Amazon just announced it's making their cloud available for free for a year. This is a promotional deal. Here are the specs:

AWS Free Usage Tier (Per Month):

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 an Elastic Load Balancer plus 15 GB data processing*
10 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, plus 1 million I/Os, 1 GB of snapshot storage, 10,000 snapshot Get Requests and 1,000 snapshot Put Requests*
5 GB of Amazon S3 storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests*
30 GB per of internet data transfer (15 GB of data transfer “in” and 15 GB of data transfer “out” across all services except Amazon CloudFront)*
25 Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hours and 1 GB of Storage**
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**


I find this move very interesting and perhaps the only bold move to see larger adoption of the cloud...

Regards
Joe / UNIXY

Thanks for the info.
Will definitely try it out.

Here's a direct link: http://aws.amazon.com/free/ :agree:

Wow.. Anyone else tried this yet? I would like to hear more information

I`d also like to hear some more information on it if anyone has tried it yet.

How in the world are they going to do it with spammers and illegal stuff? No paying can only lead to abuse. Whats the trick? You have to renew the next year?

anyone tried it?? need more info

Regards

How in the world are they going to do it with spammers and illegal stuff? No paying can only lead to abuse. Whats the trick? You have to renew the next year?

You do have to provide a valid credit card which would slow down a few of the trouble makers.

You do have to provide a valid credit card which would slow down a few of the trouble makers.

A little, but not much now days.

Has anyone tried this out? and have got theres?

How in the world are they going to do it with spammers

I think most of Amazon's range is already blocked/blacklisted by a lot of rbls because of the amount of spam originating from EC2.

That said, this is a decent offer and I'm sure some people will find it useful to give the service a try. It's interesting the language Amazon use and the way they market their cloud product(s) - it's almost as if they want to alienate the non-techy market so that they only get customers that understand what they're doing, and thus don't require much support.

Just grabbed one -- so far so good :)

If you plan on using it only for the trial period, make sure you cancel your account before then.

If they have your credit card details and depending on the ToS, they may charge you automatically at the end of the trial, especially since they're subject to change within 12 months.

It's been talked previously also at LEB

If you plan on using it only for the trial period, make sure you cancel your account before then.

If they have your credit card details and depending on the ToS, they may charge you automatically at the end of the trial, especially since they're subject to change within 12 months.

Ah, thanks for the notice :). If I understand correctly, I should have until Nov 1, 2011 until billing starts?

Fraudsters have tons of stolen credit cards to use and since its free it will never get charged and since the owner doesn't complain about any charge the fraudster/spammers will have a free platform for malicious activity.

It will a hell of a nightmare for them for sure and I dont think people will renew after one year, several providers tried this, like 1and1 and others, even 2 years free, nobody wanted to pay after the 2 years where over, in the case of 1and1 they started to charge cards for the 3 year because it was on the TOS of the promo. They received a hell good amount of chargebacks and complaints, but they where in their right actually. This promos only hook people that want the free side of things, the % that actually uses or is hooked into then being a paid customer very small.

I guess amazon wants to become this like a freemium services where the % that pays actually pays for the free ones as well.

wow. this is an amazing deal! i wonder how other cloud providers are going to respond. amazon has enough capital to eat this cost no doubt.

wow. this is an amazing deal! i wonder how other cloud providers are going to respond. amazon has enough capital to eat this cost no doubt.

They dont need to respond, they are selling just fine and the market is big enough to start giving everything for free. If they respond this will lead to a freemium war where everything is free that will eventually prostitute the cloud services like it did with shared hosting (which 90% of services suck big time now), and taking to a crash a few companies with it as well, those that cannot sustain having 0 incomes for so much time.

Amazon is just testing this hoping it will gain to a few paying customer, and to be honest I would had done the same as they have probably thousands of servers sitting around that are getting old now so they just put this to work on the free services instead of laying around wasting energy. I think its a nice offer but the packages are just big enough for small testing and nothing serious. Also amazon is not what is considered a quality cloud service, its known to be one of the cheapest, biggest and was probably the first one to be launched.

They dont need to respond, they are selling just fine and the market is big enough to start giving everything for free. If they respond this will lead to a freemium war where everything is free that will eventually prostitute the cloud services like it did with shared hosting (which 90% of services suck big time now), and taking to a crash a few companies with it as well, those that cannot sustain having 0 incomes for so much time.

Amazon is just testing this hoping it will gain to a few paying customer, and to be honest I would had done the same as they have probably thousands of servers sitting around that are getting old now so they just put this to work on the free services instead of laying around wasting energy. I think its a nice offer but the packages are just big enough for small testing and nothing serious. Also amazon is not what is considered a quality cloud service, its known to be one of the cheapest, biggest and was probably the first one to be launched.

I can agree with that... I have a small business and I'm looking at this and thinking it is good for extended testing (maybe six months), but that is about it.

The extended testing is welcomed since I might actually purchase after that...