When I first signed up to Bluehost they advertise the $4.95 per month cost of shared hosting. But after your the first(year(s)) subscription runs out the monthly would be $8.95/month and that’s not so cheap. Since I’ve been into Cloud Computing for years and my not so active blog needs a new host I finally moved my blog hosting from shared hosting on bluehost to Amazon Web Services EC2 for FREE. I chose a Micro Instance with an Ubuntu Linux image and got setup my server setup in 5 mins.

In my next blog post I’ll post a short tutorial with the details how to move an existing WordPress blog to be hosted on Amazon EC2 on Ubuntu and some tips and tricks to speed up your instance.

First time AWS account members they are entitled to 1 year Free Usage Tier which includes:

AWS Free Usage Tier (Per Month):
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux† Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month*
750 hours of Amazon EC2 Microsoft Windows Server‡ Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month*
750 hours of an Elastic Load Balancer plus 15 GB data processing*
30 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, plus 2 million I/Os and 1 GB of snapshot storage*

Simple Storage Service (S3)

5 GB of Amazon S3 standard storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests*

DynamoDB

100 MB of storage, 5 units of write capacity, and 10 units of read capacity for Amazon DynamoDB.**

SimpleDB

25 Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hours and 1 GB of Storage**

Simple Workflow (SWF)

1,000 Amazon SWF workflow executions can be initiated for free. A total of 10,000 activity tasks, signals, timers and markers, and 30,000 workflow-days can also be used for free**

Simple Queue Service (SQS) and Simple Notification Service (SNS)

100,000 Requests of Amazon Simple Queue Service**
100,000 Requests, 100,000 HTTP notifications and 1,000 email notifications for Amazon Simple Notification Service**

Relational Database Service (RDS)

750 hours of Amazon RDS for SQL Server Micro DB Instance usage (running SQL Server Express Edition in a single Availability Zone) – enough hours to run a DB Instance continuously each month
20 GB of database storage
10 million I/Os
20 GB of backup storage for your automated database backups and any user-initiated DB Snapshots

CloudWatch

10 Amazon Cloudwatch metrics, 10 alarms, and 1,000,000 API requests**

Data Transfer

15 GB of bandwidth out aggregated across all AWS services*

In addition to these services, the AWS Management Console is available at no charge to help you build and manage your application on AWS.