AWS: Amazon Web Services

[wir]

AWS is nothing new but I just recently discovered it myself, and it's pretty great. I'm using their 12-month free package to host myself ZNC(an IRC bouncer).

What is AWS?

In 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) began offering IT infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services -- now commonly known as cloud computing. One of the key benefits of cloud computing is the opportunity to replace up-front capital infrastructure expenses with low variable costs that scale with your business. With the Cloud, businesses no longer need to plan for and procure servers and other IT infrastructure weeks or months in advance. Instead, they can instantly spin up hundreds or thousands of servers in minutes and deliver results faster.

Free Usage Tier

New customers can sign up and receive a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for a year, while also leveraging a free usage tier of Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS data transfer. Simply sign up for AWS and your usage for applicable services, up to the monthly free tier limits, will be free.

More about the free tier.

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 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*
5 GB of Amazon S3 standard storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests*
100 MB of storage, 5 units of write capacity, and 10 units of read capacity for Amazon DynamoDB.**
25 Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hours and 1 GB of Storage**
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**
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**
10 Amazon Cloudwatch metrics, 10 alarms, and 1,000,000 API requests**
15 GB of bandwidth out aggregated across all AWS services*
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

In addition to these services, the AWS Management Console is available at no charge to help you build and manage your application on AWS.

tl;dr: Free virtual dedicated server among other things.

[Wesley]

Amazon's doing a lot of great things for the internet these days, they're definitely the one company to watch out for in the coming years. I'll probably have a look at their hosting fees when I need my own website sometime.