How I Deployed WordPress on Oracle Free Tier (1GB RAM, 1 vCPU)

How I Deployed WordPress on Oracle Free Tier (1GB RAM, 1 vCPU)
Oracle Free Tier gives you a permanent free cloud server — 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, 50GB storage, forever free. Here’s exactly how I got a
full WordPress blog running on it.

What You Get for Free

Oracle’s Always Free tier includes:

2 AMD compute instances (1 vCPU + 1GB RAM each)
2 Block Volumes (50GB each)
10TB outbound data transfer per month No credit card required after signup, and it never expires. The Stack OS: Ubuntu 22.04
Web: Apache 2.4
PHP: 8.1 + OPcache
Database: MariaDB 10.6
Cache: LiteSpeed Cache plugin Step 1 — Create the Instance
Sign up at https://cloud.oracle.com
Go to Compute → Instances → Create Instance
Choose Ubuntu 22.04 as the image
Shape: VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro (Always Free)
Download the SSH private key
Click Create Step 2 — Open Firewall Ports Oracle blocks ports by default. Go to Networking → Virtual Cloud Networks → Security Lists and add ingress rules for:
Port 80 (HTTP)
Port 443 (HTTPS)
Port 22 (SSH) Also run this on the server to open Ubuntu’s firewall: sudo iptables -I INPUT 6 -m state –state NEW -p tcp –dport 80 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -I INPUT 6 -m state –state NEW -p tcp –dport 443 -j ACCEPT
sudo netfilter-persistent save Step 3 — Tune PHP for 1GB RAM The biggest performance win on a low-memory server is enabling OPcache. Add this to your PHP config: opcache.enable = 1
opcache.memory_consumption = 64
opcache.max_accelerated_files = 4000
opcache.revalidate_freq = 60 This caches compiled PHP in memory — pages load 3-5x faster with zero extra cost. Step 4 — Add a 1GB Swap File With only 1GB RAM, swap is essential to prevent crashes during traffic spikes: sudo fallocate -l 1G /swapfile
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile
echo ‘/swapfile none swap sw 0 0’ | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab Results After tuning, the server handles WordPress comfortably:
Memory usage at idle: ~380MB
Page load time: under 1.2s with LiteSpeed Cache
Monthly cost: $0 The Oracle Free Tier is genuinely useful for personal projects and small blogs. The catch is the setup complexity — but now you
have the exact steps