The Free Tier
AWS figures that the more comfortable you feel working with its services, the more likely you’ll eventually start moving serious workloads to its cloud. So, AWS offers a generous Free Tier for the first 12 months after opening a new account. Under the Free Tier, you can freely experiment with light versions of most AWS services without being billed.
How Does the Free Tier Work?
It’s remarkable how much you can do with the Free Tier. Since, for instance, you’re allowed to run a t2.micro Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instance—powered by either Linux or Windows—for up to 750 hours per month, you can effectively keep a low-demand website going without interruption for your full first year. In fact, you’d be surprised how much you can get done with such a resource.
You don’t have to consume those 750 Free Tier EC2 hours by running a single instance 24/7. You could instead choose to experiment with something more complex, such as...
