infoTECH Feature

November 03, 2010

Amazon.com Offers Cloud Computing Services for Free

Amazon.com (News - Alert), a pioneer in cloud computing, is now giving its customers an introductory, free offering of its core cloud computing services. According to the Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) website, “new AWS customers will be able to run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for a year, while also leveraging a new free usage tier for Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS data transfer.”

Since Amazon is currently holding the leadership position in cloud computing, it’s making this move secure its place in this new area of Web hosting. Amazon.com was among the first companies to create a customer-facing product from its own internal excess computing capacity. During the beginning of the cloud computing revolution, customers had to instead pay for scalable hosting services.

The services offered for free by Amazon are:

  • 750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support), which will provide enough hours to run continuously each month;
  • 750 hours of an Elastic Load Balancer plus 15 GB data processing;
  • Ten GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, plus one million I/Os, One GB of snapshot storage, 10,000 snapshot Get Requests and 1,000 snapshot put requests;
  • Five 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 one GB of storage;
  • 100,000 Requests of Amazon Simple Queue Service;
  • 100,000 Requests, 100,000 HTTP notifications and 1,000 e-mail notifications for Amazon Simple Notification Service.

Companies like 34SP.Com, HostGator and iPage are currently offering free hosting services to gain customers and this has been around for years to promote their hosting services. But Amazon’s offer on cloud computing model is the first in the Web hosting market that makes the Amazon products gain advantage over its competitors. According to Forrester (News - Alert) Research, “this low barrier to adoption may be all Amazon needs to attract a much larger potential customer base for its cloud offerings. Free is sticky. When deciding which public cloud platform you want to be hosted on, how can you argue with one that costs you nothing when traffic is low?”

Amazon has started the marketing battle among the cloud computing companies. More offerings will be available for customers in the near future.


Vanchi Govind is a TMCnet contributor. He has more than 12 years of IT/domain experience including more than eight years in software development, e-business consulting and project management. To read more of his articles please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Tammy Wolf
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