How to get Oracle's 24GB RAM server free - what I call the 'VPS Lottery'. Problem - hard to get. Solution - automated scripts and patience.
Published: January 30, 2026
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 FastAPI + HTML interface with Basic Auth. All OCI credentials stay server-side.
2026 Infra Guide for Tool Builders
Live Dashboard (DuckDB, IMDb data, 230M rows, 16GB, Open Source) https://www.tigzig.com/movie-explorer Toggle between Hetzner/Oracle servers.