What is Amazon Web Services?

Translation into this language is not yet finished. You can help this project by translating the chapters and contributing your changes.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud platform providing scalable and reliable web hosting services. Cloud computing is the delivery of computing and storage capacity as a service to a community of end-recipients. With AWS, you can easily set up a web server and access it in a few minutes. For new users, Amazon provides a free usage tier: you are able to run a web server for one year absolutely for free.

So, with AWS free usage tier you have:

virtual Linux server (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support);
30 GB of storage;
15 GB of traffic per month;
a dedicated external IP address.

And all this you can register and prepare for work in half an hour, if you have a credit card that Amazon accepts (Amazon will charge $2 during registration) and a phone (Amazon may request your identity verification).