If you've not yet tried EC2 then wait until Nov. Starting then, if you sign up as a new customer you get basically a year's basic service for free: <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><a href="http://aws.amazon.com/free/">http://aws.amazon.com/free/</a><div>
<br></div><div>You get (these are all per month)</div><div><ul><li>750 hours of EC2 micro instance (610MB RAM, dual core, low priority i.e. a baby VM)</li><li>10 GB of Elastic Block Storage, which basically means a 10GB disk for your EC2 instance. Really, storage is so cheap though... $0.10/mo per GB so if you made it 100GB it'd only $0.90/mo</li>
<li>5GB S3 storage (again, not a big savings)</li><li>15GB in and out bandwidth</li><li>25 hours of Simple DB usage (that's plenty)</li><li>100,000 request of Simple Queue (again, plenty) and Simple Notification Service (seems a lot to me)</li>
</ul></div><div>These last two bullets are actually free for everyone, even if you're not a new user.</div><div><br></div><div>If you have an app you're building and you want to see how it scales when you run it across 10 EC2 instances, you could test it in this configuration for 3 days straight per month and be within your free plan (you don't have to run one instance continuously for a month).</div>
<div><br></div><div>We use EC2 at work for doing tests on apps. It frees up your workstation for actual work. The micro instances here are nice because they're so cheap $0.02/hour and they're EBS backed so you can use persistence.<br clear="all">
<br>-- <br>Matthew Nuzum<br>newz2000 on freenode, skype, linkedin, <a href="http://identi.ca" target="_blank">identi.ca</a> and twitter<br><br>"An investment in knowledge pays the best interest." -Benjamin Franklin <br>
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