Free hosting for your site in the cloud

Thinking of getting hosting or a vps server for your web site, application or blog? Well now you can get it FREE for a whole year!

Not only can you have free hosting, you get to choose the OS installed, you get full root access to install whatever you want, you can even choose from several geographical regions!

What’s the catch? Well, none really.. its a great deal! Of course there are limits and if you go over those limits you pay for that overage but its very cheap anyway and chances are, for a new site or a small site you wont be going over the limit for a while.

Now you’re probably thinking this is provided by some dodgy “here today, gone tomorrow” host but you’d be wrong – the company providing this free hosting is none other than Amazon with their “AWS Free Usage Tier”.

But can you realistically host your site there for free? Absolutely! In fact this very site at sysops.ie is hosted on just such a node – specifically an EC2 Micro Instance.  It has cost us so far just 69 cents and that only because we stored a load of extra data outside the instance on EBS. Of course if your site is full of videos or other large files and gets truck loads of traffic then you may quickly use up your allowance of 15GB in and 15GB out so you’ll need to consider that.

So what are you waiting for? Its great for any startup looking to keep costs to a minimum while allowing you to easily scale up as needed in future. Go here for full details and to signup: http://aws.amazon.com/free/

Of course if you need help with setting up such a node or managing your server(s) long term or you need advice on getting started – SysOps can help!