Amazon Web Services to Launch Free Usage Tier

Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS), an Amazon.com Company announced that developers and businesses will be able to take advantage of a new free usage tier for a full year. Beginning November 1, new AWS customers will be able to run a free Amazon EC2 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. This will enable developers to launch new applications, broaden their AWS knowledge, or simply gain hands-on familiarity with the services -- all while incurring no charges. To learn more about the new AWS free usage tier, visit http://aws.amazon.com/free.

With the new free AWS usage tier, developers will be able to launch applications at no cost. If their new application spikes in popularity, it will seamlessly scale and run on AWS's inexpensive, pay-as-you-go, standard pricing that is much less than traditional computing costs. Below are the highlights of AWS's new free offering. All are free for one year (except the last three which are free indefinitely).

- 750 hours per month of micro Linux Amazon EC2 instance usage -- enough to run continuously (there are approximately 750 hours in a month)

- 750 hours per month of an Amazon Elastic Load Balancer

- 10 GB per month of Amazon Elastic Block Storage

- 5 GB per month of Amazon S3 Storage

- 30 GB per month of internet data transfer (15 GB of data transfer "in" and 15 GB of data transfer "out" across all services)

- 25 Machine Hours per month of Amazon SimpleDB

- 100,000 Requests per month of Amazon Simple Queue Service

- 100,000 Requests per month, 100,000 Notifications over HTTP per month, and 1,000 Notifications over Email per month for Amazon Simple Notification Service