Amazon announced today that they will now be offering reserved windows instances.  Reserved instances were available before, but only in the Linux flavor.  Here is how it works.  Amazon EC2 lets you purchase servers and pay for what you use.  You’re charged for bandwidth in, bandwidth out, and hourly usage.  For example, the “Small Windows Instance” inside of Amazon EC2 is about $.012 per hour.  This isn’t a bad price.  However,  the “Small” instance in Amazon EC2 isn’t a very big server and your cell phone probably has more processing power than this guy.  It has one CPU and 1.7GB of RAM.  If you purchase a “Reserved” instance, you are essentially pre-paying for a year.  But not really.  What really happens is that you pay an upfront cost for the year and then get a significant discounted hourly rate for what you use.  So if I wanted a Small “Reserved” instance for a year, I would pay the $228.00 upfront fee and then $.05 per hour for only the time the server is used.  Its an interesting model and definitely some cost savings there.  Amazon also gives you the ability to bid on unused instances at a large discount, but we’ll cover that in our next post.  It’s great to see to them constantly changing and adapting.  Gives you a good feeling that they are in this to win.  Now if they can only give me a static internal IP address, I’ll be completely happy.