Red Hat is opening the beta of its on-demand Enterprise Linux, hosted on Amazon's internet computing service.

The oafishly named Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) lets subscribers run applications certified for RHEL on Amazon's utility computing data center - the theory being that customers lacking the server space can place their applications unto Amazon's hardware, and dial up more capacity when needed.

As for pricing, subscriptions to the beta are $19 per month, per account for access to support and services.

Once signed on, customers can start server instances on Amazon EC2 — which charges $0.21 to $0.94 per hour, depending on the extent of use. Data transfers in will cost an additional $0.11 per GB, and data transfers out cost $0.19 per GB.

If that sounds palatable, you can head over to the beta sign-up page.

If not, may we suggest over here? ®