That sure got my attention when I saw it. Amazon Web Services is now offering what they call the "Free Usage Tier." If your AWS usage is less than this per month...
A "Linux/Unix Micro Instance" is a 1.2GHz Xeon (burstable to 2.4) 613MB RAM VPS with root access. Pathetic by VPS standards, of course, but the price is right.
These do require a bit of technical expertise to use. They run Amazon Linux AMI, which is a bare Linux that doesn't even come with a web or database server. This said, if you have some Linux knowledge it's not hard to toss on Apache2, MySQL, and PHP (they have all three ready to go in a Yum repository, and Amazon Linux AMI supports RPM packages too) and have a fully functional host in short order. If you're the type who needs cPanel and Fantastico, though, this isn't for you.
It's worth learning, though -- AWS is awesome for an affiliate marketer. You can assign multiple IPs to a server and run different virtual hosts on each, and reassign them as desired for SEO. You get 5 to start and can request more if you can justify it (hint: if you need more IPs, make a number of sites that use SSL equal to how many IPs you have, then ask for more IPs because you need them for SSL.) If you get to the point where you need powerful hosting, you can get Amazon-managed MySQL servers, and you can crank your web servers up to quad 2.4GHz with 16GB RAM each. Plus when you're actually paying you can run whatever OS you want, and not just Amazon Linux AMI.
Being able to crank your host's power up and down as your PPC campaigns scale and end, or being able to assign tons of IPs for SEO and swap them around is very nice.
And well, even if you don't use that, free VPS for a year is hard to beat. Especially since making another Amazon account to get another year isn't exactly hard.
- 750 hours of EC2 running Linux/Unix Micro instance usage
- 750 hours of Elastic Load Balancing plus 15 GB data processing
- 10 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) plus 1 million IOs, 1 GB snapshot storage, 10,000 snapshot Get Requests and 1,000 snapshot Put Requests
- 15 GB of bandwidth in and 15 GB of bandwidth out aggregated across all AWS services
A "Linux/Unix Micro Instance" is a 1.2GHz Xeon (burstable to 2.4) 613MB RAM VPS with root access. Pathetic by VPS standards, of course, but the price is right.
These do require a bit of technical expertise to use. They run Amazon Linux AMI, which is a bare Linux that doesn't even come with a web or database server. This said, if you have some Linux knowledge it's not hard to toss on Apache2, MySQL, and PHP (they have all three ready to go in a Yum repository, and Amazon Linux AMI supports RPM packages too) and have a fully functional host in short order. If you're the type who needs cPanel and Fantastico, though, this isn't for you.
It's worth learning, though -- AWS is awesome for an affiliate marketer. You can assign multiple IPs to a server and run different virtual hosts on each, and reassign them as desired for SEO. You get 5 to start and can request more if you can justify it (hint: if you need more IPs, make a number of sites that use SSL equal to how many IPs you have, then ask for more IPs because you need them for SSL.) If you get to the point where you need powerful hosting, you can get Amazon-managed MySQL servers, and you can crank your web servers up to quad 2.4GHz with 16GB RAM each. Plus when you're actually paying you can run whatever OS you want, and not just Amazon Linux AMI.
Being able to crank your host's power up and down as your PPC campaigns scale and end, or being able to assign tons of IPs for SEO and swap them around is very nice.
And well, even if you don't use that, free VPS for a year is hard to beat. Especially since making another Amazon account to get another year isn't exactly hard.
