---
title: "How to get Oracle's 24GB RAM server free - what I call the 'VPS Lottery'. Problem - hard to get. Solution - automated scripts and patience."
slug: oracle-always-free-arm-vps-retry-script
date_published: 2026-01-30T10:00:00.000Z
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 24GB RAM server free - what I call the 'VPS Lottery'. Problem - hard to get. Solution - automated scripts and patience.

![Oracle ARM VPS Monitor](/images/blog/ovrmTool_v2.png)

Oracle provides one VPS instance of 24GB RAM, 4 ARM CPUs, 200GB storage. Forever free. Like an EC2/Azure VM. Only cloud provider that gives this away always free.

Banged my head past one year on the web console - capacity never available.

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.