The Next Wave: Free Cloud Hosting
OK. So we all know that Amazon.com has plenty of internal excess computing capacity. That’s why it started offering its own pay-as-you-go cloud hosting services. It was a smart move for the company, as today they’re still leaders in Cloud Computing hosting — even though Google and MS are trying their hardest to catch up.
Not so fast. Amazon has ushered in the next wave. As of November 1, 2010, Amazon will offer a small introductory offering of core cloud services free of charge. Amazon announced on its Amazon Website Services (AWS) site that “new AWS customers will be able to run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for a year, as well as leverage a new free usage tier for Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS data transfer.”
AWS said its free usage tier is designed for new users to do things like launch new applications, test existing applications in the cloud, or “simply gain hands-on experience with AWS.”
I won’t go into details about the new free cloud usage, but what makes this different from the free hosting deals that have been seemingly going on forever is, well, the cloud.
You can be sure that other cloud hosting companies will jump on this and add this to their services — again, in order to gain new customers. In fact, Forrester Research, in an article I read, speculated that AWS’s new low barrier to adoption may be all it needs to get a much larger customer base for its cloud services.
I agree. While offering free, trial cloud services may be a new thing for AWS, we here at monitor.us have offered a free, yet powerful website, server and traffic monitoring service for years. We have established track records of robust execution, alerts delivery and we help many website owners to reach high uptime and availability at no cost.
Currently, we monitor nearly 260,000 sites per day, checking over 37 million times per day. monitor.us is for businesses that need:
- High uptime
- To deliver a superior web experience to customers
- Find reliable hosting
- Benchmark website performance
- Diagnose and prevent issues
- Full control over server resource usage
- Free monitoring for an unlimited number of sites
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