How to create AWS free tier account in 7 easy steps
Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers comprehensive free services when you register for their free tier account. The idea behind AWS free tier account is, new users can get familiar with AWS without investing a lot of money. This provides an easy way to understand and get hands-on with AWS environment with practical knowledge.
With AWS free tier account, you get 12-months free access to a vast array of AWS services. These services include EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), RDS (Relational Databases), ELB (Elastic Load Balancer), AWS Lambda, AWS SNS (Simple Notification Service), AWS DynamoDB and many more. Although there are limitations on how you can use these services. For example, you get 750 hours of t2 micro ec2 instance. If you use instance other than t2 micro then there will be charges.
Despite such limits, AWS free tier account is more than enough to start your journey with AWS and get hands-on with their most-used services. I will recommend you to take advantage of this and start your free tier account.
I have created a video about how to create an AWS free tier account. You can watch that or you can read this blog and follow these steps. So let’s get started.
Step 1. Open a browser and go to AWS free tier account.
To go to AWS, you can open this link in your favorite browser. Once on the page, you should click on “Create Free Account” button.
Once you click on that button, you will be asked to fill up your basic details like Email, Password and account name. You can change your account name later from AWS account settings. Enter your email with which you want to create an AWS account
Step 2: Contact Information
On the next page, you need to insert your contact information. The first thing you will need to choose is your account type. You have two options Professional or Personal. If you are a business or startup then you should choose Professional. In most other cases, you can choose Personal.
Your full name will be auto-populated with AWS Account Name from the last page. Next, you need to insert company name, Phone number and your country of residence with a valid address. This address will be used to generate your bills. You will also need to accept AWS terms. Once you are done with this click on “Create Account And Continue” button at bottom of the page.
Step 3: Payment Information
After the last step, you will be on the page where you need to submit your payment information. You can use your Credit/Debit card for this step. Please remember that AWS will test your card with 1$ transaction. So make sure you are entering valid card details. Do not worry, this amount will be refunded by AWS.
Also if you are not from the USA, then international transactions should be enabled on your card. So that AWS can validate you have entered correct card details. You can use your personal address for billing purpose or enter a new address. Once you have entered your payment details click on “Secure Submit” button.
Step 4: Confirm your identity
On this page, you need to confirm your identity. Here you need to submit your phone number. Once you click on a button it will show you a verification code. In a few seconds, you will get system generated call from AWS on the phone number you have submitted. You will have to enter that verification code. Once you enter the correct code, this will verify your account and you will see “Your identity has been verified successfully” message.
Step 5: Select Support Plan
This is where you need to choose your support plan for your AWS account. This is the only step in this process which may cost you more depending on your choice. There are 3 options.
- Basic Plan – free plan recommend for most users.
- Developer Plan – from $29/month. Email support. Suitable for start-ups.
- Business Plan – from $100/month. Email/Chat/Phone support. Suitable for the enterprise.
In the paid plan, you can take assistance for AWS professionals. They will help you solve your technical issues, recommend you about service and guide you for better and cost-effective architecture.
I will recommend you to choose the basic plan. This is more than enough for individuals and beginners. You can always opt for a paid plan in the future if you need it.
Step 6: Selecting your role
This is the last step in registering for your AWS free tier account. You need to choose your role and your area of interest. For your role, you can choose from Academic, Business Analyst, Software Developer, Student, etc.
Both of these choices do not matter that much. You can choose them as per your preference. Once you click on the submit button, your AWS free tier account will be created. On this page, you will also find out tutorials provided by AWS. You can take look at them.
Step 7: Login to your AWS console
Now we will log in to our AWS console for the first time. Click on “Sign In to the Console” button at the top right corner. Enter your email and password which you have used in step 1. Once you click on Sign in you will see your AWS console.
From this console, we can access different AWS services. Though at the start it may feel there are too many services, we will slowly learn most of them.
Conclusion
So we have crated our AWS free tier account and we are ready to start learning AWS. AWS has a lot of services and any wrong step can cause you to lose your data or generate a huge amount of bills. So there are a few steps we need to take to secure our AWS account. You can read about them here. I hope you will enjoy learning AWS. See you around.
