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Just thought I could share this with everyone here...

I (and probably a lot of you) run my scripts (templogging, watering plants based on temperature etc.) scheduled, but I rather not be dependent on my home PC to do this.

An alternative is to run a virtual server in the cloud, but this is usally rather expensive, but amazon is currently letting you try their service for 1 year for free!

It's only a micro instance so it's pretty slow, but it works for running small apps/scripts, you can choose between both Linux and Windows servers.

So now my plants are actually getting watered from a cloud

Just thought it might interest someone else aswell

Link:
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

Yes, one micro-instance for one year!

But there are a few limits on the server (bandwidth etc.), and I think you "only" have 2 million I/Os per month included for free, which is fine when just running scripts. But during the first weeks if you are installing some software etc. it might go over that. Exceeding that does'nt cost that much neither, I used something like 9 million I/Os my first month, so I had to pay $0,86 that month... Felt quite reasonable

Everything is specified on their website though! See: http://aws.amazon.com/free/

Mine has worked perfectly. Kept my plants alive at home during my 2 week vacation running some powershell scripts


Remember that they will start charging you for the server after a year, it's not that much IMHO, but it won't be free forever... (If you choose to "pay as you go/on demand", they will charge $0.020/hour for a windows 2012 micro instance, sums up to ~$14-$15/month.)