Are you looking for a free test server to host some smaller projects on or to use as a playground environment?

There aren't too many free VPS options out there unfortunately And, often, if they are free, they may not even be worth the effort to set up.

Oracle provides a pretty decent cloud VPS server that I've been using as a test server for a couple of months now. I recommend you give it a try!

This guide walks you through how to set up an Oracle Cloud free server in their GUI and then how to connect to it with Cleavr as a 'Custom Server'.

[UPDATED] 10th April - 2022

Free Oracle Cloud VPS is now supported out of the box in Cleavr.

You can create an Oracle Cloud Account as explained in Step 1. Now create a VPS profile in Cleavr and you're all ready to provision a new free Oracle Server. To connect you Oracle Cloud account to Cleavr you may refer to our documentation

Head over to Oracle Cloud and create a new account.

Expect to have to provide a Credit Card in order to create an account. As long as you stick to the free options they provide, you shouldn't need to worry about your card getting charged. They do a good job at tagging which resources are free eligible.

One more thing to mention, expect to get contacted via email and phone by an Oracle rep. Believe me, they'll do their best to try to get in contact with you

Once signed up, on the getting started page, launch a new VM instance.

On the **Image and shape** card, click **edit You'll need to select the **Canonical Ubuntu: 20.04** instance.

Add your SSH key (you'll need to SSH into the new server in the next steps).

Finally, click on **Create This will provision the server on Oracle's side.

Once the Oracle server has an assigned Public IP Address, copy the IP to the clipboard and header over to Cleavr.

On the dashboard, click the **Create** button and select server.

For VPS Profile, select **Custom Server

Give the server a name and paste the **IP Address** into the corresponding field.

Copy the command to run as root on the server and open up your terminal and SSH into the server.

ssh ubunutu@

The default server user with Oracle Cloud is

ubuntu. You cannot access as

root at this point. Once you conenct to the server, you can switch to root using the following command.

sudo su root

Now, paste in the command and run it.

Back in Cleavr, provision the server.

Cleavr will add further dependencies to the server and get it all ready to host your apps.


We've seen some odd behavior that blocks port 80 connects, even when enabling it via the Oracle UI and in UFW. This often seems to really come into play after a server reboot.

Thanks to our community members, we've found that installing firewalld on the server and opening Port 80 works to resolve the issue.

On the server terminal via SSH, run the following commands one-by-one:

apt install firewalld firewall-cmd --zone=public --permanent --add-port=80/tcp firewall-cmd --reload

You're now all setup to use Cleavr to manage your free Oracle Cloud server and start adding sites and deploying web apps!

Sign up for a 5-day free trial of Cleavr Pro. No credit card required until you decide to subscribe.Sign up for free

Server and web app deployment management for doers. 💡 🏗

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