Dimitri Gielis, the founder of AOP and APEX R&D, wrote about the best and cheapest Oracle APEX hosting – Oracle Cloud Free Tier. The following post shares Gielis’ thoughts, originally shared in his blog, on Oracle Cloud Free Tier.

Best and Cheapest Oracle APEX Hosting

I really have to write about the Oracle Cloud Free Tier as it’s the third time in my career I’ve been blown away by Oracle.

The first time was when I first saw and worked with the Oracle Database, the second time when I saw HTMLDB (now APEX) and today, again, with the announcement of the Free Autonomous Oracle Cloud.

The Free Oracle Tier is a hardcore smackdown on any other cloud offering which includes a virtual machine, database, and development environment!

The Free Oracle Cloud was announced by Andy Mendelsohn at Oracle Open World 2019.

You get a free Oracle Autonomous Database, 2 Virtual Machines (Compute), Storage and other services, including:

There’s nothing like this Oracle offering on the market. The best database in the world, running on amazing hardware and all of this for free. This is not just for APEX Developers, this is for anybody who wants a datastore or virtual machine in the cloud without wanting to manage things themselves.

Jon, from JMJ Cloud, wrote RIP Exadata Express, where do I run my RAD stack now?, the answer today for me is in the Free Oracle Autonomous Oracle Cloud. For many of my customers, I also used the Exadata Express service before, as it was ideal to start developing new Oracle APEX apps. The Free Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud is a better version of what Exadata Express has ever been. I would always start my development in this new free Oracle Cloud offering as it allows you to scale up while you grow.

I really believe everybody should sign-up for this service. As with every new service, the beginning might have some hiccups, but to me, it’s worth starting with this service straight away.

I signed up for the Free Oracle Cloud in multiple regions, and love it so far.

So, I thought to write a series of blog posts on how you can get started:

1. Sign-up for Free Oracle Cloud
2. Setup Autonomous Transaction Cloud (ATP)
3. Connecting with SQL Developer (Desktop) to ATP
4. Connecting with SQL Developer Web to ATP
5. Setup APEX in ATP and create the first APEX app
6. Create a VM Instance (Compute Cloud)
7. Setup a Webserver on the Compute Instance (VM)
8. Setup APEX Office Print (AOP) to export to PDF, Excel, Word, Powerpoint, HTML, and Text
9. Setup Object Storage and use for File Share and Backups
10. Running SQLcl and Datapump from the Compute Instance (VM) to ATP
11. Sending Emails with APEX_MAIL on ATP
12. Create a 2nd Compute Instance and a Load Balancer
13. Final things to take away
14. Message: Your Oracle Cloud Free Trial has expired (but FREE keeps running)
15. Error: The request could not be mapped to any database