Amazon Introducing Free Usage Tier

To help new AWS customers get started in the cloud, Amazon Web Services LLC is introducing a new free usage tier.

Beginning November 1, 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. AWS’s 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 AWS.

AWS’s free usage tier starts November 1, 2010. A valid credit card is required to sign up.

Below are the highlights of AWS’s new free usage tiers. All are available for one year (except Amazon SimpleDB, SQS, and SNS which are free indefinitely).

AWS Free Usage Tier (Per Month):

• 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**

* These free tiers are only available to new AWS customers and are available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date. When your free usage expires or if your application use exceeds the free usage tiers, you simply pay standard, pay-as-you-go service rates (see each service page for full pricing details). Restrictions apply; see offer terms for more details.
** These free tiers do not expire after 12 months and are available to both existing and new AWS customers indefinitely.

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

The new AWS free usage tier applies to participating services across all AWS regions: US – N. Virginia, US – N. California, EU – Ireland, and APAC – Singapore. The free usage is calculated each month across all regions and automatically applied to the bill – free usage does not accumulate.