I just ran stress -c 1 on mine to keep the CPU usage above the idle threshold until I did enough stuff on it where that wasn't necessary anymore
The documentation clearly states that idle vms on free tier could be reclaimed: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier_topic-Always_Free_Resources.htm#freetier_topic_Always_Free_Resources_Infrastructure
Idle Always Free compute instances may be reclaimed by Oracle. Oracle will deem virtual machine and bare metal compute instances as idle if, during a 7-day period, the following are true: CPU utilization for the 95th percentile is less than 15% Network utilization is less than 15% Memory utilization is less than 15% (applies to A1 shapes only)
So don't create a 4 core 32gb ram vm to run a vpn, and you should be fine :)
They sent me an email saying my account was idle (an always on Wireguard for Plex).
I converted to the Pay As You Go plan, and I was good. And it was still free.
IMO get a <$25/year VPS rather than dealing with Oracle's free tier. Look at sale pricing from RackNerd, GreenCloudVPS, HostHatch, etc.
These seem incredibly cheap, like too good to be real cheap.
If you stick with the known good providers, things usually work out well.
I'm running my Lemmy and Mastodon servers on a VPS I got from GreenCloudVPS during their 9th birthday celebration: 9 cores (old Intel Xeon E5 though), 9GB RAM, 99GB NVMe SSD for $99 every three years (effectively $2.75/month). I haven't had any issues with it, and it's located very close to me so the ping time is <10ms.
I'm running my email server on a similar VPS but with fewer cores on a much newer AMD EPYC processors.
Any companies that have been around 5+ years are usually fine. Hosthatch is the main host I use and I think they've been around 10 or 11 years now. They sporadically have very good sales on Lowendtalk.com
Racknerd has been around for a really long time and has a great reputation.
I'm running a PBS instance (plus networking containers) for 4years now, cc on file for the first 2 years, now on file, but my usecase is operating within the free-forever tier.
My instance has not been deleted by them, though I've rebuilt the multiple times since.
The region you are on might be struggling with capacity issues, I use middle east region and never encountered account/vm deletions (yet). For my case, latency isnt an issue so i dont mind having it ona far away region.
Have had an account for a year and a bit. Never any issues.
Did eventually add a credit card to get an Ampere instance as at least at the time that was the only way to get one.
Could have split up the Ampere into more than one instance but why not have 4 cpu 24gb ram setup.
I don’t do anything too crazy and the 2 other free tier ones I use to mess around with.
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