Amazon has finally added a free service tier to compete with Google's App Engine. Beginning November 1st, Amazon users can run a free EC2 Micro Instance usage for a year. The free tier, however, is on underpowered machines: 750 hours/month on 613 MB memory, 32-bit and 64-bit platform support. The free quota limits are good:
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)
It's enough to run your mashup for a year for free. But after one year, you pay Amazon's normal rates. With GAE now supporting SQL (in the past, folks have complained about a 'lock-in' factor with BigTable), we see no reason to use the Amazon Free tier. Google's free limits are generous, and they don't expire after a year. Here is an outside look at Amazon vs GAE.
