Amazon reserved instances don't seem cheap.

If you check again on the calculator (you link to) and change the Billing Option to '3 yr Heavy Reserved' you'll notice that the effective monthly charge drops to $8.64/mth (~60% of 'On Demand').

The cheaper plan that you link to above has a few caveats though... Firstly they're OVZ VPSs not fully virtualised or paravirtualised servers (like Xen, KVM or others - IIRC AWS uses Xen). Whilst OVZ is great (I use it tons for self hosting my TKL appliances) it is nearly impossible to guarantee CPU allocation. It is also easy to overallocate (or oversell in this instance) RAM and other resources (while this hosting company say they don't and I have no reason to doubt them you never really know...).

So whilst for your purposes it may well be adequite it's not completely fair to directly compare them (because it's not an apples to apples comparison).

And you should be able to use AWS Free Tier. I know others have (although I can't test it as I'm not eligible).

And obviously feel free to use them if it works better for you. There are also a number of VPS providers that even support installation of TKL appliances so that is always an option. I know that the devs have dreams of supporting alternative providers but at this point it is impractical to support them all (there is no standard API for starters...). TKL devs chose AWS because of the flexability, the infrastructure and availability and AFAIK there is no one else that provides everything they do to almost every corner of the Earth...

And I apologise I recall that thread now you mention it. I did a bit of research and from what I read I didn't reach a conslusion on whether or not TKL appliances (running as Micro instance) were available as free tier. I read contradictory information in a number of places. And as I stated, unfortunately I can't test (because I'm not eligible for free tier). So whilst I couldn't find anywhere on the AWS site that explicitly states that TKL appliances are available via the free tier, I did read that all free AMIs (i.e. ones that don't have licencing fees) are eligible.

So have you actually tested it? I.e. signed up for the AWS free tier and then launched a (single) micro instance (with no other micro instance running) from the Hub? Or did you just launch it direct from the AWS market place?

I also found a few KVM with much lower pricing than Amazon, without needing to sign up 3 years.

And I mentioned a few weeks ago in separate thread, Amazon says tk is from marketplace and not eligible for free tier.

But I'm not sure that it would make any difference... Because the Hub is just a front end for AWS so AFAIK it should essentially be the same... Perhaps AWS changed their policy on Free Tier at some point? I'm sure others have successfully used it in the past. I'll get the core devs to double check with Amazon, and if you can't use the Free Tier (as you suggest) then they'll definately need to change that.

The TKL instance you were billed for which you thought should have been free tier, was it launched from the Hub or from the AWS Marketplace? I ask because I have discovered that from the perspective of the end user they are the same (the server itself is the same) but they are actually different images... So perhaps this makes a difference (i.e. perhaps they are only free when launched from the Hub?)

Yes, I've actually running one micro instance, eligible for free tier (from amazon page), and I'm actually being billed for it. THerefore, I had ask Amazon, and that was their reply then. TK apps are not eligible. Unless there is another way to launch the app.

But that destroys that theory... :(