Amazon AWS can be free to use for a year - but only if a micro instance will do the job.

To help developers get started in the cloud, Amazon AWS has introduced a new free usage tier. From  November 1, new AWS customers will be able to run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for a year and use 5 GB of Amazon S3 storage, and free tiers of Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancer, and AWS data transfer.

In addition, customers can benefit from the existing free tiers for Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service, and Amazon Simple Notifications Service. This is enough to build and test most applications as long as they fit into a Micro Instance which isn't very powerful.

The specification of the free service in detail is:

• 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

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

After the year your use of AWS reverts to the standard charging rates.

To learn more about the new AWS free usage tier, visit aws.amazon.com/free.

Further reading

Amazon Micro Instances - the cloud on the cheap

Amazon's cloud messaging

Cloud Security and Privacy