Oracle Free Tier Setup

Free 24GB 4CPU Server – WordPress Setup with Aapanel

In this video we will be showing you how to set up a WordPress site on Oracle Cloud which is free forever! This is great for those who want to try out WordPress and see how it works and for those who just want a free site. The free tier also allows you to use free SSL certificate and a custom domain. We will be using the Oracle Cloud dashboard to set up our server and we will be using Aapanel to manage our server and install WordPress.

Here are the commands we used in the tutorial:

Run as sudo:
sudo -i

Update server:
yum update -y

aapanel install command:

yum install -y wget && wget -O install.sh http://www.aapanel.com/script/install_6.0_en.sh && bash install.sh

Other Uses for Oracle Free Tier

There are many other great ways to use the free tier, we have links below to some Oracle tutorials below, from game servers to app development!

Oracle Documentation Tutorials:

Node: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/developer-tutorials/tutorials/node-on-ol/01oci-ol-node-summary.htm

Flask and Python: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/developer-tutorials/tutorials/flask-on-ubuntu/01oci-ubuntu-flask-summary.htm

Oracle Developer Blog Tutorials

Minecraft: https://blogs.oracle.com/developers/post/how-to-set-up-and-run-a-really-powerful-free-minecraft-server-in-the-cloud

Counter Strike (CS:GO): https://blogs.oracle.com/developers/post/create-host-your-own-dedicated-counter-strike-global-offensive-csgo-server-for-free-forever

Node: https://blogs.oracle.com/developers/post/installing-node-red-in-an-always-free-vm-on-oracle-cloud

OpenVPN: https://blogs.oracle.com/developers/post/launching-your-own-free-private-vpn-in-the-oracle-cloud

Ghost: https://blogs.oracle.com/developers/post/stand-up-a-free-blog-in-15-minutes-with-ghost-in-the-oracle-cloud

Rocketchat: https://blogs.oracle.com/developers/post/blast-off-to-the-cloud-free-team-chat-with-rocketchat-in-the-oracle-cloud

Why did I decide to try Oracle Cloud Infrastruture?

I decided to opt for Oracle’s free tier after one of our subscribers on YouTube recommended it to me. Usually when someone requests a video from me, it means there is some signficant demand for a tutorial video that hasn’t been quite addressed by existing YouTubers.

I had tried AWS and Google GCP free tier before and never made videos about them because I believed the content would be too technical and not interesting to a wide audience. However, I was wrong.

My attitude towards setting up WordPress sites from the command line did a 180 when I tried out a few free options back in early 2021, and the first one that I tried was WordOps and the second was Cyberpanel. Both these systems provided quick and straightfoward ways to launch high performance WordPress sites with very minimal use of the linux command line. I made the decision to transform these experiences into YouTube videos, and in both cases they have been met with positive feedback.

Naturally, when I first tried Oracle, I tried to use Cyberpanel and WordOps, I found both of these would work on the AMD micro instance easily but gave me trouble on the Ampere ARM instance. I made a YouTube video about Oracle and Cyberpanel using AMD, then someone in the YouTube comments mentioned that they were able to use Aapanel with ARM. This lead me to try it out and I was very impressed with how easy it was to get up and running. Finally, I set up Ampere ARM with Aaapanel and shared this on YouTube. With over 9000 hours of video watch time, the video has been really well received, and is now my most popular post by far!