Free Amazon AWS cloud hosting

Posted on March 11, 2023 by Kunal Saxena

Hi Readers,

There are free cloud hosting solutions available. Amazon AWS is one of them. Let me introduce you to AWS if you not know about them.

Amazon AWS

They are cloud services provider and offer variety of services on pay per use basis. Some of AWS services are EC2, S3, SES, SNS, RDS, ELB, IAM, EBS and lot more.

I have been using amazon AWS from more then 3 years.

You want to try this service, they will give you Free Tier on Sign-up. Under Free tier you can use couple of important services for Free.

Things that you might be looking for are

Static Website hosting

This you can do with AWS S3 service. S3 is object storage so you can host all of your html, css, js etc files there. You can also give your custom name to the location, it will become the url and you will have amazon name in your url. There are tutorials available on Google on how to do this.

Hosting a Dynamic website/blog

If you want to keep technology choice in your hand and build a website/blog in PHP, JAVA or any other technology. Then amazon’s EC2 service is for you. It is cloud based service and provides you total freedom of choosing technology or platform. You can get Windows/ Linux or Ubuntu servers from them and install whatever you want. Here you get hardware on rental basis. Amazon charges you on pay per use basis. So you will only get charged only for the time your server is on.

Best part is, they have one year free trial called Free Tier

This free tier lasts for 1 year and it has some basic usage limits under Free tag. There are quotas set for each service as free. After that quote limit amazon will start charging you. Your bill comes monthly.

All you need is a credit card to start your Free Tier. You need to put your credit card as payment option. Don’t worry they will not charge you for a year unless you cross your allowed quota limit.

If want to start a blog or you are going to start a company, any web application or you just launched a startup, you can get benefit of this one year free trial and you don’t need to worry about the rented hardware and IT costs. AWS will take care for you and you can run for 1 year without spending anything on IT hosting etc.

More details about the services under Free Tier are :-

Amazon EC2 -

You can create your Ubuntu, Windows, Linux server for free. You can run t2.micro instance which is 1GB Ram, upto 30GB of storage.

Amazon S3 -

you get 5GB of storage, 20,000 get requests for your objects under S3 and 2000 put requests.

Amazon Dynamo DB -

This is NoSQL database, fast and scalable. This will give you 25 GB storage.

Amazon RDS -

This is relational database service provided by amazon. You can choose MySQL, Postgres, Oracle and SQL Server as your database options.

You get 20 GB storage, 20 GB backup and 10,000,000 database requests per month.

Other Free Services are Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, Amazon SES and ….

For more details :- https://aws.amazon.com/free/

Hay if you do not have credit card. Don’t lose hope. So there are several other options for you.

Suppose if you want to list your product, do some changes from time to time. You business requirement is online presence. So Weebly is good option for you. It is free, only they will have weebly in your website name. If you have domain name already then you can host there.

You want to start a blog then start with Blogger. This is good and totally free service provided by Google. They have all the CMS ready for blogging. Services are for no cost al all and in exchange google will have their name in your site address. So your site name will become your site.blogspot.com.

If you already have domain name then you can add it to Blogger and use this platform to manage your Blog.

You also have option for Wordpress. They also offers you similar services as Blogger and for Free. Wordpress also provided CMS for blogging. The added advantage is that Wordpress is more customisable and have more cool UIs.

So there are a lot of options to start your website, application, blog, startup app or company website. Operating at no extra cost will help you at some point.

I have a tutorial on "How to launch your first AWS server"