Friday, October 22, 2010

Free Ubuntu Server for a year at Amazon

Yes, you can get your very own Free Ubuntu server in the clouds for one full year! The folks at Amazon have just announced

"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"

You can find the details of the offer at: http://aws.amazon.com/free/

Ubuntu being arguably the most popular Amazon guest image is also available to you for free today! Get the list of Official Ubuntu images created by the Ubuntu's very own server team at

Maverick http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/server/maverick/current/
Lucid http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/server/lucid/current/

For the free offer, you will want to launch a t1.micro instance, and it seems you will want to wait till Nov 1st for registering your account (credit card needed). This is great news! If you ever wanted to play with Ubuntu server on the cloud, now is the best time to get started!

Update: The terms page mentions "Only accounts created after October 20, 2010 are eligible for the Offer"

Update2: Please read Scott's comment below, on why you will be charged 0.5$/mo if you run the standard Ubuntu image (or Amazon's own AMIs)

5 comments:

roddie said...

I'm tempted to sign up; now I just need to find something to use it for!

Scott Moser said...

Please note that if you do use one of the linked Ubuntu images (which I would highly recommend), you will be charged $0.50 per month.

The same is true of many other ec2 ebs images (including Amazon's own images), as the "standard size" for EBS root volume is 15G, but the free trial only covers 10G of provisioned storage per month.

Your additional cost is $0.10 per GB-month of provisioned storage, meaning $0.50 / month.

Dimitri John Ledkov said...

Demand smaller root size images?

Anonymous said...

I've been meaning to get a VPS and this could do just as well... are there any obligations to stay after a year?

Kamal said...

@Vadi, Not really, check out Scott's comment, you may end up paying 0.5$/mo