I've used the technology before and it's great as a hosting service... just wondering how the free service works. In my experience these free services are typically crippled so that you're forced to fork over $$$ after investing time with it.
It IS crippled in that:
1) It's only "free" for a year..
2) If you use more than $n bandwidth, they charge.
3) You need a credit card so they can charge you. So if your server is unmonitored and hit with a DoS attack for 3 days, the bandwidth charges _could_ be heavy.
Reference:
AWS Free Usage Tier
To help new AWS customers get started in the cloud, AWS is introducing a free usage tier. New AWS customers will be able to run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for a year, while also leveraging a free usage tier for Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS data transfer. AWS’s free usage tier can be used for anything you want to run in the cloud: launch new applications, test existing applications in the cloud, or simply gain hands-on experience with AWS.
For no additional charge, AWS Elastic Beanstalk allows you quickly and easily deploy your .NET, PHP, Python, and Java applications using many of the services offered in the free usage tier. To learn more about AWS Elastic Beanstalk and the free usage tier, go to "Deploy a Sample Web Application in the Free Usage Tier" in the AWS Getting Started Guide: Free Usage Tier.
Below are the highlights of AWS’s free usage tiers. All are available for one year (except SWF, DynamoDB, SimpleDB, SQS, and SNS which are free indefinitely):
An AWS account requires a valid credit card.
To stay within the Free Usage Tier(s), use only EC2 Micro sized instances.
See offer terms.
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
- 750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux
†Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month* - 750 hours of Amazon EC2 Microsoft Windows Server
‡Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month* - 750 hours of an Elastic Load Balancer plus 15 GB data processing*
- 30 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, plus 2 million I/Os and 1 GB of snapshot storage
*
Simple Storage Service (S3)
- 5 GB of Amazon S3 standard storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests
*
DynamoDB
- 100 MB of storage, 5 units of write capacity, and 10 units of read capacity for Amazon DynamoDB.**
SimpleDB
- 25 Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hours and 1 GB of Storage
**
Simple Workflow (SWF)
- 1,000 Amazon SWF
workflow executions can be initiated for free. A total of 10,000
activity tasks, signals, timers and markers, and 30,000 workflow-days
can also be used for free
**
Simple Queue Service (SQS) and Simple Notification Service (SNS)
- 100,000 Requests of Amazon Simple Queue Service
** - 100,000 Requests, 100,000 HTTP notifications and 1,000 email notifications for Amazon Simple Notification Service
**
Relational Database Service (RDS)
- 750 hours of Amazon RDS for SQL Server Micro DB Instance usage (running SQL Server Express Edition in a single Availability Zone) – enough hours to run a DB Instance continuously each month
- 20 GB of database storage
- 10 million I/Os
- 20 GB of backup storage for your automated database backups and any user-initiated DB Snapshots
CloudWatch
- 10 Amazon Cloudwatch metrics, 10 alarms, and 1,000,000 API requests
**
Data Transfer
- 15 GB of bandwidth out aggregated across all AWS services
*
In addition to these services, the AWS Management Console is available at no charge to help you build and manage your application on AWS.
-jmzOn Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 12:20 PM, keith smith <klsmith2020@yahoo.com> wrote:
It is free to a point. I backup about 1.3 Gigs every night. I keep 15 days of history on their server and they charge us several dollars a month. That is right about 20 gigs of storage for 2 or 3 dollars a month. It was free for a year. It rocks. As I recall they charge for bandwidth and storage. Been using it for year and a half or so. I'm very impressed.
------------------------
Keith Smith
--- On Sun, 8/19/12, Joshua Zeidner <jjzeidner@gmail.com> wrote:
From: Joshua Zeidner <jjzeidner@gmail.com>
Subject: free AWS
To: "Main PLUG discussion list" <plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us>
Date: Sunday, August 19, 2012, 9:31 PM-----Inline Attachment Follows-----Hello,
anyone have any experience with free AWS?
good/bad/ugly?
http://aws.amazon.com/free/
thanks, jmz
--
http://home.joshuazeidner.com/
(602) 492-5749
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