From 1st November 2010 Amazon Web Services (AWS) will allow new users who signed up as of 20 Oct 2010 free usage for one year from the date of signing up.
If you are interested in trying out or learning about Cloud Computing, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), testing your new web service or starting your service in production to see how it performs, go to Amazon Web Service and get your free account. If you are planning on starting a new web site or service, try it out first free. If your site is successful and demand picks up you can then scale up and start using AWS’s full service. Test your software for scalability and “elasticity” using Amazon’s load balancing. Some network traffic and disk usage is also free which should get you started.
What does “Free Usage Tier” mean exactly?
There are some restrictions of course. You are allowed to use their smallest (micro) Linux servers only, but this should be enough to get you started. On my server I have 595 MB of usable RAM. One micro server can be running continuously & free of charge for one month since this usage would fall just withing the allowed 750 hours per month. You can run more than one server (i.e. with free load balancing) but you will be charged for one of them. If you go over your quota of machine hours for the month you will need to start paying $0.02 per hour of machine running time (as of writing in the US Region).
If you are new to Cloud Computing do not be afraid to get started. After about 20 minutes only you can sign up and have your own server running whatever (open source) software you like, free of charge on the Internet.
For more information see http://aws.amazon.com/free/ and read the rather short terms here.
See also my guide to setting up a server at AWS.
- Stephen Bylo