Amazon offers virtual Windows servers for hire

Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service now offers time on virtual Windows servers alongside the existing Linux machines. Virtual machines running Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft SQL Server can be hired by the hour, with prices varying depending on time and available capacity.

Amazon Web Services has had a beta service offering virtual Linux machines for some time now, using the Xen hypervisor to provide virtualisation services. Amazon says that the test period is now complete and the service is ready for commercial use. The company claims at least 99.95% availability per year and now offers a professional Service Level Agreement.

For the Linux machines, there's a choice of five hardware configurations, starting at 10¢ an hour for an instance with 1.7 GB of RAM and 160 GB of hard disk. Data storage is another 10¢ per GB.

(lghp)