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Does anyone of you use a free Amazon AWS account?
I'm wondering if I could access it via FTP and use it like any other normal free webhosting?

I'm not very familiar on what the free AWS has to offer so maybe you could help me out?


Thanks for your answers...


EDIT: It says "Sign up for a free AWS account.", but is it also free to use, or do I have to pay using this service?

[Ryan Williams]

Signing up is perfectly free. It's once you start using resources that you have to pay, as it's pay-as-you-go.

I use CloudFront to serve all the images on my site and have been very satisfied with it, though.

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So in fact there is NO free AWS, right?

[Ryan Williams]

That's right, you definitely misinterpreted that.

It only costs me like $2 a month at the moment though to push 8GB of image bandwidth. It's so ridiculously cheap (it'd cost you about 25 cents to do 1GB of testing) it's practically free to try if you're curious.

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it's practically free to try if you're curious.

Ok, if you're looking at it from this point.


And does it really make a difference to the performance of your blog or whatever?

[Ryan Williams]

Depends what you're using it for.

For a site like mine which has many images, it certainly makes a difference. My image galleries are huge and are where a lot of my traffic goes, so having those as quick as possible is good. However if it's a blog with little in the way of image content, the difference will be minimal to non-existent.

Note that the primary thing CDNs combat is region slowness. So if all your traffic is US-based and your site is hosted in the US, a CDN will accomplish little. However if like me your visitors are somewhat evenly distributed between the US and Europe, your foreign visitors will appreciate the added speed (both download and latency).

If you stream videos or serve downloads on your site, the difference in speed is very significant. For example my UK connection can pull about 2200kB/s, but a US host typically only gives me ~600kB/s. Thus a CDN means I can pull my full speed and receive the file over three times faster, which I always appreciate. However I personally use YouTube for this so I don't have to pay.

As for AWS's other services such as cloud computing, no experience with those. But if you're interested in a CDN, CloudFront is a very good player IMO.