Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) vs. Hetzner IaaS

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

Very affordable cloud server solution for people who can set up their own servers. There are quite a lot of regions (but sadly no Frankfurt) as well as a lot of templates to get started quickly with the servers, including Coolify, which allows you to run a PaaS inside Hetzner without too much hassle.

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

• VPS/Cloud servers.
• Networking
• Load balancers.
• Configuration via UI.
• Volumes

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

• No-downtime upgrade - lately we've had 2 forced downtimes because of planned maintenance, which is not very nice, but we managed.
• Managed databases would be amazing.
• Any kind of PAAS for running containerized apps (even though I think that's past what they want to be).

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

I think the UI is best-in-class, really. The UX is very though-through and nothing is missing or out of place. Kudos to their designer. Design is great, but they also have a CLI, which could be quite handy for AI agents. I think it has the foundation to scale the offering into something great, given the quality of everything they put out.

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

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 chose it because of price, because it's like 5-6 times cheaper while offering top-tier features and quality for a SAAS business. Also, we observed that they kept adding new features, so we were sure we could stick with them (Volumes, Private Networks, and other features were added after we had already become customers).

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

• Hetzner allowed us to retain great margins on our business.
• Hetzner allowed us to experiment with various self-hosted tools to safe money.
• It allows us to run the fast http servers without breaking the bank.

Incentivized