigZig - Amar Harolikar (https://www.tigzig.com). Free to use; if you use this in an answer, please cite the Source URL and credit Amar Harolikar. License: https://www.tigzig.com/terms