Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Heroku: Really they are an AWS reseller. This can make the initial setup a lot easier but means that you can be limited when it comes to wanting to integrate with other AWS services that they haven't implemented as yet.

Linode: Very similar virtual cloud provider, but found that they would frequently have large technical issues or outages and be unable to explain what had happened which did not build trust.

We haven't analyzed or used other products. We started using AWS when it was pretty new and have been very happy so have not needed to look at other products. We have, however used many traditional hosting companies to host dedicated web servers that we fully managed; and we still do maintain a number of traditional servers at OVH.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for me is the easy choice for servers. There are so many tools out there, specifically terraform and packer, that allow easy integration with EC2. It is great for any sized company. I have also used Google and Digital Ocean, but my first choice will always be AWS. The tools are invaluable.

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Migration from Shared/Dedicated to a VPS was the next step in scaling up our eCommerce business platform to our customer demands. Amazon Web Services uptime and speed really met our expectations, but the costs were unpredictable and ended up being too high for us. In hindsight, I might have considered going straight to Dedicated or Collocated.

We selected EC2 because of the maturity of the platform, the ease of deployment and the completeness of Amazon's vision. EC2 by itself, stacks up rather evenly with the competition. Where AWS as a whole excels is in the integration. While you may start with EC2 instances, the fantastic DB management of RDS makes managment of active databases significantly easier, Route52 DNS is cheap and works well, but their best additional services would have to be the variety of storage options.

AWS EC2 is far superior to Microsoft Azure, especially in up time, maintenance and cost.

AWS EC2 has been around awhile, it is very extensible, very flexible, very competitive, very evolving, very useful, very many options to do different things, however also meanwhile with hybrid cloud, we also are using Microsoft Azure VMs, as well as VMware vSphere ESXi among various other tools and technologies as part of software-defined data infrastructures.

EC2 is far broader than Microsoft's Azure cloud and offers separation from Microsoft if needed. The product features paired with usability and notoriety are far superior to Microsoft's. I wish I could state the same regarding other Cloud Solutions but we have not explored many

We chose EC2 over Azure because our tech stack was already invested in AWS. Documentation is better, and there is more community support for AWS services. EC2 is the pioneer in virtualization and we wanted to go with the stability of AWS. As far as pricing goes, EC2 can be cheaper depending on when rate cuts are made. Overall the industry is shedding costs and each cloud provider is catching up, so while cost is a factor, it is more important that your application stack is designed to run in AWS and on EC2 appropriately.

I have minimal experience with AWS alternatives. I used Azure for a short time, but found the console to be confusing. The number of services offered was also much smaller.

AWS is by far the most mature platform, but others are catching up. We will be keeping a close eye on the competition and using them whenever they're a better fit for the workload than AWS.

Pretty much every cloud provider has some equivalent to EC2, since it is essentially the most basic offering one could provide. We chose AWS because of its strong track record as a leading cloud services provider and because we were offered free credit to make the switch. We are happy with EC2, but I would recommend reviewing other options like GCE or DigialOcean Droplets, which may be cheaper for your use case.

EC2 is the original market leader and that is the reason why we chose to go with them, but Microsoft as well as others are catching up. It boils down to price and comfort level. The feature sets are mostly the same and the service will continue to be come commoditized as time goes on.

DigitalOcean and Heroku are two other leading competitors to the EC2 in terms of the type of instances they offer.

Digital Ocean:
Their Droplet service is equivalent to EC2 instance.
Their droplet's offer a low cost, no non-sense alternative to EC2. They are geared more towards hobby/student developers with limited options at considerably lower cost compared to EC2. The reason we choose EC2 is because rest of the ecosystem is tied in with AWS.

Heroku:
Its geared towards the same crowd as DigitalOcean but they offer a wider suite of applications similar to the AWS offerings. The Heroic shines in offering build packs that recognize the type of application automatically and take care of deployments. The reason we picked EC2 apart from the AWS tie in is because last time I checked, I didn't find Heroku suitable for setting up Databases.

We have evaluated other public cloud providers such as IBM Bluemix and Microsoft Azure. Our choice has clearly been on EC2 due to the expansive set of features and suitability to different workload types, flexibility around On-Demand instances, Reserved instances and spot instances. AWS EC2 instances and features offered are significantly superior to ones offered by other public cloud providers.

It is better than other products in terms of their support team, documentation and initially, you can set up your services almost without paying anything. Apart from them, AWS services do have the best availability in any region in compared to other cloud products available right now.

We were looking to another AWS structure which would help us to avoid a lot of low level data analysis. In fact it appears to us that if even though AWS Lambda allows a lot of really good integration with a data scientist module, our team in order to make sure we are in full understanding of the data process have preferred to continue working with AWS EC2.

With twice the years of experience the army of features that AWS brings to the table, it's hard to go wrong with AWS. If you run windows server or strongly need a hybrid cloud partial-on-premises solution, then Azure might be a better fit for you. If lowest-possible-budget is important and you don't need the large-scale security features, then cheaper solutions like Digitalocean are more appropriate.

If you want to scale your product very far, AWS is the tool to use – no doubt. It takes a lot longer to use than other products and is not trivial to use, but I have confidence my products can scale to meet the demands of millions of people with AWS. I do not have the same confidence in the scaling capabilities of any other host I have ever used.

The other big players standing against AWS EC2 are Azure, Google Cloud, and Salesforce, but still, they are growing in their field and stand far behind where EC2 is today. Other cloud services providers don't have a presence all across geography, which will cause a delay when your application is being accessed somewhere like South Asia. Support provided AWS EC2 is best in its class.

EC2 was broader in its offering than Azure seemed to be. Azure documentation I found to be lacking in some respects. EC2's cost model is more supportive of our business model above Azure's. Azure has the benefit of being tightly integrated with Windows/Microsoft products but EC2 still takes the cake.

Had to choose between EC2 and Google App Engine. Easily due to the support and plethora of services AWS has, EC2 was an easy choice to make. It was simple to use as well.

Less downtime. Better services. More performance. Better customer service

I currently use GitHub pages and Azure for projects, in addition to EC2. I use GitHub pages for my blog because it's free and convenient, and because my blog is a static site (HTML and client-side JS only) so there's no need for me to pay for an EC2 instance to host a web server. At my current startup we use Azure because they offered us a very generous free tier and their support is excellent. However, I still use EC2 for applications where the app requires an actual backend and I'm the only engineer, because I'm most familiar with EC2.