I was quite happy and satisfied for being able to attend a talk about a demo/intro about Amazon's cloud-as-a-service solution, the Amazon Web Services. Apart from acquire more technical knowledge, it sort of gave some options to prevent too much cost on set-up of a server for public-viewable production use.
I don't want to bother talking and putting more details on what's the technical differences and the pros and cons of AWS from traditional in-house or other cloud-hosting providers since there is really no absolute truth or "standard" that can explain this in concrete sense. But one thing that I'm actually keen is on their "free tier usage" for new AWS account holders.
Well, on a marketing standpoint, the "free tier usage" is their proof-of-concept or demo-to-purchase to reel in customers and use their offered service... which is all true perhaps. But for tech-enterpreneurs who are looking for ways to deploy their apps or products over the net and be accessible to their target customers, I could really say that AWS should be there on the potential list for achieving it.
The "free tier usage" from what I understand is good for 12 months upon sign-up of a new AWS account... which for the record requires you to provide a credit card. But despite of that uneasiness for people that are not entirely comfortable of letting someone save your credit card credentials... it is a gamble worthwhile. The main agenda at the end of the day is to try out if the 1-year free trial service that AWS offer can meet the requirements of your start-up tech project. In turn, it will make you actually move forward to realization of launching your start-up project into production.
Everyone would like to spend (too much) money on a start-up that has to prove its value, and releasing it to the public market is the driver or decision-block on determining a winning formula or just another rubbish in the bin. Of course, when it does become a huge hit upon release to the public, you would likely need to think of scaling the capacity and performance. In AWS, you can scale your set-up as convenient as you can, and as their saying goes "pay for what you only use".
For more info on this matter, I suggest you to read their program details at Amazon's own website at this link.
