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vikarjramun
vikarjramun

Reputation: 1042

Windows and Linux Simultaneous EC2 Instances on AWS Free Tier

I am running a Linux server with 10GB of EBS Storage for personal projects on AWS's free tier. I also want to create another server on that same account, but I would rather not spend anything.

I tried to create a Windows server (which has a seperate compute-hours allowance), and gave it the remaining 20GB of EBS Storage I had left (the Free Tier allowance is 30GB). However, AWS wouldn't let me create a Windows server with less than 30GB of space. I know that Windows shouldn't take that much space for sure.

Is there a way I can create a Windows instance with less than 20GB?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1380

Answers (1)

John Rotenstein
John Rotenstein

Reputation: 269826

Yes, Windows Server is that big (allowing for some spare storage space on the volume).

Please note that the AWS Free Tier is calculated on a monthly basis. So, you can actually run as many instances as you want, but turn them off when they are not being used. The first 750 hours of Amazon EC2 t2.micro for Linux and Windows is free. (So, you could run 2 Linux and 2 Windows, but turn them off for half the time).

The same thing applies to Amazon EBS storage:

30 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage in any combination of General Purpose (SSD) or Magnetic, plus 2 million I/Os (with EBS Magnetic) and 1 GB of snapshot storage*

So, you could use more than 30GB of storage, but not for the whole month.

The intention of the Free Tier is to allow people to try AWS and become familiar with how it works. It is not intended to provide free hosting for full-time production applications.

Bottom line: Just keep an eye on your monthly totals. For example, you can use twice the quantity for half the time and it will stay within the free tier.

Upvotes: 4

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