Amazon is known as an online bookstore. But the Web site now wants to extend its Elastic Compute Cloud inside the European Union too. Its commercial server hosting platform it’s ready to make the move that will include much of the globe.

The main Amazon EC2 cloud services platform is now available to customers from Europe. But even if they get the chance to access the company’s services, the Europeans will have to pay higher fees than the customers from the United States. For example, each guest who operates the system from inside the European Union pays 10% higher than if it’s accessed from the US.

The prices for using Amazon EC2’s services will vary from 0.11 cents per hour, which means that the customer uses the smallest virtual CPU, to 0.88 cents per hour for the biggest CPU capacity. In the United States, the prices are 0.10 and 0.80 for the same services.

The EC2 system offers its users the chance to either build a virtual machine instance, called AMI on Amazon, or copy one from a library of AMIs custom-built as to perform particular assignments. Yet, the only limit put to the Europeans is that they will be able to use the services only on Linux and Unix-based AMIs. These programs were exactly the ones available while the EC2 was still in beta.

The Elastic Compute Cloud developed from beta in October, 2007 and the creators had the intention of adding Windows Server 2003-based AMIs. The WS2K3 AMIs is now available only for the United States users. Yet, Amazon announced this morning that they will soon add Windows AMIs for the Europeans in the near future.