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Using AWS EC2 to offer a full technology platform with a small agency
August 31, 2018

Using AWS EC2 to offer a full technology platform with a small agency

Lynn Thames | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

We use EC2 instances to deploy development, staging, and test environments. We also use EC2 to manage Magento ecommerce sites for clients. We also deploy our SaaS customer portal solution on AWS EC2 instances. It is mainly used by our development team. It provides us scalable development capabilities and the ability to easily deploy dev copies of any client site.
  • Easily launch new instances of a 'saved site' using AIM.
  • We easily start/stop instances used for testing so that we don't have to pay when not in use. We wrote API calls to allow this to be done from our help desk software.
  • Automated backups using Lambda.
  • Hosting/Managing sites for clients is much better on AWS because we can control almost everything from the console.
  • I would say mostly in documentation. Things can be really complicated to try to learn from their existing documentation.
  • Lambda should offer more simple tools for retainage rules for automated backups.
  • Amazon SES should have a built in dashboard for tracking emails instead of making you use the API to develop your own.
  • Our profit levels on managed hosting has improved with using EC2.
  • We've saved a lot of money on in house servers by using EC2 to host our MSSQL for apps.
  • EC2 has allowed us to offer more services to clients without adding more IT staff to manage.
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.
Trello, Slack, Magento Open Source (formerly Community Edition)
It is least appropriate where you don't have the technical expertise to manage your own servers. And it's not very well suited for someone who isn't willing to monitor and manage the costs.

It's perfect for development firms and smaller agencies that provide managed hosting because the infrastructure is reliable and safe and it's much easier to manage the costs when you can deploy and scale at will.