How I stopped fighting Oracle's "Out of host capacity" and let a script catch a free ARM server for me

Oracle Cloud's Always Free tier is, quietly, one of the best deals in cloud

computing: 4 Arm OCPUs and 24 GB of RAM, free forever, no trial clock. That's

enough for a real homelab node, a Docker stack, a small k3s cluster, a VPN, or a

game server — running 24/7 without paying a cent or buying hardware.

There's just one problem standing between you and that box, and if you've tried

you already know its name:

ServiceError:

  code: InternalError

  message: Out of host capacity.

Those Arm hosts are in such heavy demand that creating an instance usually

fails. US regions can be dry for hours or days. Even busy EU/APAC regions dip in

and out. Capacity frees up in small, random windows — and whoever happens to be

retrying at that exact second gets it.

I spent the better part of a week refreshing the OCI console like it was a

concert ticket drop. Then I did the obvious thing: I wrote a script to play the

lottery for me, on a timer, and walked away. It worked — it caught me a 4 OCPU /

24 GB A1 instance. So I cleaned it up and open-sourced it.

👉

Issues and PRs welcome — I'd especially love more notification backends

(Telegram, Discord, Slack), smarter backoff, and region/AD presets.

And if it caught you a free server: a ⭐ on the repo helps the next person find

it, and if you feel like it, you can buy me a coffee ☕.

Both totally optional — the tool's free either way.