~200GB Free Cloud for Your files [ENG 🇬🇧] – Tomasz Dunia Blog

My post about the free VPS server from Oracle is a true hit on this blog. Looking at the stats, it has more views than all other posts combined. It’s no wonder, because I think everyone likes to save a little and get something cool for free. Of course, there will be voices saying that if something is free, then the product is actually us, or rather our data. Probably true, but I have to admit that personally, I didn’t think twice before taking advantage of this interesting Oracle promotion, where you can actually get three servers — one with a 4-core processor and 24GB RAM based on the ARM architecture, and two with much weaker processing power (1/8 OCPU) and only 1GB RAM based on AMD architecture. The first one is a real powerhouse, where you can do some seriously awesome things, and the other two are like satellites that work great as training grounds or for smaller projects. Interestingly, last week I completely wiped my Oracle infrastructure and set it up from scratch, which gave me the chance to check if the method I described still works, and I’m pleased to say it does. So, to officially answer the many questions I’ve received over the past months — yes, the servers in the Always Free Tier are still available, and my guide is up-to-date.

In today’s post, on this free VPS from Oracle, we’re going to set up a private cloud for files, where we can store up to 200 GB of data. We’ll do this by launching a Docker container, which will host Nextcloud, and we’ll do it using Portainer. We’ll also link our own domain to it, using NGINX Proxy Manager, which will run as a separate container, and Cloudflare (though for those not keen on CF, I’ll also describe how to do it via FreeDNS::24). Of course, we’ll also take care of encrypting the communication, i.e., SSL/HTTPS, which we’ll achieve through NGINX Proxy Manager using a Let’s Encrypt certificate.

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