Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) vs. DreamHost vs. Namecheap

Suitable for companies that are looking for performance at a competitive price, flexibility to switch instance type even with RI, flexibility to add-on IOPS, option to lower running cost with the regular introduction of new instance type that comes with higher performance but at a lower cost.

Incentivized

Dreamhost was previously a great web host with reliable service and top-notch features, but I can no longer recommend them. If you're looking for web hosting on a Linux platform (such as running PHP or platforms like Wordpress, Jooma, or Drupal), with simple pricing services, then this is the great service for you. One big downside is lack of phone customer support. This is especially frustrating because of their many issues the last few weeks, which aren't easily resolved or addressed by their team.

Incentivized

Namecheap is the absolute best domain registrar that I have used, and I have used just about all of the big names. They are priced right; they offer excellent customer service, their FAQs and documentation are excellent. They don’t spam you with offers for things you don’t want, and they don’t have misleading practices like hiding that the first-year fee is 1/10 of the regular annual cost. They don’t try to sneak in a change to your bill and charge you for multiple years when you’ve already set it to a one-year renewal. The only negative of Namecheap is its brand name. I have had a few raised eyebrows when I have told executives that we are using Namecheap. It doesn’t sound like a professional service. It sounds like a consumer service. This is terrible because they are the MOST professional service and reliable service of all the services I work with on a daily basis.

Incentivized

• Huge Diverse range of machine shapes are available which cater to our demand.
• Ability to combine the machines and integrate them with any other service in AWS (Ex: RDS, S3)
• Handling performance and scalability using auto-scaling, ELB configuration and high performance machine shapes.

Incentivized

• Customer service is industry-best. We've never had a problem that wasn't solved by them almost immediately.
• Their dashboard is extremely easy to use and doesn't cause any confusion at all.
• Their website speeds are good but not great. In an age when speed is important, they are good enough, especially for the price.
• They have a great backup feature.

Incentivized

• Domain registration is easy. This is big because when finding the perfect domain name, you have to do a lot of domain checking to see what is available. Namecheap not only makes this easy, but they recommend other domains that you might like instead, if the one you want is taken. They also allow you to sell domains and buy premium domains from other sellers if they are already registered to them.
• Free Whois Guard & privacy. This is HUGE. All those annoying phone calls and emails you get the second you register a domain, they will stop when you start using NameCheap to register your domains. This is because they provide free Whois and domain privacy with all domains, for the life of the domain as long as it is registered with them. I love this and it is a huge selling point.
• Easy updating and management of domains. This is a must. At many time, I need to update the nameservers of multiple domains at once. Namecheap makes it extremely easy to do this and allows for bulk updating. Things also seem to propagate quicker than other domain providers.

Incentivized

• The choices on AMIs, instance types and additional configuration can be overwhelming for any non-DevOps person.
• The pricing information should be more clear (than only providing the hourly cost) when launching the instance. AWS DynamoDB gives an estimated monthly cost when creating tables, and I would love to see similar cost estimation showing on EC2 instances individually, as not all developers gets access to the actual bills.
• The term for reserving instances are at least 12 months. With instance types changing so fast and better instances coming out every other day, it's really hard to commit to an existing instance type for 1 or more years at a time.

Incentivized

• They could have better deploy solutions for not so experienced users
• More integration with external services to automate some tasks
• Better ways to track hosting performance
• The user management could be easier to understand

Incentivized

• Hosting isn't brilliant, as there are other options available which do a better job from a security stand point.
• Would be great if the discounts were bigger for bulk purchases for longer renewals
• The layout/dashboard could be simpler to move around - not easy to find somethings

Incentivized

We have every intention of staying with Dreamhost, but we are a tad concerned with the company's recent involvement in high profile litigation and controversial topics. While we don't take a position one way or another on what type of content they should host, one concern we have is that repeated attacks on their infrastructure have caused significant downtime during business hours for us, and that's something we'll have to take into consideration going forward.

Incentivized

You an start using EC2 instances immediately, is so easy and intuitive to start using them, EC2 has wizard to create the EC2 instances in the web browser or if you are code savvy you can create them with simple line in the CLI or using an SDK. Once you are comfortable using EC2, you can even automate the process.

Incentivized

Personally I find it really easy to use and getting everything set-up and sorted is no problem at all, from initial account set-up and purchasing to the technical aspects required

Incentivized

AWS's support is good overall. Not outstanding, but better than average. We have had very little reason to engage with AWS support but in our limited experience, the staff has been knowledgeable, timely and helpful. The only negative is actually initiating a service request can be a bit of a pain.

Incentivized

Whether we're calling in on the phone, live chatting or emailing, we get immediate high-quality, native English-speaking support. This cannot be overstated when it comes to hosting, because support tickets are usually time sensitive and high stress. I've always had great experiences with the limited times we've needed to use DreamHost support. We've dealt with support for many other providers and no one comes close to DreamHost.

Incentivized

We very rarely have to reach out to customer support because the service is so quick, easy and intuitive to use. But when we have had to use it, the customer service was quick, reliable, answered our questions and addressed our problems without too much back and forth, and was native English speaking.

Incentivized

Amazon EC2 is super flexible compared to the PaaS offerings like Heroku Platform and Google App Engine since with Amazon EC2, we have access to the terminal. In terms of pricing, it's basically just the same as Google Compute Engine. The deciding factor is Amazon EC2's native integration with other AWS services since they're all in the same cloud platform.

We've tried a few other WordPress-specific hosts, as well as other shared hosting providers (Rackspace, WPEngine, and others). We have found that DreamHost gives the best balance of cost, performance, and features, for our needs. All vendors have their own pitfalls and shortcomings, and DreamHost isn't without its own, but it works for us.

Incentivized

Namecheap wins hands down on cost and ease of use. I have experienced zero compromise with using Namecheap. There was no trade-off to enjoy the cost savings. Namecheap does everything the other registrars do and more in some cases.

Incentivized

• It reduced the need for heavy on-premises instances. Also, it completely eliminates maintenance of the machine. Their SLA criteria are also matching business needs. Overall IAAS is the best option when information is not so crucial to post on the cloud.
• It makes both horizontal and vertical scaling really easy. This keeps your infrastructure up and running even while you are increasing the capacity or facing more traffic. This leads to having better customer satisfaction.
• If you do not choose your instance type suitable for your business, it may incur lots of extra costs.

Incentivized

• The service can really be a positive value with its very solid performance and lack of downtime issues found with other services.
• For those with limited hosting or web development knowledge, the service can be a challenge to fully utilize. Sometimes this may mean additional training.
• The service also provides a number of expansion opportunities for growing with greater functionalities.

Incentivized

• Namecheap has saved us hundreds of dollars a year on services that we were required to pay extra for by NetworkSolutions that Namecheap provides for free.
• Namecheap has made managing our domains simpler, saving us dozens of labor hours a year.
• Namecheap has encouraged us to experiment with new domain names to see which ones work best. We couldn’t do this with our previous registrars because it was too hard to change from one domain to another.

Incentivized