AWS Free Hosting provides limited access to Amazon Web Services' infrastructure for deploying websites and applications at no cost. The AWS Free Tier includes 12 months of specific services free of charge, with some services remaining free indefinitely.
The AWS Free Tier offers three types of free offers:
For example, AWS offers 750 hours per month of Amazon EC2 instances (Linux or Windows) for the first 12 months. After that period, you pay standard rates.
| Service | Free Tier Details |
|---|---|
| Amazon S3 | 5 GB of standard storage, 20,000 GET requests, and 2,000 PUT requests per month |
| Amazon RDS | 750 hours of Amazon RDS (db.t2.micro or db.t3.micro instance) usage monthly for two databases |
| AWS Lambda | 1 million free requests per month and 400,000 GB-seconds of compute time per month |
Developers often use AWS Free Hosting to:
I used AWS Free Hosting to deploy a personal blog during my first year of web development. The setup was straightforward, and the performance met my expectations for a low-traffic site.
Many people confuse AWS Free Hosting with completely free, unlimited hosting. However, there are important limitations:
According to Amazon's documentation, exceeding free tier limits results in standard usage fees. For example, storing more than 5 GB in Amazon S3 incurs charges of $0.023 per GB/month.
To begin using AWS Free Hosting:
For more details on what's included in the free tier, visit AWS's official free tier page.