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Comment by dholowiski | Hacker News Reader

Wow that's... Cool but not that great of a deal. You need to create a new account, and you only get 30gb of bandwidth. If you exceed any of the limits it all converts to paid services. Plus, it's only for a year. Good for learning ec2, but I'll stick with heroku or google app engine for my freebies.

As an aside, I realize how crazy it is to say that a year lease on a vps for free is not a great deal. This is an amazing, magical time for web developers/programmers.

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If you exceed any of the limits it all converts to paid services.

That's not how I read: "You also will be charged AWS’s standard rates for any use that exceeds the free usage amount provided under the Offer."

Maybe I mis-read it. I keep coming back to this line which seems to imply otherwise: When your free usage expires or if your application use exceeds the free usage tiers, you simply pay standard, pay-as-you-go service rates

It looks like the 2 different terms are contradictory. We may have to wait and see if they clarify whether you just have to pay the extra fees or if you are completely switched to a paid account if you go over.

Of course, it would make sense if you only paid for the 'extra' charges if you went over. It would be kind of sneaky if they charged you for the whole thing if you went over. I hope they do clarify this.

Lawyer stuff aside, what can I do if I don't want to exceed those limits? I could monitor everything myself and stop the services when the limits are reached, but I would prefer an automatic solution offered by Amazon. I don't want any credit card surprises while I'm still learning.

Well, I think that using the Amazon API you could monitor that stuff and shut it all down if you exceeded the limits, but you'd have to program all of that to happen.

I agree, it would be nice if amazon could allow you to put some hard limits on all of the AWS services. That's why I haven't used AWS yet - I'm afraid of that 10K bill if I should 'accidentally' hit the front page of Digg/Reddit/HN.

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