In an effort to introduce, and attract new customers to Cloud Hosting, Amazon Web Services is introducing a new free usage tier. Beginning November 1, new Amazon Web Services 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.

Amazon Web Services 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 Amazon's cloud.

**These free tiers are only available to new Amazon Web Services customers and are available for 12 months following your Amazon Web Services sign-up date. When your free usage expires or if your application use exceeds the free usage tiers, you pay standard, pay-as-you-go service rates.

I could (and probably should), do as most tech media have done and end the story now. Not satisfied with status quo, I decided to get a sense of the value of the offering and the potential liability of cost overages.

Costing

I decided to proceed in the order set out by the Amazon's press release, starting with “Run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for a year”. Amazon EC2 Micro Instance is listed as .025 per hour from Northern California. (With Linux/ Unix Usage. Windows Usage added 1 cent per hour to cost. An instance running from Virginia was .020 while the EU and Asia priced similar to California).

 I noticed that the Standard Small (Default) plan had a cost of almost ten cents per hour or almost $75 per month, so I felt a need to better understand the package limits for calculating the potential liability of cost overages. (they do require you to have a credit card to sign up!)

Scrolling down on the page, I see various add-on features listing costs per instance-hour (or partial hour) for the EC2. Terms like Reserved Instances, Spot Instances, Data Transfer, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Elastic IP Addresses, Amazon CloudWatch (not to be confused with CloudFront), Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing.

I scrolled a little further and got to the “Getting Started” section which descriptively stated....

“The best way to understand Amazon EC2 is to work through the Getting Started Guide, part of our Technical Documentation. Within a few minutes, you will be able to log into your own instance and start playing!”

Clicking on the link provided I was taken to the documentation page which listed twenty two documents! (clicked on the first document and was taken to a page that listed six subsequent choices). Someone needs to seriously look at the choice of wording of the “in a few minutes” statement.

It will be more cost effective for HostJury to pay the overages... watch for my hosting review of AWS Free Usage Tier in the coming months.