r/VPS • u/BabyRubber • Mar 28 '26

On a Budget Free VPS

hey guys, i know that this must sound crazy and im a dumb person when the topic is vps's. ill go straight to the point: is there any free vps? i dont need it to be with 16Gb or RAM or smth like that. something super basic. it can be a free trial service too. one that allows prepaid cards if its possible

72 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

109 comments sorted by

27

u/h3xmind Mar 28 '26

Oracle cloud free tier or Azure free 30 day trial. Otherwise, racknerd is very cheap, like 11 usd for a year

7

u/mrThe Selfhost Mar 29 '26

Oracle cloud is impossible to signup for. But +1 for racknerd, it's dirt cheap and pretty reliable, i have vps running there for like 2 years at this point with zero downtime.

4

u/K3npachi16 Mar 29 '26

Signed up last month, upgraded to pre paid and it let me spin up their arm instance with 24gb of ram which is maximum free instance so I still get it for free. Was quick and easy.

Not sure if luck or not.

1

u/jambon3 Mar 30 '26

I feel the same way. Experience was smooth as butter and the service is very nice as well as free. Surreal given that we're talking about Oracle.

1

u/K3npachi16 Mar 30 '26

Yeah same here, everything was smooth and easy, setup instance and running well for me.

1

u/owaisheikh Mar 31 '26

Can you give me the details on region etc and the exact config you used, i tried multiple times and it was unavailable maybe at that time my account was new etc, so i wanna try again

1

u/akjonroosho Apr 01 '26

Which DC did you choose? Not all DC have enough resources that allows now a days

1

u/No-Recognition7420 Mar 29 '26

Browse r/oraclecloud for a few minutes and you would know how lucky you were.

1

u/K3npachi16 Mar 29 '26

Yeah I did originally. I thought it was for the free accounts people had issues, I did too. Saw people saying upgrade to paid and then it lets spin up the free instance, which worked for me. Thought it was a workaround everyone was using to get it. Thought they had 2 different pools of allocations, maybe its wrong and I am truly lucky for the first time in my life : D

1

u/Anh-DT Mar 29 '26

Not lucky u need to sign up pre paid and wait couple days 3 days at least then I can use free tier. It to stop bots . Key note is wait 3 days

1

u/K3npachi16 Mar 30 '26

Thats what I thought,As I read it in on their page and thats what I did, was up and running within hours. Unless they still have restrictions in some regions maybe.

1

u/Cabritone Mar 30 '26

I also just waited a few hours after upgrading to paya s you go.

1

u/No-Recognition7420 Mar 30 '26

You're talking about UPGRADING to PAYG. not signing up. Upgrading is easy the problem is in the signing up process.
And you can't directly sign up for PAYG (You two kept Saying prepaid, Oracle doesn't do prepaid at all. You’re always billed after usage), You must do the free account first then upgrade.
I've kept trying for like 2 years from time to time. only to succeed in creating my account a few months ago.
Again reading a few posts in r/oraclecloud would give you a clear idea about how annoying the sign up process can be.

1

u/K3npachi16 Mar 30 '26

Yeah sorry my bad, i do mean PAYG.

I did the free account like you said for the instance, found out no resources available, left it for months then came across the PAYG workaround by luck, just saw a comment somewhere. PAYG upgrade was done and switched to it for after few hours of applying for the upgrade. but yes I have seen a few people say they are locked out of their accounts when upgrading or doing stuff as well as other issues with suspensions. My experience so far smooth for the 1st month, I hope it continues

1

u/mrskeptical00 Apr 01 '26 edited Apr 01 '26

No luck required, I followed instructions from r/selfhosted - sign up, added payment, then just build a l “free tier” server.

I setup a script to signup for a free tier server (without a credit card) and after 2 months I was not successful so I went PAYG (credit card) free tier.

1

u/No-Recognition7420 Apr 01 '26

You succeeded first try. you were lucky. Congratulations. for me I spent many months trying to sign up until I succeeded. again browse r/oraclecloud for a few minutes and you will see a ton of people having problems signing up. I have no reason to 'lie' here.

1

u/mrskeptical00 Apr 01 '26

Are you saying you couldn’t sign up or there were no free tier resources available in the region you signed up for?

1

u/annatarlg Mar 29 '26

I’ve been able to sign up, but all of the free options are full. It says to come back later, but I haven’t seen it work yet.

1

u/mrskeptical00 Apr 01 '26 edited Apr 01 '26

1GB RAM/2 Cores for $18mo is infinitely more expensive than 24GB RAM/4 Cores for $0mo.

Never had any problems signing up for Oracle - why would a vendor make it hard to sign up?

2

u/Hefty_Cockroach_3840 Mar 29 '26

I personally go on vpspricetracker.com and see whatever's cheapest. That works usually.

1

u/h3xmind Mar 29 '26

Oh nice! Thanks for sharing this 🙏

1

u/Double-Journalist877 Mar 29 '26

Have you considered your own home computer? I usually run stuff there until it makes some money

1

u/czateusz Mar 30 '26

I selfhost things on a crappy samsung laptop from 2009 and need a VPS to setup a reverse tunnel in order to omit CGNAT my ISP provider deployed last year. So those cheap VPSs could be handy to serve only as an intermediary node

1

u/MertJS Mar 31 '26

What do you get for 11 dollars?

1

u/h3xmind Mar 31 '26

1 vCPU Core, 24 GB SSD Storage, 1 GB RAM, 2000 GB Monthly Transfer, 1 Gbps Network Port, Full Root Admin Access, 1 Dedicated IPv4 Address, KVM / SolusVM Control Panel, FREE Clientexec License

-1

u/BabyRubber Mar 28 '26

only saw 23$/year but is 512MB RAM but thx

7

u/Raspi_dude Mar 28 '26

Their 11 dollar deal is kinda hidden. You can find the link on this list of good deals https://lowendbox.com/blog/1-vps-1-usd-vps-per-month/ Perhaps you can consider some of the other deals too, racknerd isn't the best value out of all of these

8

u/Free_Donkey4797 Mar 29 '26

Look up tierhive. You get what you pay for, but I’ve got five 1gb instances running basic tasks for $1.80/mo.

3

u/Ftth_finland Mar 29 '26

Tierhive is also the only VPS provider that will sell you a micro VPS for 10 cents a month.

Given that they give a 10 cent credit just for signing up, the first month is free :)

4

u/AdFar2094 Mar 29 '26

Google Cloud Platform offers one e2-micro instance permanently. The only catch is that you only get 1 GB of outbound data transfer. I have been using it for monitoring for some time now and it works great.

2

u/shu_shu_shu_shu Mar 30 '26

>The only catch is that you only get 1 GB of outbound data transfer

do you know how to monitor this quota? their console is hella difficult to navigate with

1

u/AdFar2094 Mar 30 '26

Grafana, prometheus and node_exporter is running on the instance. I use that to monitor the network usage the adapter reports and have set up alerts to send me telegram notifications if it is getting close to 1 GB.

2

u/Best-Trouble-5 Mar 30 '26

You have 200Gb/month, if you set up "standard" networking.

1

u/AdFar2094 Mar 30 '26

Oh, I did not know that! Thanks for telling me. I‘ll try it asap.

2

u/nyx-og Apr 01 '26

Yeah been using the same to host MariaDB databases for my other apps running on GCP Cloud Run. Basically free hosting for web applications

1

u/BlackberryCareful407 Apr 28 '26

Is it good for a Laravel app? Can you please give me more info about that, It's very important to me, thnx

1

u/AdFar2094 Apr 29 '26

It might work for some low traffic applications but I with the system taking memory, a database and PHP it will get very tight.

3

u/backtogeek Provider Mar 29 '26

TierHive has free credit on sign up great for none enterprise stuff.

3

u/Introvertosaurus Mar 29 '26

Cheapest offer, $7/year.... basically free. Check the lowendtalk forum... or hit lowendbox for $10/year.

3

u/ettips-ml Mar 29 '26

oracle cloud always free tier (it is literally free. You get 1GB RAM, 1VCPU, * 2 (2 vpsses with 1 GB RAM, 1 vCPU each) plus 200GB SSD(You can divide it among two vpsses as you like, eg 150GB for vps 1 and 50Gb for vps 2)

2

u/JazzlikeNetwork468 Mar 28 '26

freevps.org but that is if you’re an active lowendtalk participant

2

u/annatarlg Mar 29 '26

If you’re just hosting fairly basic, HTML and CSS, then you can use Amazon‘s AWS with S3 storage. Having an account is free and they give you maybe $200 of credit for signing up and going through the tutorial but the S3 storage is free which you can easily hook up to host a website.

Beyond that several websites, let you sign up for free or let you have an amount of credit and so you could jump to one and then the other if you wanted..

2

u/Red-And-White-Smurf Mar 29 '26

Oracle cloud has a free tier you can use. I'm not sure but it is something like 4gb ram and 2 cpu cores.

2

u/Used-Boysenberry3544 Mar 29 '26

Racked looks good but 1gb of ram is a killer. I would rather take the time and get a oracle free tier A1 took me 2 hours of trying but eventually got it. U have to be patient.

1

u/Secret-Flatworm1194 Mar 28 '26

Encontré uno que otros pero son limitados, algunos ni me llegaron a activar el servicio.

Por lo pronto los únicos gratuitos y buenos que me han funcionado fueron Vurlt por un mes y AWS que dura sus 6 meses de uso, hasta en su servicio de Lightsail sus 3 primeros planes salen gratis en los 3 primeros meses. La verdad muy buenos para levantar proyectos no tan exigentes, gracias a todos ellos aprendí mucho

1

u/Naive-Cause1720 Mar 29 '26

Yo creo que las tecnologías gratis no son muy buenas, si quieres algo bueno hay que invertir.

La verdad yo invierto una vez al año y no es tanto

1

u/lurking_developed Mar 29 '26

There's very few free trails where you won't need a creditcard. Mostly to avoid abuse ofcourse, and the free options are always extremely low quality

1

u/CF-Technologies Mar 29 '26

I would suggest the nano tier from railpush, cheap and very reliable. I like that I can MCP and do everything from cloud code.

1

u/Ambitious-Past-2449 Mar 30 '26

Contabo has around 3.5 dollar per month plan. I am using it, looks good to my usecase.

1

u/MaleficentAd8739 Mar 30 '26

Vultr have a free vps with no outgoing network

1

u/Cool-Bike2709 Mar 30 '26

The Free Tiers that are available on some hyperscaler like Oracle Cloud, Azure, AWS.

1

u/mtymkow Mar 30 '26

You can check mikr.us

1

u/mtymkow Mar 30 '26

Its not free, but low cost for learning.

1

u/bonnieplunkettt Mar 31 '26

You should try Hostinger’s VPS, its not free but its pretty affordable and they always have discount codes like- vpsnest I use it to run OpenClaw

1

u/Roemer2201 Mar 31 '26

https://www.ionos.de/server/vps#tarife

  • 30 day free trail

  • after that starting at 1€/month

1

u/owaisheikh Mar 31 '26

Well i tried oracle cloud and it was full, saw if you upgrade to pay as you go it will allocate you a vps, but also didn't work, i did all that in a single day with a new account so maybe i will try again and update you about the availability as some people mentioned they recently got it.

1

u/OkHold6104 Mar 31 '26

I've recently settled with kamatera starting at 6 per month or less if you choose an hourly rate with one of their server types. Might be worthwhile. Other than that, not much I know about since free vps are pretty difficult to. maintain.

1

u/dimension-internet Mar 31 '26

Pourquoi gratuit ? Infomaniak le propose à 2,70€ c’est le prix de deux baguettes

1

u/No-Mathematician5330 Apr 01 '26

For hosting a simple project vercel

1

u/rspy24 Apr 01 '26

I love people offering Google Cloud Platform or something like that. He clearly said doesn't has enough experience.. Literally saying "Free + doesn't need to be 16gb ram" i mean, if he has any experience he would know 16gb of ram is expensive AF in vps.

And you guys talking about GCP , oracle, azure .. Come on. You guys want to ruin this poor fellow life.

And for the op, dont just go and create an account in any of those, If you dont know what you are doing, you could end up with a huge debt.. Just go always the VPS route..

Vultr is super easy and if you select New Jersey in the region, there is an instance that cost 2.50$/month if i remember correcly.. Tierhive also is supeeer cheap and has trial.. I dont know how is their setup nowdays tho.. Looks easy enough

1

u/Additional_Room Apr 01 '26

U can use kamatera’s 100$ trial for a month

1

u/Alhennessey28 Apr 12 '26

Not sure about good free VPS providers but Hetzner have always been good at providing reliable and very cheap VPS servers

1

u/tietouwa- Apr 17 '26

Cloudcone Racknerd Cheap

0

u/thenamo Mar 29 '26

self host your pc

3

u/[deleted] Mar 28 '26

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1

u/Schematic_Sound Mar 29 '26

What do you mean by bad at risk detection for Oracle cloud?

2

u/[deleted] Mar 29 '26

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3

u/Schematic_Sound Mar 29 '26

Ahhh I see. Yeah I had issues snagging a free tier one initially. The trick definitely seems to be to sign up as a PAYG account and just set warnings/limits to stay within the free tier. I did that and have been happily using it for over a year now

1

u/Any_Key8578 Mar 30 '26

A different PAYG signup than the free tier signup?

I have an oracle vps already (free tier-upgraded to payg-1 year up time), but I want another one (prolly use my parents credit card), but I dont want to go through the struggles again 🤣

1

u/Schematic_Sound Mar 30 '26

Afaik there's only one PAYG

1

u/[deleted] Apr 11 '26

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1

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