back to article Amazon floats free Windows Server clouds

Amazon is giving Windows shops a taste of Microsoft's Windows server for free in the cloud. The Amazon Web Service (AWS) Free Usage Tier now includes up to 750 hours of Windows Server 2008 R2 without having to pay the hard-to-catch cloud-fluffer anything. Amazon is targeting developers – especially .NET heads – starting up …

COMMENTS

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Lure the mug punters in for free...

    Get them hooked and then start charging them when they've become addicted.

    Wonder where they learnt that trick from? Google?

  2. jonathanb Silver badge

    Am I missing something?

    Surely the longest possible month is 745 hours (31 days with the clock going back 1 hour), so how do you actually manage to get 750 hours out of it?

    Sounds like Compuserve back in the 1990s when they offered 750 hours of on-line access per month, and AOL went one better and offered 1000 hours per month.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. starsilk

      run more than one instance at the same time. you get a set number of hours, but you can spin up as many 'micro' instances as you want. you start paying as soon as you go over 750 hours in a month.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The race to the bottom has begun

    cloud going the same way as the ISP's have?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Sounds Like MS discout Deal

    Bet MS gave Amazon a licence discount if they did the offer

  5. Matt Fowler

    Nobody said you were locked to 1 instance at a time

    Because these are compute-hours, maybe you could fire off 750 instances and burn all your free time in only one clock-hour?

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Bandwidth

    What about network usage?

  7. Don Mitchell

    Thunder in the clouds

    It will be interesting to watch Amazon and Microsoft battle over pricing. Microsoft has the most sophisticated OS technology, with Cutler's Red Dog system. But Amazon has done a better job of building and managing cost efficient data centers.

  8. blondie101
    FAIL

    Low demand?

    Is demand for Windows in the cloud this low that they are forced to lower prices to attrack one or two customers...

  9. Martin
    WTF?

    What has the picture...

    ...of the bottom half of a woman got to do with this story?

  10. The Vociferous Time Waster
    Unhappy

    I'd rather have 1500 hours...

    I'd rather have 1500 hours of any instance instead of 750 hours if Linux and 750 hours of Windows. Personally I am using Linux but whatever your OS religion most people are working with one and unlikely to want to trial one of each. Give me two instances of the same technology and I can start experimenting with load balancers and more complex architectures.

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