Alibaba Cloud Free Trial: How to Sign up and Get Started
Welcome
As a new user of Alibaba Cloud, you can access a free trial worth up to USD $450 or $1,300. This will allow you to learn about and experience a range of the products and services available across the Alibaba Cloud platform.
If you sign up for a free trial as an individual, you will get $450. If you are a registered company, you may choose Enterprise free trial and submit basic info to pass the enterprise real-name registration verification before starting your free trial to the value of $1,300.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to set up your account and use your free trial.
About the Free Trial
Before we start this trial, we will assume that you have not used Alibaba Cloud before. You must also comply with the following Terms and Conditions to access your Free Trial. These are:
- Only accounts created within one year are eligible for Alibaba Cloud Free Trial.
- With this free trial offer, a user can try each product listed on the free trial campaign page for free once. If you have multiple accounts, only one account is eligible to participate.
- Users who pass our Company Real Name Registration verification process are eligible for Enterprise Free Trial. Those who have already joined our Individual Free Trial are not eligible for the Enterprise Free Trial.
Once you have created an Alibaba Cloud account, your free trial can be used to access products from the free trial campaign page at www.alibabacloud.com/campaign/free-trial.
Your free trial is valid for up to 12 months for our Elastic Compute Service (ECS), and the credits for trialing other Pay-As-You-Go products will be valid for a period of 60 days.
Once you’ve registered, individuals and enterprises can try up to 17 trial products across a range of services including Elastic Computing, Storage, Database, Application Service and more. This includes $50 credit towards Object Storage Service (OSS) with 100GB standard storage; one month and 100,000 images in our intelligent Image Search, or unlimited tickets for a month as part of our developer after-sales support plan.
You can also put your credit towards getting started on our always free products, improving monitoring and management with CloudMonitor, try Auto Scaling to automatically scale your ECS instances based on your business’ real-time needs, or even start using DataWorks, our one-stop big data development platform with powerful open APIs.
You can get started with your free trial in three simple steps.
First, let’s look at how to sign up to a free account and add a payment method so you can access your free trial — worth up to $450-$1300 — and start using our extensive range of products and services.
Part One: Get Signed Up
1. Visit Alibaba Cloud’s website and click the Free Account button on the top right hand side of any page.
2. You will then be asked for your email address and to choose a password. Make the password as long and complex as possible. Anyone who manages to access your Alibaba Cloud account will have full access to all of your server resources, web hosting packages, firewall configurations and so on and therefore, choosing a strong password is necessary.
Take care to ensure that you choose the correct country, typically the one in which you are located (and specifically in which your credit card will be billed), otherwise you will have problems when it comes to entering and validating your payment details. If you specify the wrong country, you’ll need to start again and set up a new account, as this setting cannot be changed.
3. Next, you need to verify your email address. Click on the Send button. This will result in a numerical code being sent to you in an email. Open your email and look for the message — it should arrive within a minute or so.
When the code arrives, type it into the box and click Verify.
Now that your email account is verified, you need to enter some additional information such as your name, address and postal code. You are also asked for a mobile phone number, which needs to be verified too.
If you are registering for an Enterprise account, to access the Enterprise Free Trial benefits, you will also need to complete the Enterprise Real Name Registration verification process. If you have already joined our Individual Free Trial, you will not be eligible for the Enterprise Free Trial.
To complete the Real-name Registration for an enterprise, you must provide the name and registration number of your company, the registered address of your company, the name of the country in which your company is registered and a photo showing your company certification or registration form.
4. When you have entered your phone number, click the Verify button next to it. When you do this, a second window will pop up. Click the Send button on that window and a numeric code will be sent to your phone as a text/SMS message. Again, enter the code into the box once you have received it, and your mobile phone number will be marked as verified.
Your name and address are now on file, as is a verified email address and a verified phone number.
5. Next, you need to enter a payment method. This is to ensure that your Alibaba Cloud services continue to work if or when your free trial expires.
You can specify a credit card number, a PayPal account or both. Some services on Alibaba Cloud require a one-off payment, while some are Pay-As-You-Go. You can’t pay for Pay-As-You-Go services with PayPal. So, for maximum flexibility and to ensure that you can try out all that Alibaba Cloud has to offer, we recommend that you provide credit card details. You can supply PayPal details too, of course, to use when that option is available to you.
When you have entered your credit card details, the card needs to be verified and validated. To do this, Alibaba Cloud will charge a small amount (less than $1) to your card and the transaction record will include a 6-digit code. In order to verify your card, you need to provide either the code or the charged amount. To find this information, you will need to contact your card company (by phone or online) or wait until your next printed statement arrives.
In the meantime, if you are keen to get started, you can always register your PayPal account too. You won’t have access to all of Alibaba Cloud’s features, but you’ll be able to explore the system and use many of the features.
Again, to verify your PayPal account, you might receive a confirmation code on your phone.
Please note you will pay standard service rates for extra usage if you exceed the dollar value or allotted time during the free trial period. A full list of pricing options for all Alibaba Cloud’s products is available at https://www.alibabacloud.com/pricing .
Once you have completed these forms, you will be taken back to the free trial page at https://www.alibabacloud.com/campaign/free-trial , where you can start to access a range of Alibaba Cloud’s products and services.
Part Two: Accessing Products and Services through the Free Trial
Now that you have set up your new Alibaba Cloud account, let’s look at how to begin using our extensive range of products and services. A total of 17 Alibaba Cloud products are available for you to try, along with more than 20 of our always free products and services, during this free trial.
Note: You can ONLY access the free trial offer by selecting your desired product through the Free Trial page.
Firstly, to access the free trial go to the website. Now let’s look at how you can try one of our core products: the Elastic Compute Service (ECS). ECS is our online computing service that offers elastic and secure virtual cloud servers to cater for all your cloud hosting needs.
ECS has a simpler and more efficient management mode than physical servers. You can create instances, change the operating system, and add or release any number of ECS instances at any time to fit your business needs.
An ECS instance is a virtual computing environment that includes CPU, memory and other basic computing components. An instance is the core component of ECS and is the actual operating entity offered by Alibaba Cloud. Other resources, such as disks, images, and snapshots, can only be used in conjunction with an ECS instance.
With the free trial, SMEs and individuals can now add T6 burstable instances into their cloud migration plans without any cost commitments. T6 ECS instances are perfect for web application servers, development or testing environments, lightweight applications, and microservices. T6 instances are more cost effective compared with their predecessor, T5, and can reach a maximum bandwidth of 6 Gbit/s.
During your free trial, you can try our Burstable Type t5 Instances free for 12 months, or the latest t6 Instances free for 3 months.
Here’s how you can try out this Alibaba Cloud product, for free:
1. Make sure you are logged in to your Alibaba Cloud account and go to https://www.alibabacloud.com/campaign/free-trial .
2. Scroll down to the Free Trial Details area and select your target instance.
3. Click Try Now.
4. The following window will appear where you can set your ECS configuration options:
5. When you are happy with your ECS configuration, click to accept the Terms and Conditions and, then, click Try Now.
6. Your new instance will be set up and available in the Alibaba Console. To view the Console, just click the Console link in the top-right of your screen:
7. On the main Console screen, click Elastic Compute Service in the left-hand menu:
8. This will pull up the ECS Console, where you will see an overview of your current instances. Click on Instances on the left-hand menu. If required, this is where users can switch the operating system of their free trial. You will be restricted to the operating system you select when you configure the instance (ie Linux or Windows).
9. Next, you will see details of your new instance, and any existing instances you may have set up.
You can continue to add products and services from the free trial page at https://www.alibabacloud.com/campaign/free-trial and then view them in your Console.
Next, let’s look at what other Alibaba Cloud products and services are available for you to try out with your free trial.
Part Three: Available Products and Services
ECS is one service that forms part of our range of Elastic Computing products. Two further services are available under the free trial, these are:
Function Compute
Alibaba Cloud Function Compute is an event-driven, serverless computing platform where you can build and deploy your services, without the need to manage any infrastructure.
Under the free trial, you can manage one million calls and 400,000GB-seconds per month for free. This free offer has no expiration date and your free monthly quote updates automatically at the start of each calendar month.
Subsequent fees will be charged at a rate of $0.2/1 million calls or you can use a duration fee that depends on your network location. More details are available here: https://www.alibabacloud.com/product/function-compute .
Server Load Balancer
The Server Load Balancer monitors the health of your servers. It then, effectively, forwards each incoming request to your web application to the server that is best capable of handling it at the time.
So, the Server Load Balancer helps you to manage sudden spikes in traffic, minimize response times and maintain a 99.99 percent availability of your web application.
The Server Load Balancer service uses instances as its basic units and provides metering data for the instance billing cycle. Fees are calculated based on length of time of load balancer rentals and network traffic.
Under the free trial, you can receive a $15 Server Load Balancer credit that can be redeemed for the following:
- 1 public Server Load Balancer instance for 750+ hours
- 50–150GB downstream traffic (The actual traffic volume varies depending on the data center used.)
Please note, for Pay-As-You-Go products like Server Load Balancer (and OSS and Table Store, which we will look at later), you will receive dedicated product credits, which will be deducted automatically when you use the resources. If your usage exceeds the free trial offer, you will be charged at the standard rate, and you can choose to stop using the resources if you don’t want to get billed.
Let’s look at how to view your product credits for the Server Load Balancer, and other Pay-As-You-Go products:
1. Go to the product information box for the Server Load Balancer and click Try Now.
2. The following window will appear, click OK.
Your account will now be credited with the $15 SLB credit.
3. To view this credit, go to the Console and click Billing Management in the top right-hand corner.
4. Next, click Coupons in the left-hand menu.
5. Here, you can see the details of the coupons for the Pay-As-You-Go services that are available on your account.
Let’s continue to look at the other products and services that are available as part of your free trial.
Other Available Services
You can also use your $450 or $1,300 balance against a range of product and services on Alibaba Cloud, including databases, storage, application services and more.
Here’s a brief overview of some of your pricing options:
For databases, individuals can use one instance with the following configurations free for one calendar month under the trial for all three of the available services:
- One Core, 2GB
- 20GB storage
- WiredTiger storage engine
- Classic network
Enterprises, meanwhile, can use one instance for two months with these configurations for ApsaraDB for RDS, Database for Redis and Database for MongoDB:
- Two Core CPU, 2GB
- 40GB storage
- One 8GB master-slave instance
- One WiredTiger instance
- One MySQL/ Microsoft SQL Server/ PostgreSQL instance
Where the following services are available:
- ApsaraDB for RDS: this is an on-demand database service, which frees you from the administrative tasks associated with running MySQL, SQL Server and PostgreSQL servers. There are several different pricing options, but a 1 CPU, 1GB instance for MySQL is available to try for a month under the free trial and 2CPU, 4GB under the enterprise trial.
- ApsaraDB for Redis: is an automated and scalable tool to manage data storage shared across multiple processes, applications or servers. This service is available for a one month free trial with standard architecture and classic network for the free trial, or two months with the enterprise trial, then will charge by the hour with more details available at https://alibabacloud.com .
- ApsaraDB for MongoDB: is a secure, reliable and elastically scalable cloud database service that supports the ReplicaSet and sharding architectures. A 1 Core and 2GB service is available to try for one month with 20GB storage under the free trial, or 2 Core 4GB service for two months under the enterprise trial .
Under storage, you can access the following services:
- Object Storage Service: you can access 100GB of encrypted and secure cloud storage, 50,000 put/post/delete and 50,000 get/head requests for $5 OSS of your balance under the free trial. The enterprise trial can access $12 OSS credit, providing 500GB storage, 500,000 put/post/delete and 500,000 get/head requests.
- Table Store: this is a fully managed NoSQL database service. You can use 750 hours and 100GB storage on a capacity instance, or 50GB storage on a high-performance instance and get 50+ GB of downstream traffic for $19.
- Network Attached Storage: provides a file storage service for your ECS Instances. You will get $17 Table Store trial, which can be applied towards 100GB storage use for one calendar month.
Two application services are also available under the free trial:
- DirectMail: this service sends transactional notifications and batch emails. You can send 50,000 emails in total for free over a six-month period.
- API Gateway: this API hosting service lets you deploy and release APIs for your Alibaba Cloud products. For the first year you activate API Gateway, you get one million free calls each month.
Your free trial can also be used towards features such as:
- Content Moderation: over a 31-day period, you can scan 3,000 images for inappropriate content for free.
- Developer After-Sales Support Plan: supports an unlimited number of technical tickets for free on our basic plan, or $19.99 for our developer plan.
- Certification to Operate and Manage ECS: where you can watch an unlimited number of training videos and have two chances to take the certification exam for free.
- Enterprise Distributed Application Service: a PaaS platform that supports application life-cycle management. Billing is based on the number of nodes on which the service is deployed. Under the free trial, 20 instances are supported using the standard edition for free for one calendar month.
Finally, you will also get access to more than 20 of Alibaba Cloud’s always-free products and services, which cover elastic computing, network and security, monitoring and management, analytics and big data, application and more software from our marketplace.
That’s it!
Now that you know how to get started, just go to https://www.alibabacloud.com/campaign/free-trial and sign up today. We hope you enjoy using Alibaba Cloud and make the most of your free trial!
