You can now run an EC2 instance 24×7 for under $15/month with the announcement last night of the Micro instance type. The Micro includes 613 MB of RAM and can burst for short periods up to 2 EC2 Compute Units(One EC2 Compute Unit equals 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor). They are available in all EC2 supported regions and in 32 or 64 bit flavors.
The design point for Micro instances is to offer a small amount of consistent, always available CPU resources while supporting short bursts above this level. The instance type is well suited for lower throughput applications and web sites that consume significant compute cycles but only periodically.
Micro instances are available for Windows or Linux with Linux at $0.02/hour and windows at $0.03/hour. You can quickly start a Micro instance using the EC2 management console: EC2 Console.
The announcement: Announcing Micro Instances for Amazon EC2
More information: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
–jrh
b: http://blog.mvdirona.com / http://perspectives.mvdirona.com
Yes, I agree. The spot market is one of the coolest and more innovative things I’ve seen done in cloud computing.
I hadn’t checked the price of a Micro since the annoucne. Under a penny an hour is pretty amazing. Thanks for pointing it out Randall.
–jrh
jrh@mvdirona.com
The spot price for Micro instances is currently $.007 an hour. If your app can stand a higher chance of random termination, you can get one or n for about $5 a month (plus EBS and bandwidth costs). Might be fun to develop on or for a personal server you can afford to have go "poof".
Assuming you’d still want the server at more than $5/month, you can set the max spot price to the list price for Micro instances. It’s still probably terminated more often than an on-demand instance would be — at least, Amazon doesn’t make any promises — but less often than a $.007 request.
I’m a contractor for CloudShare (www.cloudshare.com), an IT as a Service (ITaS) provider. It’s good to see Amazon offering services for smaller businesses and teams of individuals. I’m curious how you think it stacks up to CloudShare Pro? CloudShare Pro offers similar on-demand IT services that users to create and manage multiple virtual IT environments, but it’s free – for unlimited hours – and includes storage, OS, licenses, software, etc. If you haven’t already, I invite you to try it out at http://www.cloudshare.com/pro and let me know what you think.