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Amazon EC2 Reviews

Overall rating

4.6

/5

145

Rating criteria

  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend8.74/10

Reviews by rating

Pros and cons

I really like their customer service, they are great and very very helpful.
I love how we can easily customize the virtual machine and how good amazon's customer service is. Our company uses it as a VM and we also run our products on it.
I've been extremely impressed with Amazon's open source integration into virtually all other services especially e-commerce which is why I recommend this app.
EC2's billing flexibility is a downside in that it's very difficult to give "off the cuff" estimates for how much a given EC2 setup might cost.
Sometimes it gets into deadlock state from which itself restarts it and we have seen the erasing of the data.
Really it's difficult to remember a time before EC2, getting a new hardware instance was typically weeks or months of effort, now it can be done in seconds.
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145 reviews

Recommended

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Tigran K.

Owner

Real Estate, self-employed

Review source

Overall Rating

Takes some time to figure out, but ideal for the job to be done

Reviewed a year ago

Transcript

Tigran: Hi, my name is Tigran and I'm a small business owner. I would like to give Amazon EC2 to a rating...

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Justin S.

DevOps Engineer

Computer Software, 201-500 employees

Review source

Overall Rating

O'Reilly Learning Platform Review: Reliable, flexible, and capable: just don't get lost in the details

Reviewed a year ago

Transcript

Justin: Hi, I'm Justin, DevOps Engineer, and I give O'Reilly Learning Platform four out of five stars....

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Raamnaaraayan R.

Information Technology and Services, 10,001+ employees

Used daily for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend10/10

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Deploying our containers is efficient for business application as EC2 provides effective isolation

Reviewed a year ago

1. We utilize EC2 services offered by Amazon for our container deployments through Docker in Testing & Production environments. 2. Since the infrastructure is provided by AWS, we needn't worry about regional downtime or security updates as they are fully managed by Amazon. 3. We define our docker containers within EC2 instance and we can trust in the isolation between the containers are properly maintained. 4. We can leverage to stop the EC2 instances in case we need to retain the application configurations for a later point in time and start it again for future use. 5. Hosting multiple backend cloud-based applications is feasible with EC2 and all configurational changes can be viewed completely in its CLI.

Pros

1. Amazon EC2 offers exceptional capabilities to deploy our customer-centric application in cloud platform at ease. 2. We can effectively utilize its AMI to spin up any type of EC2 instances with any OS based on our business requirements within minutes. 3. Its auto-load balancing feature is helpful when we carry out web hosting with diversified incoming requests from the user. 4. We can also retain snapshots of our EC2 instances which can be used anytime to replicate our application configurations & deployments. 5. As it offers licensing within the charges of its EC2 instances, we are able to utilize various vendor applications and not worry about license renewal or request.

Cons

1. If you wish to perform custom updates, it needs updating a lot of security patches along with its Amazon Machine Image which is quite complex. 2, Network configurations & ACL should be maintained properly so that there isn't any connectivity issues with our EC2-hosted applications. 3. We need to ensure to terminate the EC2 instances if we no longer require the service of it. Charges may incur if its left unchecked.

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Matthew N.

Information Technology and Services, 1-10 employees

Used daily for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend10/10

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EC2 Leads the Industry for a Reason

Reviewed 2 years ago

We've hosted with them for many years. Despite some little drawbacks, we wouldn't consider switching to another cloud provider. A technical project can thrive in the AWS ecosystem, with EC2 as the foundation for server capacity.

Pros

Superb pricing. Very reliable. Lots of choices. Great dashboard tools. When connected with CloudWatch, monitoring is great. Tools for networking and security are very flexible. Perfect tool to pull out of the technical toolbox when you need a server.

Cons

The variety of choices and configuration options increases the level of complexity. Ideally you know what you're doing before you get started. Windows pricing is a bit steep, but one is better off not running servers on Windows anyways. For paying customers with a certain volume, they need to include a free support level that at least allows bug reporting. We pay them more than $10K/month, and it's crazy we can't even send them a support email or do a chat without paying hundreds more per month.

AR
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Verified reviewer

Computer Software, 11-50 employees

Used daily for 6-12 months

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend7/10

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Good quality machine with room for improvement.

Reviewed 4 years ago
Pros

Pretty easy to use. Wide documentation is available in case you get stuck somewhere. And good quality machines.

Cons

For some reason, the p3.16xlarge (8 tesla v100 GPUs) machine is outperformed by p3.8xlarge machine (4 tesla v100 GPUs) (tested on multiple GPU supported model). I was using it for ML training and p3.8xlarge was taking 27 to 28 seconds for an epoch where p3.16xlarge was taking 31 to 32 seconds for an epoch even though it is a larger machine !!!!!! It has twice computing power on paper but that does not reflect in actual performance. I am not sure what might be the reason but paying twice but slower machine does not make any sence. I hope they will fix this soon.

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Carlos Alberto G.

Computer Software, 1-10 employees

Used daily for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend9/10

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Experience to grow

Reviewed 2 years ago

I have been able to solve many types of problems, from simple hostings, to applications that have grown and needed to scale. The configurations are simple for the most part, and you can really grow without the need for large expenses or investments of time in implementing astronomical solutions.

Pros

I think the whole EC2 environment is impressive, the set of tools allows for implementations of all kinds and on the scale that is necessary. Currently there are many configuration options, the user interfaces have improved making the use fluid and very easy to understand. All the implementations that I have had to carry out have been fast and the integrations with the existing resources have not been a problem.

Cons

In my case, I would like to have some extra tool available to manage the operating system of the instances.

AR
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Verified reviewer

Computer Software, 51-200 employees

Used daily for 1-2 years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend8/10

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Very good cloud service to host application servers!

Reviewed 2 years ago

Amazon EC2 has allowed us to host our application server very quickly and easily without worrying about the setup process and security measures, as it takes care of that. Amazon EC2 also has a lot of services for server monitoring and the ability to scale up or scale down servers when required which reduces operational costs as we only scale up when there is heavy load & scale down otherwise only paying for what we use. I am happy with Amazon EC2

Pros

Amazon EC2 has a wide variety of instances with various operating systems and hardware options to choose from, this ensures that we are able to select the server we need and have to pay only for that which helps in cost saving. It has options to interact with the server via application libraries, command line terminal & its dashboard which helps in managing the server. Amazon AWS also has other products that integrate really well and easily with Amazon EC2 making it the go-to choice for hosting application servers.

Cons

Amazon EC2 has a learning curve that a beginner may find difficult to grasp easily & quickly also its dashboard user interface is quite complex with a lot of options and it is easy for someone to get confused and overwhelmed by it.

AA
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Abdullah A.

Information Technology and Services, self-employed

Used daily for less than 6 months

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend5/10

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Journey With Amazon EC2

Reviewed 2 years ago

It is a good platform and with better computing power, connectivity, features, and customer support.

Pros

To be honest Amazon EC2 is better than Google's Cloud Computing Engine. It has more range of server region support, SMTP port support, Customer Support, Faster Connectivity, and Low latency.

Cons

It is not easy to use. If you are a new person to this world. It will give you a hard time deploying a server. Not well documented.

FA
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Francis A.

Banking, 1,001-5,000 employees

Used weekly for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend10/10

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AWS EC2 review

Reviewed 3 years ago

Easy to launch an EC2 instance into different subnets and regions

Pros

A very user friendly interface. easy to navigate and setup

Cons

The free tier eligible instance is just 1gb ram. cant really do much with it

AO
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Adebayo O.

Computer Software, 1,001-5,000 employees

Used monthly for 6-12 months

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend9/10

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Your Personal Server in the Cloud

Reviewed 2 years ago

Overall, Amazon EC2 was amazing both for learning the ropes of the AWS universe and for testing, and/or deployment of a new application in the cloud without going through the hurdle of buying and setting up a physical server

Pros

The ease of being able to spin up a server with a few clicks and under 5 minutes puts Amazon EC2 as the go to instance during testing and deployment of an application. You can basically scale horizontally or vertically as required which is more preferable when compared to on prem

Cons

You need to be well vast in computer security and a few basic concepts about a server to be able to properly configure the instance. Else, you run the risk of exposing your data if not setup correctly

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Darian P.

Insurance, 201-500 employees

Used daily for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend8/10

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Review of Amazon EC2

Reviewed 10 months ago

Overall I think EC2 is a good product especially if cost is not as important. The ability to configure everything through the cloud plus the reliability of AWS is very hard to beat.

Pros

We like how quick it is to setup and clone instances with EC2. When doing development it is fairly easy to spin up test instances for little cost. Speaking of cost, since EC2 has so many options/tiers it is quite simple to choose a plan/tier that minimizes our costs but maximizes our output. The security aspect of EC2 is also very intuitive requiring that we have keys to access any particular server. This is an upgrade compared to when we had everything locally.

Cons

This is not built out of the box but we have had the situation come up where we wanted to start and stop an instance on a schedule. EC2 does not have a built in solution to handle both of these steps. Although I mentioned the flexibility of the configurations, the cost still is quite high especially coming from a local solution. However from our perspective it was worth it for the other features it provides.

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David Felipe C.

Computer Software, 51-200 employees

Used monthly for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend6/10

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Computing on the cloud (just if you need more AWS products)

Reviewed 4 months ago

It's a powerful tool when used for a good use case , for example a couple years ago the only way to run a prometheus database on Amazon was via EC2 , and since it was deployed on my infrastructure I applied the same security groups and networking configurations that I had for other services.

Pros

Once you have an infrastructure created on AWS creating instances on EC2 is easy , networking capabilities are very powerful and give you a lot of flexibility for different use cases. You also have a wide variety of options to choose from.

Cons

It's too heavy for very simple use cases, for example if you want to deploy a wordpress server or a simple django application you will need to understand and take into account a lot of networking settings. It's not cheaper than other services like DigitalOcean or Linode, and the heavy-lifting is real

AR
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Verified reviewer

Marketing and Advertising, self-employed

Used daily for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend9/10

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It gives you exactly what it should

Reviewed 10 months ago

After I figured out the complicated interface, I was being able to use my virtual machine and it was working 100% of the time and I had an amazing experience with it. Definitely suggest to anyone. The price is still high but much cheaper than Google or Microsft

Pros

My virtual machine was always up, like I've never seen it ran out or restart or anything. It was always running which is what I was looking for in a server, Consistency.

Cons

The Amazon AWS platform is too confusing, like they think you have to be an Amazon employee to understand the interface, too many buttons, too much information that I (as a marketing professional) don't need to know or I won't ever use. They really need to work on a simple platform for people who are not an engineer and let us just choose a simple plan and go with it.

AR
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Verified reviewer

Logistics and Supply Chain, 201-500 employees

Used daily for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend9/10

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Quick to use and cost efficient

Reviewed a year ago

Overall, Amazon EC2 gives us a cost-efficient method of deploying apps and services we need both for internal and customer-facing apps.

Pros

I like the on-demand features of Amazon EC2. It's very easy to spin up a powerful VM, scale it up or down, and switch it off when not in use. It gives us a very easy way to provision computing capacity as our need comes.

Cons

I think it'll be nice to have some VM operations to be doable in the AWS console, like installing SSH keys, etc. These are readily available in Google Cloud console, in comparison.

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Pawe W.

Computer Software, 11-50 employees

Used daily for 6-12 months

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend8/10

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Cloud computing done easy with EC2

Reviewed 8 months ago

I really enjoyed using EC2 and AWS overall, I have used it for many of my projects and it worked seamlessly.

Pros

EC2 was the core infrastructure in the Platform I have developed for a few months. It has provided computing sources for a Web App that was used extensively by hundreds of clients. It was reliable (no downtimes were recorded) and quite easy to set up. We have used different configurations of EC2 to meet our efficiency needs

Cons

The learning curve for EC2 and AWS overall is quite steep, so the first steps were quite hard, but it was worth the effort to learn administrating EC2.

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Nathan S.

Used weekly for 6-12 months

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend8/10

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Cloud Computing at its best with a catch

Reviewed 4 years ago
Pros

Server Deployment is easy - We use Amazon EC2 for deploying cloud servers for our applications. We have been able to easily deploy multiple configurations from the panel at the click of a button. Y Built on Linux - EC2 is built on Linux so if you have an understanding of Linux, it makes using EC2 easier. Cost effective. You really can't beat the cost here, being able to scale at a fraction of the cost of hosting an actual server is worth investing in EC2. You can easily turn off instances of EC2 servers when not in use to save money. Reliability - Amazon servers have extremely good uptimes which means they are working most of the time, in fact, we have not experienced any downtime since we switched from a fixed host provider.

Cons

As with any platform, learning to use Amazon EC2 can take some time. We had to have our team re-trained to start using it. So it is not ideal if you just want to deploy right away. Also AWS services are complicated to use in general so you may find it confusing use. For example, the billing panel can be confusing to use if you have multiple instances of servers running. Because of the complicated nature of the Admin panel, it is easy to get lost in features and tools available, so you are better off staying within the areas of the admin area you know.

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Winston M.

Computer Software, 51-200 employees

Used weekly for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend9/10

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A great choice for scalable projects.

Reviewed 3 years ago

My experience in general with this software has been very positive, it has served me for different types of projects, and even projects outside of aws, since the tool can be easily integrated with other sources, be it other websites, databases, computers, etc. It also integrates very well with the other tools of aws.

Pros

What I like most about Amazon EC2 is that it is a tool that has many uses is very versatile and allows me to customize the requirements that I need according to the project that I am developing, I can increase the amount of ram, hdd, processor memory easily from the website, it also has a high level of security, and allows you to manually configure many functions, such as ports, tasks, the control panel from the website is very intuitive and with many features, it also has a command line for more cases specific.

Cons

It is an easy-to-use tool for basic use, however for something more specific it is really complex, the most difficult to learn to use is the console, it has many commands.

AM
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Antonio M.

Information Technology and Services, 11-50 employees

Used daily for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend10/10

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The best solution for all your computational needs

Reviewed 2 years ago

We used it to host the web app we were developing, together with all other websites we were making for that business. We even hosted our newspaper website WordPress setup with Amazon. The developers were extremely happy with Amazon services and were in touch with people from Amazon who were amazingly nice whenever I interacted with them.

Pros

Whatever we needed, Amazon supported. They even had a Wordpress hosting environment that we could transfer our newspaper website to.

Cons

The price was not low as we had a need for a large number of machines and the amounts quickly added up, but it was still manageable.

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Gouri S.

Telecommunications, 501-1,000 employees

Used daily for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend9/10

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EC2 Instances for big data clusters

Reviewed 10 months ago

Overall experience using AWS EC2 is very good, we are able to create the cluster for the big data set-up, It's easy and fast to create instances on AWS.

Pros

The best thing about EC2 Instance is - 1. It is easy to create by just clicks 2. Easy to access or integrate with Other AWS services like RDS 3. Easily we can change the RAM of the server as per the requirement

Cons

What I disliked the most about AWS EC2 is the documentation part is little complex to understand for the new user

AR
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Verified reviewer

Computer Software, 10,001+ employees

Used other for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend8/10

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Simple cloud virtual machine hosting

Reviewed 3 years ago

EC2 has provided me with excellent, low-cost VM hosting in the cloud for many years

Pros

EC2 is a game-changing technology that enables you to rapidly spin up a virtual machine in the cloud at very low cost

Cons

Compared to newer on-demand hosting options, the EC2 model is less flexible

JS
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Justin S.

Computer Software, 201-500 employees

Used weekly for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend10/10

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Reliable, flexible, and capable: just don't get lost in the details

Reviewed 2 years ago

Once you get over the pricing hurdles, EC2 provides a remarkably consistent experience. I haven't had any real problems with it.

Pros

EC2 is a remarkably easy service to understand: you pick a virtual machine of a given type and launch it. AWS has the sort of SLA that can't be matched by an on-premises network environment. Even better, since EC2 instances can be billed for very short periods of time, you can spin up an incredibly powerful machine for a short time without having to worry about provisioning.

Cons

EC2's billing flexibility is a downside in that it's very difficult to give "off the cuff" estimates for how much a given EC2 setup might cost. AWS has a nice cost calculator, but even with that, pricing it out still isn't easy.

AR
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Verified reviewer

Information Technology and Services, 1,001-5,000 employees

Used daily for 1-2 years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend10/10

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One of the best IaaS

Reviewed 4 years ago

I use it for my personal projects. I host all my websites on it. We also use it at work. All of our company's servers are on AWS.

Pros

1. The ease of use. With in few clicks and configurations, you get a server up and running. 2. Stability. I have never seen a down time/failure of any of my EC2 instances. 3. Saving of money. You only pay what you need and you can easily configure what you need. Saves ton of money.

Cons

There is nothing I can say I do not like. Everything of EC2 has been working great.

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Duane W.

Marketing and Advertising, 1-10 employees

Used daily for 2+ years

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Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support

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Worst Support

Reviewed 7 months ago

worst, billings all ways contentious, support is retarded.

Pros

Nothing interesting, just the same old slugged things and keep changing.

Cons

Horrible services, bad support, keeping charging when their instances not working properly.

AR
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Verified reviewer

Information Technology and Services, 11-50 employees

Used daily for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend7/10

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One of Best Cloud Service Provider

Reviewed 2 years ago
Pros

This is a very secure, high performing and highly available server.

Cons

Its UI is a bit confusing for the starters and updating the servers takes time as we need to apply every patch manually.

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Abdul Waudud C.

Computer Software, 11-50 employees

Used weekly for 6-12 months

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend8/10

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Great Service to Host Application Server on The Cloud

Reviewed a year ago

It works great for me and I will continue using Amazon EC2 Service.

Pros

Amazon EC2 is a great service to host application servers on the cloud. It is my go-to Cloud Server Solution for a few years now. You can spin up a server almost instantly and you can select from a different variety of CPU Core, Memory, and Storage tire. You can also select from thousands of pre-loaded servers with many flavors of Linux and Windows OS. It's a very fast, secure, and reliable solution. It also supports load balancer, so you don't have to worry about your server resources during peak traffic season.

Cons

It takes a while to navigate through the different aspects of the service and requires some technical knowledge. For deeper dive into the platform, there is a steep learning curve. Also, the pricing structure is a bit costly.

AR
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Verified reviewer

Outsourcing/Offshoring, 10,001+ employees

Used daily for 6-12 months

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend6/10

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Not a great software package for providing cloud storage services.

Reviewed 4 years ago

We have implemented in a project in which we process the data every hour and the client requires to review it hourly for this we used this and we had an average experience with it not good that much and nor bad with it.

Pros

1) We do not require huge memory base for storing our data on cloud storage. 2)Its data processing speed is very fast and accurate. 3)Its cost is also not that much high.

Cons

1) Sometimes it gets into deadlock state from which itself restarts it and we have seen the erasing of the data.

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Juan Carlos G.

Computer Software, 11-50 employees

Used other for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend10/10

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Your computer on the cloud

Reviewed 2 years ago

Very good option for cloud computing i recomend it to anyone but you should be ready to read everything to avoid unnecesary costs.

Pros

Easy to setup any machine needed in your enterprise Capable of setup specific images and replicate them several times. Compatible with most OS in te market Windows ,linux ,etc. several prize options. Several hardware options and can be scaled anytime

Cons

We have an issue with incorrect setup of elastic ip of a computed and it cost us like 250 Dollars for unsetup static ip.