Try cloud hosting for free

I sometimes write about how to join new technologies for free or inexpensively, this post is no exception. Today, I propose to play with such a fashionable phenomenon as cloud hosting, cloud computing and others like them. I was prompted by the recent references to GoGrid, one of the active market participants in the clouds, and the BitNami project, which provides including virtual machine images in GoGrid compatible format. Now a couple of clicks separate you from the deep test drive of this service.

For action people, I’ll say at once that under the cut is a free initial balance of 100 evergreen American rubles that can be spent on the IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) services of the GoGrid cloud provider. For fans, there will be another small promotion from Strato AG
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Today, many articles have already been written about utility and convenience, in general, about the advantages and disadvantages of cloud hosting. I will not go into the theory, on Habré enough interesting materials. But as a rule, the matter stops at that - we study general information, read interesting press releases, but I think despite the availability of some cool solutions (for example, free Google App Engine), practically no one has any real experience with them. IMHO the below promo action allows you to get one completely without a hole in the family (personal, corporate, other) budget. Although the news is not fresh, it was briefly mentioned, and the provider is quite well-known, the action did not seem to cause much excitement. We will fix

With what you can get acquainted with GoGrid, what's interesting there (you can read the uninteresting on their website yourself), if we talk more about a lengthy quiz than about productive use:
1. There is no fee for the initial installation and incoming traffic, a small amount of cloud storage, no surcharge for Windows / SuSe / RHEL licenses
2. When you turn off the machine, the IP and data do not disappear. Those. it is quite convenient for you to turn on an instance only when necessary, and not to keep it “so as not to sweat with the consequences”
2. Payment on the fact - for the allocated resources. Prices start from 20 cents per hour with the words of marketers - in practice, interesting tests will be more expensive, but the $ 100 promotion balance will be enough to drive the system for your pleasure. At the minimum parameters, it will be enough for a month somewhere, the park from the heap of servers with the balancer will last for free up to a week (around the clock) use
3. The system uses the expensive F5 balancers, you can taste their features, if HAproxy or nginx do not cope well with your project, and you don’t like Squid, this can be an interesting experience
4. Socket cute is sharpened by a bunch of servers, using images from BitNami will roll out a fleet of 6-10 machines and it will be easy and informative to capture. There are also a number of own images and community images.
5. For those who like to automate, there is a RESTful API and implementations for the main languages. It supports cloud abstraction via libcloud, it is possible to automatically manage the infrastructure through

In general, for those who are simply inquisitive and specifically interested in the clouds - the most it. Promotional page for getting freebies - Russian , Amerykanskaya (BitNami promo code)
Judging by the topic on Habrahabr, the Russian page exists without much support, the support in any case is only English. I hope the feeling of the service will be interesting and useful

As promised for the second promotion - most likely available only to residents of the European Union and DACH - the German company Strato AG, one of the largest hosters in Germany, is holding a promotion on the MultiServer product. I wrote about it earlier - in short, this is a dedicated server with virtualization pre-installed on Xen 3.2.x, which allows you to create up to 25 virtual machines through their very simple panel and start up to 8 of them simultaneously. If you need several virtual lovers with a serious resource consumption, this is the thing. Server with Opteron 1214, 4Gb RAM, 2x500 Gb HDD and most importantly without a long-term contract will cost 59 euros. All other configurations of MultiServer are affected by the free installation action, and the top model has its own actions. All can be viewed on page 1 , 2 (stocks on the right)

I would be glad if all this is useful to someone, I will be even more happy to get feedback on the GoGrid testing experience (which, by the way, I don’t have a relationship)