Amazon EC2 launched as limited public beta August 25, 2006 — single m1.small instance at $0.10/hour
Created 2026-06-21
Summary
Claim: Amazon EC2 launched as a limited public beta on August 25, 2006, with a single instance type (m1.small) and a single region. Original price: "10 cents per clock hour" for a ~1.7GHz Xeon-equivalent, 1.75GB RAM, 160GB disk, 250Mb/s instance.
Source: AWS "Amazon EC2 Beta" blog (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon_ec2_beta/).
Confidence: Verified (primary).
Why this matters for Candid: The dated launch price is the primary anchor for "compute got cheap." Without EC2 the SMB story still rests on dedicated/colocation pre-cloud (Pre-cloud dedicated/colocation pricing 2004–2007 — managed dedicated $250–$1,400/month; budget $89–$199; 1U colo ~$50/month).
Related entries
Referenced by (8)
- reference Research brief: the falling cost floor of "real" web functionality for SMBs (June 2026) relates-to
- reference EC2 entry price fell from $0.10 to ~$0.005/instance-hour by 2018 — ~20× cheaper at the floor (Jeff Barr, HashiConf) depends-on
- reference EC2 per-second billing introduced October 2, 2017 — replacing hourly increments in place since 2006 relates-to
- reference The structural shift: capex (server + sysadmin) → opex (managed service, administration included) relates-to
- reference NYT 2007/2008 EC2 archive job — one engineer ran OCR on the paper's scanned archive on a personal credit card for ~$200 depends-on
- reference Timeline 2004–2014: the decade when each of the three historically-expensive parts independently got cheap depends-on
- rule R1 — Anchor the falling-cost case on the decade 2004–2014 (infrastructure + parts + data); AI-assisted coding is NOT the spine depends-on
- reference Pre-cloud dedicated/colocation pricing 2004–2007 — managed dedicated $250–$1,400/month; budget $89–$199; 1U colo ~$50/month relates-to