IBM Bluemix is really aimed at enterprise developers rather than the typical LET use cases of website, email, backup storage, and VPN. But they are offering a free 30-day trial, so I thought I'd give it a go. Their pricing calculator suggests that anything up to 512 MB is free in perpetuity. I'm not sure if I'm reading that correctly. Can that really be true? Anyway, you can get a free 30-day trial without entering a credit card number.
You go to https://console.ng.bluemix.net to sign up for an account. They call whatever email address you give them your "IBM id." About 10 minutes later, you'll get an email to verify that email address. The message on the website then says you'll get a confirmation email within 24 hours. I didn't receive that second email, but it didn't seem necessary, as I was able to log in within a few minutes.
The services you can try right away are their Cloud Foundry development stacks and their Docker containers. For virtual machines, you have to apply, and then wait another 24 hours for them to manually approve your access to virtual machines.
When you get access to the VM feature, you will see that the site says this feature is still in Beta. The only two sizes available are 2GB with 1 CPU (m1.small) or 3GB with 2 CPUs (m1.medium). I chose the small size with Ubuntu 14.04. Your default user id is ibmcloud. Make sure your upload your SSH public key ("Security Key", "Add Key") before you create the VM, otherwise you'll have no way of getting in to it. Also, leave the box checked that assigns a public IP address to your virtual machine.
Once you SSH in to your machine with the user id ibmcloud, you'll see that you can issue sudo commands without a password. The firewall is UFW, and only port 22 is open by default. I was surprised to see that the CPU (at least at the U.S. South location) is a Core i7 and not a Xeon. Maybe that's because it's aimed at developers rather than production users. Here are the numbers:
$ wget freevps.us/downloads/bench.sh -O - -o /dev/null | bash
CPU model : Intel Core i7 9xx (Nehalem Class Core i7)
Number of cores : 1
CPU frequency : 2299.996 MHz
Total amount of ram : 1498 MB
Total amount of swap : 2047 MB
System uptime : 13 min,
Download speed from CacheFly: 70.5MB/s
Download speed from Coloat, Atlanta GA: 1.52MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Dallas, TX: 90.7MB/s
Download speed from Linode, Tokyo, JP: 13.9MB/s
Download speed from i3d.net, Rotterdam, NL: 3.53MB/s
Download speed from Leaseweb, Haarlem, NL: 19.3MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Singapore: 8.68MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Seattle, WA: 40.1MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, San Jose, CA: 39.0MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Washington, DC: 56.1MB/s
I/O speed : 500 MB/s