[johnnygood]

The beauty of this is that it's a way for them to let people try Ubuntu Server quickly and easily. While I don't remember the articles, we've all seen the ones talking about how demand isn't linear. Lots of people will try something free that won't try something that costs even a cent. So, Canonical will pick up the 2 cent tab (the cost of one hour of a Micro instance). Many will try it. Heck, if a million people try it, it will cost Canonical $20,000. That's a lot of exposure for a small amount of money. Companies are paying way more than 2 cents per click in advertising. Booting up an instance to try it out is a lot more engagement and investment in the process than an ad click.

Canonical is getting smart people to engage with their product for several minutes (if not the whole hour) for a mere 2 cents. That's one of the best campaigns I've seen and far more effective and cheaper than AdWords for what they're doing.

[vimalg2]

I was provisioned a Small instance (with the 1.7GB ram). Did everyone else get a Micro?

Unixbench 5.1.2 gave me a score of 133.5 on the one I booted. Anyone know if this is pretty much par for the course on a EC2.small?

BTW, I've gotten excellent unixbench numbers (around the 500 mark) on one of lsc's smaller Xen instances(512M from prgmr.com)

[nadim]

150.9 here.

[SpikeGronim]

It is important to normalize those numbers by accounting for steal time.

http://3spoken.wordpress.com/2006/12/10/cpu-steal-time-the-n...

[bad_user]

I agree, it's probably a good idea, but in order to make statements about effectiveness, you've got to show some numbers.

What I'm thinking is that while the conversion rate may be a lot better than with something like AdSense, how many people are going to find out about this promotion? (that aren't already ubuntu users)

[nivertech]

Micro instance will only make them disservice. It will freeze and scare potential new Ubuntu users.

[swaits]

No, not in my experience.