Likelihood to Recommend We recommend AWS Lightsail with Plesk Ubuntu Web Admin (free) edition for launching WordPress websites. Pricing starts with 3.5$ per month and they are providing 3 months free. In order to access advanced features of Plesk, consider upgrading to paid Plesk plans that starts with 13.50$ per month (10 websites supported). Up to 40% discount is available for the first year. Anyway, even the free Plesk Web Admin version is by itself self sufficient with free SSL.
Read full review Good for transferring over an existing site. Truth be told, I haven't used it for building a brand new site-- I know that this is a fairly common thing but I just never needed it. For what I've used it for, it has worked well. For a small business with anyone with a little bit of technical skill, it's surprisingly good.
Read full review Pros Starting an instance and accessing it for testing purpose, demo or production deployment its always easy. All the things which are available over AWS are pretty well managed and easy to use. You might find everything you required for an product and other development over AWS. Its suitable for both either an enterprise or an startup Various resources and documentation are available in case you struck somewhere. Read full review Registering a domain - I've found their site to be the easiest to navigate Website builder - their website builder is user friendly Email hosting - easy to set up and use, wether in an email app or online email. Wordpress hosting - I have multiple wordpress sites I use under one account Their customer service is always very helpful and easy to contact. Read full review Cons If there is one thing I think AWS needs improvement on, it is the administration dashboard. It can be a nightmare to use especially when trying to access billing. This could be made better, honestly, as there should be a simplified way to access simple admin features. While AWS was fairly easy to integrate into our solutions, it is not as easy to use without some IT knowledge. The dashboards are complicated and designed for someone who is computer savvy. If you are just want to keep track of billing, for example, you may need to take a course or spend a few hours with someone being walked through the admin console. AWS does tend to be slow at times. If you do not have a fast internet connection, it can take time to access services that are hosted on AWS. This is not always the case but we have had clients complain about this if they are trying to access a service from multiple points (IP addresses). The only real fix we found was to make our files cache to another server and only keep current data accessible to clients. Read full review Support agents are woefully undertrained, even in knowledge of their own products. Support agents will always try to upsell you, even when you're dealing with an urgent, high-impact issue. There's no guarantee of uptime, and there will often be gaps in service as part of normal procedures. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We are almost entirely satisfied with the service. In order to move off it, we'd have to build for ourselves many of the services that AWS provides and the cost would be prohibitive. Although there are cost savings and security benefits to returning to the colo facility, we could never afford to do it, and we'd hate to give up the innovation and constant cycle of new features that AWS gives us.
Read full review We can't really choose anyone else and the cost/effort of moving all of the hosted data would be extremely large, and we just have to stick to them, and hope they improve service
Read full review Usability Our cloud platform architecture was designed in order to collect, analyze, and optimize modern networks, from AWS-powered computing, networking, storage, and more. So, we needed a reliable, scalable, and secure global computing infrastructure. Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing were key features in our evaluation and later on for scalability and high performance. We being a cybersecurity company, we needed to ensure that our cloud provider utilizes an end-to-end approach to secure and harden the infrastructure, including physical, operational, and software measures - which AWS had all in place.
Read full review Some integration could be much cleaner and smoother. Seems it used to be easier. Plus, they took away the catch all email feature.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Availability is very good, with the exception of occasional spectacular outages.
Read full review Performance AWS does not provide the raw performance that you can get by building your own custom infrastructure. However, it is often the case that the benefits of specialized, high-performance hardware do not necessarily outweigh the significant extra cost and risk. Performance as perceived by the user is very different from raw throughput.
Read full review Support Rating The customer support of Amazon Web Services are quick in their responses. I appreciate its entire team, which works amazingly, and provides professional support. AWS is a great tool, indeed, to provide customers a suitable way to immediately search for their compatible software's and also to guide them in a good direction. Moreover, this product is a good suggestion for every type of company because of its affordability and ease of use.
Read full review I think a lot of companies can learn from GoDaddy's support team. I have found:
Chat or phone support is almost always available. Their agents are friendly and helpful. Their agents seem to care and be knowledgeable about a wide range of issues. I rarely have to escalate my problem to get the support that I need. If they can't help me, then they can tell me why something is happening and direct me to resources that can fix my problem. page V CEO (Chief Executive Officer)
Read full review Implementation Rating The API's were very well documented and was Janova's main point of entry into the services.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Amazon Web Services is well suited when we have a huge amount of data to store, process, manipulate and get meaningful information out of. It is also suitable when we need very fast data retrieval from the database. They provide a superior product at a fair price which allows us to further our goals and push the limits of what we are capable of as a team / company.
Read full review We use
Wix currently for our online store. It is nice and easy to use, but they don't offer the email domains as well (the last time we checked). They have pretty decent customization of the web page, but still limited. We're going to try it with GoDaddy, since we have other services from them already. It just doesn't make sense to pay two different companies for something we can do with one.
Read full review Return on Investment AWS has lowered our employee cost, because you don't have to hire Network/Server Admins to manage infrastructure. Increased productivity by incorporating Continuous Integration with AWS and our development life cycle. Increased customer confidence by being able to provide HIPAA level security in our development and production environments Read full review GoDaddy reduces our ROI by costing me in non-billable hours. I don't charge clients for sitting on the phone with tech support to power cycle the server or fix the php.ini file, so my $/hr takes a hit. Their nickel&dime strategy requires I have an additional conversation with clients about their max recurring fees. Small as they are, I need approval for upping their bill. GoDaddy is only the cheap option if you don't value security, stability, or performance. Read full review ScreenShots