Your school partners with Fondation Simafri
Your school confirms your enrollment itself: all you do is name it in your request.
Simafri VPS for Students
Free VPS for students: a server of your own to learn and deploy
Simafri VPS for Students is a free VPS for students, offered for 10 months by Fondation Simafri. A VPS Pro 1 with root access, a backup every night and Full-Stack Assistance: everything you need to put your coursework, your thesis and your portfolio online, on a real machine.
Free for 10 months
VPS Pro 1 1 vCPU, 2 GB, 20 GB
Full-Stack Assistance included
The offer
What you receive
Fondation Simafri
Simafri VPS for Students
Freefor 10 months
- VPS Pro 1: 1 vCPU, 2 GB of memory, 20 GB of storage
- Full-Stack Assistance included
- Offered by Fondation Simafri
This offer is subject to available stock.
Included in your VPS
What your free VPS comes with on day one
Root access over SSH
Connect with your own key, on a port of your own, and install what your courses call for: Node.js, Python, PHP, PostgreSQL or a bot.
Xeon processor, ECC memory
Your school projects run on the same Intel Xeon processors and error-correcting memory as our customers' production servers.
Fast storage, in a mirror
Your code and your data sit on datacenter NVMe drives kept in a mirror, and their integrity is checked constantly.
A copy of everything, each night
Experiment freely: an encrypted copy of the whole server leaves the machine every night, and the last seven stay available.
HTTPS from the first visit
Show your project to your professors or to a recruiter at a secure address: the certificate is issued and renewed for you.
Flood protection
Anti-DDoS filtering stays active on the network, to keep flood attacks away from your final presentation.
An eye on availability
Our monitoring checks day and night that your server answers, and the alert reaches us first.
Full-Stack Assistance
Stuck on a setting, a query or a bug? Tell us what you see: we find the cause and explain the fix.
Full-Stack Assistance
When you get stuck, we find the cause and show you the way
A lab assignment, a group project or a thesis all bring questions no course covers. Full-Stack Assistance is part of your free VPS: tell us what you are seeing, we look for the cause, whether it sits in the system, a database or your own code, and we explain what to do. The server stays in your hands, and you will know how to solve it the next time.
My course project runs on my laptop, but not on the server.
We compare the two environments, spot the version or the setting that differs and tell you what to change.
My API is timing out, the day before my final presentation.
We trace where the requests lose their time and point you to the query or the setting to correct.
Four of us are deploying the same group project.
We suggest how to separate accounts, permissions and folders, so that each of you puts your part online without touching the others.
I have never installed a database on a server.
We recommend the engine and the access rules that suit your project, and you put them in place with our directions, one step after another.
Eligibility
Two ways to get your free VPS
You have the GitHub Student Developer Pack
GitHub has already verified your student status: add your GitHub username to your request.
Any school can become a partner
Its administration writes to us at fondation@simafri.com, and we are glad to open the partnership, for you and for your whole class.
The program opens a limited number of places. This offer is subject to available stock.
What you do with it
A free VPS for your coursework, your thesis and your portfolio
A school project takes on another dimension once it runs somewhere other than your laptop: online, at a real address, ready to be shown. Simafri VPS for Students offers you that server for 10 months, on the hardware of our VPS Pro range.
Your coursework and lab assignments
A web application, a REST API, a bot or a networking lab: you deploy it yourself, you read the logs when an error shows up, and you understand what happens on a Linux machine, from the system up to the HTTPS certificate.
Your thesis and capstone project
The prototype behind your thesis, the database of your capstone project or the service your professors will test all run on a server copied every night and shielded from flood attacks, right up to presentation day.
Your portfolio and first deployments
A portfolio online, a demo to send to a recruiter, a first automated deployment from your GitHub repository: you walk into interviews with projects that run, and hands-on experience of a real server.
How it works
How to get your free VPS, in 3 steps
-
You make your request
Through the form on this page: how you qualify, your school and your program, and the project you want to run.
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The Foundation confirms your status
Your partner school confirms your enrollment, or your GitHub Student Developer Pack stands in for it. The Foundation then gets back to you.
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Your server goes online
You add your public SSH key in your my.simafri.com account. The connection command appears there as soon as the server is live.
After the 10 months
The end of the gift
We let you know thirty days before the gift ends. You can continue at the regular rate; otherwise, your data is returned to you.
The server in detail
Inside your VPS Pro 1
Simafri VPS for Students gives you a genuine VPS Pro 1: the size we sell to our customers, on the same components.
- Compute
- 1 vCPU on an Intel Xeon server processor
- Memory
- 2 GB of ECC memory, which repairs errors as they occur
- Storage
- 20 GB on datacenter NVMe SSDs, in a mirror
- Integrity
- A checksum on each block of data
- Backups
- One encrypted copy per night, outside the machine, seven nights of history
- Network
- Anti-DDoS filtering, active at all times
- Systems
- Debian, Ubuntu, Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux
- Growth
- Ready to move to a larger VPS Pro, with nothing to reinstall
Frequently asked questions
Your questions about Simafri VPS for Students
How long does the free VPS last?
For 10 months: Fondation Simafri covers the VPS Pro 1 for that whole period. Thirty days before the gift ends, we write to you: you carry on at the regular rate, or you get your data back.
What are the specifications of the free VPS?
It is a VPS Pro 1: 1 vCPU, 2 GB of memory and 20 GB of NVMe storage. Root access, one encrypted backup per night, anti-DDoS filtering, availability monitoring and Full-Stack Assistance all come with it.
Who can request the free VPS for students?
Students whose school partners with Fondation Simafri, which confirms their enrollment, and students who have the GitHub Student Developer Pack, whose status GitHub has verified. The number of places is limited. This offer is subject to available stock.
Can my school become a partner of the Foundation?
Yes, gladly: its administration writes to us at fondation@simafri.com, and we set up the partnership together. All of its students can then request their VPS.
Who helps me if I get stuck?
Full-Stack Assistance, included in your VPS. Ask your question or show us what you see; we look for the cause, from the operating system to your code, and we explain what to do. You apply the solution yourself, which is also how you learn.
Can I run my thesis or capstone project on it?
Yes, it is one of the uses it is designed for: the prototype, the database or the service you present to your professors stays online, with a backup every night.
Which Linux distribution can I choose?
You have four to choose from: Debian, Ubuntu, Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux. Root access then lets you add whatever your project relies on.
What if I break something on the server?
Nothing serious: last night's copy and the six before it stay available, encrypted, outside the machine. Ask our engineers to restore one, and you pick up where you left off.
Will my project have HTTPS?
Yes, from its first day online. The certificate is issued and renewed for you.
How do I make my request?
Through the form on this page: how you qualify, your school and the project you want to run. An email to fondation@simafri.com works too.
Contact
How to request your VPS
Fill in the form: Fondation Simafri reviews your request and gets back to you.
This offer is subject to available stock.