Amazon apparently has announced that they will provide free use of a Windows server on Amazon EC2 for a year.  

This is a big deal for us because the EC2 for Poets server package runs on Windows on Amazon's system. Now the ability to run a server for a year costs nothing, so there's no barrier for its use in education. 

We had asked Amazon to allow students to create servers at no charge so they could learn how to operate their own publishing and editorial infrastructure. I didn't imagine getting this much free server time for students. And of course the offer is open to everyone, not just in education. 

This is a huge deal. For example it will be possible for one user to host rivers for a whole company (even a very large one) for one year for nothing. Or publish linkblog feeds for a few hundred users -- all for nothing.  

Thanks to Amazon and Microsoft for putting this together.