The Oracle Always Free plan is an excellent option, but I found myself struggling with their firewall settings while attempting to run an Nginx web server. Despite enabling port 80 in both the network security groups and security lists, it was still being blocked for unknown reasons.

Firstly I checked the ufw settings and it was disabled definitely. However, when I looked at the iptable rules by executing sudo iptables -L, I was surprised by lots of existing rules there.

Continue reading →