AWS - launchpad for VPS' at usage-based billing
August 29, 2018
AWS - launchpad for VPS' at usage-based billing
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
We have been using Amazon's EC2 service to host our Magento eCommerce website on Amazon's AMI. We have been doing this for 10 months now, and between uptime and manageability we are very pleased. We chose this platform for the attractive prospect of usage-based billing and potential for provisioning more resources as we grow as well as auto-scaling and load balancing options. The migration was hand-in-hand with a re-development, platform and host were new, so comparing to our old Wordpress store on shared hosting would not be apples to apples at all. All said, we have been please with AWS EC2 on the whole.
- It's a very easy task to fire up an EC2, even for first-timer education. Launch a free account, pop into EC2, and follow the prompts.
- Snapshots and Images are particularly nice, fast and easy to work with. I've had my entire catalog erased by mistake, and been able to restore content within minutes.
- Access to data is right there - you have root access to your virtual machine, no clunky interfaces, no negotiation with hosts for resources.
- EC2 is quick to launch, but ends up being an unnecessarily complex rabbit hole. Most users on EC2 are attempting to accomplish the same goals: host content with close to 0 fault tolerance. I want people to be able to buy my stuff. I should be able to one-click a load balancing and autoscaling package for my existing EC2 instance that will scale resources in proportion to my incoming sessions and corresponding usage. Instead, setting up advanced EC2 features ends up requiring an expert to accomplish functions which should be readily available.
- Usage-based billing sounds like you may be getting the best value, but understand that Amazon is not losing money on hosting, and costs are no longer entirely predictable. Cents for data piles up quickly and once you get load balancing up with a influx of customers, your finance department comes at you waving your budget around...
- AWS has been a costly experiment, only from the surprise costs of hosting.
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.