Item: Amazon Web Services
Rating: 6
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction

Pros and Cons

Pros

Scalability- Can expand from a few servers to hundreds or thousands quickly, and without long term commitments.
Pay as you go- If you need 10,000 servers to crunch through a problem overnight, AWS is the way to do it.
Variety of services- from basic computing with EC2, to specialized database, storage, and routing platforms AWS is designed to work well together and provide a full feature set to both growing startups and mature organizations.

Cons

Amazon will nickel and dime you to a great degree-- their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform charges not only for server run time, but for I/O, bandwidth (none is included in the per hour fee), storage, IP addresses, etc. While most of this is expected, the bill at the end of the month is sometimes a rather unpleasant surprise.
While I'll admit I'm not a developer, the platform can be unforgiving to those not used to an enterprise server environment (pretty easy to accidentally delete mission-critical data)

Return on Investment

Decreased complexity of communications chain between company and clients, no more hunting for a file in an email.

Likelihood to Renew

AWS is very reliable, and will scale as needed with an organization. We have yet to experience any downtime. Despite a higher than expected monthly outlay, we will likely continue to use it.

Likelihood to Recommend

Evaluated Rackspace and a few other similar hosts, but AWS offered far more flexibility and scalability for a small premium over these other providers.

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AWS in a startup environment from a non-developer's perspective