Lot of sales for 4th of july (and ongoing ones) where you can pay $10-$14 for a YEAR of a small cheap VPS. Usually only has 1GB of memory, but that’s plenty to play around with and learn. If nothing else, a good cheap ipv4 you can use for some port forwarding. There are lots of options, but I’ve used racknerd and ethernetservers which have been fine.
I have my own server at home, but I bought two small ones to start learning Ansible with in a risk free way. Eventually plan to redo my main server with a complete Ansible setup, really want to hop on that “infrastructure as code” train.
I thought the same thing when I heard about the free tier, but you have to remember that oracle cloud is distant 4th in the cloud race so they are trying to just get people to use their capacity. Oracle and free are rarely used in the same sentence, but I’ve had an instance running for about a year with minimal problems.