VPS, bare-metal & dedicated servers

Mapping summary. As of 2026-10-22, the perpetual-free leaders for servers are Oracle Cloud (Always Free: up to 2 AMD micro VMs + a trimmed 2 OCPU/12 GB ARM slice, 200 GB block, 10 TB/mo egress) and Google Cloud (always-free e2-micro VM + 30 GB disk, us-* regions). The big clouds otherwise run time-boxed trial credits: since 2025-07-15 AWS no longer gives new accounts a 12-month EC2 free tier — it's now a $100+up-to-$100 credit "Free Plan" that closes at 6 months; Google gives $300/90 days; Azure $200/30 days. Second-tier VPS providers (Vultr, Linode/Akamai, OVHcloud, Hetzner, UpCloud, Kamatera) run $100–$200 trial credits or a $200/2-month no-commitment trial; note that Vultr's and Linode's trial amounts are now promo-code-dependent and no longer fixed in official docs, and DigitalOcean's old $200/60-day trial has been wound down to a ~$5/90-day standing credit. Startup credit programs (AWS Startups, Azure for Startups, Google for Startups, DigitalOcean Startups, Scaleway) add five-figure credits. Seeds with NO genuine free offer were excluded: Contabo, RackNerd, Aeza, Netcup, ExoScale, Kimsufi; IONOS offers only short trials. Several figures here (OVHcloud, Scaleway, UpCloud, IONOS, Kamatera, Azure/Google startup caps) are marked "verify in-console" because their marketing pages are JS-gated and could not be live-fetched this pass.