The latest post on the AWS blog reveals an update to the AWS Free Usage Tier, which has been made more attractive for the sake of free users. A Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 EC2 t1.micro instance can now be run for up to 750 hours per month without charge, and another 750 hours are available to users who are running Linux.

In addition to the added time cap, the Elastic Block Storage allocation has been increased to 30GB. This covers Windows’s memory requirements but is not enough to power Linux at the same time, though it is a big enough boost to pull in Microsoft customers that want to try out AWS.

Several other service enhancements were announced as well, including Elastic Load Balancer time and bandwidth and Amazon and SimpleDB storage. On top of that up to two million I/O requests can be now be processed per month, and a lot of documentation has been added.

• An updated (and even more helpful) Amazon EC2 Microsoft Windows Guide.
• Getting Started Guide: Web Application Hosting for Microsoft Windows.
• The Getting Started Guide includes a new section on Deploying a WordPress Blog.
• Our Windows and .NET Developer Center.
• A brand new AWS Microsite, with a focus on running Windows on Amazon EC2.
• Additional documentation on the AWS free usage tier, including eligibility information and some tips for making the most of it.

Amazon Web Services has been slashing rates and updating pricing plans in the past two or three years in order to maintain its position in the growingly competitive PaaS space. The last such initiative Amazon undertook recently before this latest update was in December, when a new model pricing model was coupled with the Reserve Instances service.