For almost two years, this project has been giving away names. A name is a powerful first step, but anyone who has ever taught a friend to build for the internet knows the question that comes right after it: now what do I point it at? A borrowed laptop works until it goes to sleep. The big clouds have free tiers, and the free tiers ask for a credit card, which is exactly the thing a student most likely does not have.
So today we are doing the thing we have wanted to do since day one. SEUS Light Servers are small virtual machines on the real internet, IPv6-only, and free. Not free for three months, not free with a card on file: free for as long as you want them, paid for in participation instead of money.
What you get
Every light server is a small but real computer with a public address:
- One shared vCPU, 512 MB of memory, and 5 GB of storage, enough for a blog, a practice mail server, a bot, or a small flock of containers;
- A real, static IPv6 address, with reverse DNS you can edit yourself in the console;
- Your choice of system image: Debian, Ubuntu, Alpine, and a couple of minimal ones built for container experiments. Reinstall from the same page whenever you break something, which you will, and which is the point;
- A free domain that fits it perfectly: add one AAAA record in the console and your PFS name resolves straight to your box.
The honest fine print
Two things to know before you request one.
First, these machines are IPv6-only. There is no IPv4 address, and quite a few home networks, campus networks, and phone carriers still cannot reach an IPv6 address directly. For a website, a proxy in front of the box solves it for most visitors; for SSH, connect from a network with IPv6 or through a tunnel. We could have waited until we could afford IPv4 too, but IPv6 is where the internet is actually growing, and an IPv6-only box is the most honest way to learn it.
Second, they are small and shared. A noisy neighbor can slow your disk, and the Acceptable Use Policy applies to servers exactly the way it applies to domains. Do not run anything that must never go down, and do not look for loopholes in that sentence.
How free forever actually works
Here is the part that makes people suspicious, so let us say it plainly: the server is free, and it stays free. What we ask for instead of money is participation.
Each month, a light server needs a small number of community points to renew. You earn them in SEUS Community by doing the things the community already runs on: posting a build log with the #PFS tag, answering a newcomer's DNS question, or writing up the config that finally worked after a night of failures. The bar is deliberately low, roughly one decent post or a handful of helpful replies a month. Hit it and renewal is automatic; you will not even see it happen.
Miss a month because life happened, and nothing dramatic occurs. The server is paused, not deleted. Your disk and configuration wait for up to 60 days, and the moment your balance recovers, the same machine comes back exactly as you left it. Nobody will ever be asked for a payment method, because there is nothing to pay for.
Why run it this way? Because these boxes cost real money every month, and the community is the engine that keeps everything else here alive. Every build log and every answered question pulls the next learner in, and that is what sustains the whole project. Your activity is the subsidy, and honestly, it is the kind we prefer.
Who this is for
Students and junior developers, mostly. This is the right size for a first real Linux session, for breaking SSH at midnight and fixing it, for learning what a firewall actually does, for your first Docker containers, and for adding DNS records and watching them resolve. There is a gap between reading about networking and typing ip -6 route on a machine of your own, and every teacher we have talked to says the gap is the whole course.
It is also for the person we think about most: a future researcher who does not know it yet. You cannot study what you cannot touch. If a free box with a real address lowers that barrier for a few hundred people this year, that is precisely what this project exists for.
How to get yours
- Sign in to the domain console, or create an account and verify your GitHub account (at least two years old), same as for domains.
- Open the new Light Servers page and request a box with the image you want. Requests open October 22, 2026. The first batch is small; if the queue is full, it moves as boxes are released, so check back.
- Point your domain at it. Add the AAAA record in the console, watch it resolve, and your name finally lives somewhere.
Your community account is where the points live; the console reads the balance automatically at each monthly renewal, so there is nothing to submit and nothing to remember.
Thank you
These servers exist because this community kept showing up: reporting abuse within hours, answering the same DNS question for the hundredth time without complaining (mostly), and building things we would never have thought of. If you take a box home, write down what you did with it and post it in SEUS Community with the #PFS tag. That post is the whole business model, truly. And if PFS keeps being useful to you, a star on GitHub helps the next learner find us.