Provider, Oracle Cloud (OCI)

Oracle Cloud's Always Free tier includes two ARM-based VMs with 24GB RAM combined, overkill for Olympus, and free indefinitely. The catch: ARM (aarch64), so verify Olympus image multi-arch support.

Always Free instance

Up to 4 OCPUs (ARM Ampere A1)
Up to 24 GB RAM
200 GB block storage
10 TB egress

If your account is set up correctly, this costs $0.

Setup

Create an Always Free Ampere A1 instance with Ubuntu 22.04.
SSH in (Oracle's default user is ubuntu).

Open ports 80 and 443:

sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT
sudo netfilter-persistent save

Also open in the Oracle Cloud Security List (web UI).

Install Podman.
Use Daedalus's Direct SSH path.

ARM caveat

Olympus's container images are built multi-arch. Verify by inspecting the manifest:

docker manifest inspect ghcr.io/olympusoss/athena:latest
# Look for "architecture": "arm64" entries.

If multi-arch isn't published yet, build locally on ARM:

cd athena
docker buildx build --platform linux/arm64 -t my-athena .

When to use

You want zero-cost hosting indefinitely.
ARM is fine for your workload (it is, for Olympus).
You're comfortable with Oracle's UI (which is less friendly than DigitalOcean).

Caveats

Oracle's free tier has occasional capacity issues (instances may not be available in some regions at peak).
Account verification requires a credit card.
Performance is reasonable for ~1k MAU but ARM-specific bugs in dependencies may surface.