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Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) vs. Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

    Score8.9 out of 10
    N/AAmazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Users can launch instances with a variety of OSs, load them with custom application environments, manage network access permissions, and run images on multiple systems.

    $0.01

    per IP address with a running instance per hour on a pro rata basis

    Amazon S3

    Score8.8 out of 10
    N/AAmazon S3 is a cloud-based object storage service from Amazon Web Services. It's key features are storage management and monitoring, access management and security, data querying, and data transfer.N/A
    Pricing
    Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Amazon S3
    Editions & Modules
    Data Transfer
    $0.00 - $0.09
    per GB
    On-Demand
    $0.0042 - $6.528
    per Hour
    EBS-Optimized Instances
    $0.005
    per IP address with a running instance per hour on a pro rata basis
    Carrier IP Addresses
    $0.005 - $0.10
    T4g Instances
    $0.04
    per vCPU-Hour Linux, RHEL, & SLES
    T2, T3 Instances
    $0.05 ($0.096)
    per vCPU-Hour Linux, RHEL, & SLES (Windows)
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Amazon S3
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Amazon S3
    Considered Both Products
    Amazon AWS
    Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
    Amazon EC2 is super flexible compared to the PaaS offerings like Heroku Platform and Google App Engine since with Amazon EC2, we have access to the terminal. In terms of pricing, it's basically just the same as Google Compute Engine. The deciding factor is Amazon EC2's native …
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
    We have been using EC2 for so much longer, that even though we use Azure's other features and services more then the equivalent AWS features and services, we don't usually go for Azure's VM offerings first over EC2. I guess that that means this recommendation is mostly based …
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
    Amazon's been leading the way in the past few years in cloud computing and have easily become a name we can trust. When we looked at options, nothing compared to EC2 when you looked at the scalability and flexibility of the product. For the needs we were trying to meet, these …
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
    EC2 is a much more advantageous compared with the competitors because it has a much better console, configuration, auto-scalability, uptime, and many other features that are way better than other services I have seen so far. It also provides great backup services integrated …
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
    Performs well and competitive price. Clear Documentation would be another factor. I have found sometimes documentations are confusing and misleading.
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
    Compared to other IaaS providers such as Google Compute Engine, EC2 stands out due to its ease of use, good performance, and low price. Lately, Google Compute Engine seems to have improved noticeably, but we stack with EC2 for the trust and quality that has generated is in …
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
    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 …
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
    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.
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
    DigitalOcean and Heroku are two other leading competitors to the EC2 in terms of the type of instances they offer.

    Digital Ocean:
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
    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 …
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
    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 …
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
    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 …
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
    EC2 is the standard for flexibility, reliability, user experience, and scalability. It could compare to something like other external servers that only provide a command line option to access. Amazon allows for a dashboard to control user access, so security is rarely a …
    Incentivized
    Amazon AWS
    Chose Amazon S3
    Due to the best integration between other AWS services my company already used, S3 was the logic choice.
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon S3
    Pricing and Cost Structure are best:Amazon S3:Offers multiple storage classes: Standard, Intelligent-Tiering, Standard-IA (Infrequent Access), One Zone-IA, Glacier, and Glacier Deep Archive while other were costly and figuring out the monthly costs were difficult. The …
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon S3
    Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is the only AWS offering for object storage. DynamoDB is fantastic for unstructured data but does not handle object storage. The relational database service (RDS) is excellent but only applies to use cases with structured table data, and does …
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon S3
    They're both great. I really don't know the differences, but both have the same basic set of features, in my opinion. But, S3 is widely know as a greater tool, safer, and much easier. Also, it's used by and compatible with a lot of applications around the world. That made us …
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon S3
    Amazon S3 is more cost-effective then what Microsoft Azure offers.
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon S3
    We have not used any other alternative for S3 as we find it more than what we actually need for.
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon S3
    There are alternatives, Google Cloud Storage and Azure storage are the only real rivals, in my opinion, although most hosting vendors have their own flavor of an S3 like utility. However, most of those are actually just sub-vendors of S3. The most compelling case for using …
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon S3
    As most of our work loads and the under laying platforms are build on EMR, Spark and AWS Lambda, we did not find HDFS a suitable solution to have all of our data in. HDFS was very costly as we had to maintain data nodes only for the sole purpose of maintaining the extra storage …
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon S3
    I did not review or test with any other services. We started this business as a loyal and excited AWS customer and we remain the same today.
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon S3
    I haven't been personally involved in the decision to use S3, but in comparison to Dropbox or Google Drive, this offers a less robust UI to modify things, while being a cheaper storage mechanism over the rest.
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon S3
    S3 is sort of the de-facto standard for cloud-based storage right now, so it's hard to have a great basis of comparison. Google's drive and cloud offerings are fairly similar in functionality, although I would say the AWS management console is a lot easier to interact with than …
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon S3
    One could summarize very generally:

    If you need a filesystem:
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon S3
    Amazon S3 is where you want to default to if you want to store a large amount of data. Compared to formatted data that you can store in Amazon RDS or DynamoDB, you can store your data in any format you want on S3. And the data retention policy can be really useful if you use S3 …
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    92%
    Would buy again
    24 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    40 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    96%
    Delivers good value for the price
    25 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    39 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    26 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    40 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    21 Answers
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    36 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    96%
    Implementation went as expected
    25 Answers
    97%
    Implementation went as expected
    38 Answers
    Features
    Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Amazon S3
    Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
    Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
    Feature
    Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
    9.5
    21 Ratings
    17% above category average
    Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
    -
    Ratings
    Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime10.020 Ratings00 Ratings
    Dynamic scaling9.620 Ratings00 Ratings
    Elastic load balancing9.820 Ratings00 Ratings
    Pre-configured templates9.120 Ratings00 Ratings
    Monitoring tools9.120 Ratings00 Ratings
    Pre-defined machine images9.320 Ratings00 Ratings
    Operating system support9.620 Ratings00 Ratings
    Security controls9.820 Ratings00 Ratings
    Automation9.610 Ratings00 Ratings
    Data Center Backup
    Comparison of Data Center Backup features of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
    Feature
    Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
    -
    Ratings
    Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
    9.0
    8 Ratings
    8% above category average
    Universal recovery00 Ratings9.07 Ratings
    Instant recovery00 Ratings7.97 Ratings
    Recovery verification00 Ratings8.05 Ratings
    Business application protection00 Ratings8.65 Ratings
    Multiple backup destinations00 Ratings9.47 Ratings
    Incremental backup identification00 Ratings9.33 Ratings
    Backup to the cloud00 Ratings9.48 Ratings
    Deduplication and file compression00 Ratings8.73 Ratings
    Snapshots00 Ratings9.55 Ratings
    Flexible deployment00 Ratings9.28 Ratings
    Management dashboard00 Ratings8.18 Ratings
    Platform support00 Ratings8.78 Ratings
    Retention options00 Ratings10.05 Ratings
    Encryption00 Ratings9.86 Ratings
    Enterprise Backup
    Comparison of Enterprise Backup features of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
    Feature
    Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
    -
    Ratings
    Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
    8.8
    8 Ratings
    7% above category average
    Continuous data protection00 Ratings9.48 Ratings
    Replication00 Ratings9.27 Ratings
    Operational reporting and analytics00 Ratings8.48 Ratings
    Malware protection00 Ratings8.02 Ratings
    Multi-location capabilities00 Ratings9.58 Ratings
    Ransomware Recovery00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Amazon S3
    Small Businesses
    DigitalOcean Droplets
    Score8.7 out of 10
    NAKIVO Backup & Replication
    Score9.7 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
    Score8.7 out of 10
    Druva Security Cloud
    Score9.7 out of 10
    Enterprises
    SAP on IBM Cloud
    Score9.5 out of 10
    Druva Security Cloud
    Score9.7 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Amazon S3
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.5
    (67 ratings)
    9.2
    (74 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    9.7
    (5 ratings)
    7.6
    (12 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.5
    (12 ratings)
    9.8
    (21 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Amazon S3
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Amazon AWS
    Suitable for companies that are looking for performance at a competitive price, flexibility to switch instance type even with RI, flexibility to add-on IOPS, option to lower running cost with the regular introduction of new instance type that comes with higher performance but at a lower cost.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    Amazon S3 is a great service to safely backup your data where redundancy is guaranteed and the cost is fair. We use Amazon S3 for data that we backup and hope we never need to access but in the case of a catastrophic or even small slip of the finger with the delete command we know our data and our client's data is safely backed up by Amazon S3. Transferring data into Amazon S3 is free but transferring data out has an associated, albeit low, cost per GB. This needs to be kept in mind if you plan on transferring out a lot of data frequently. There may be other cost effective options although Amazon S3 prices are really low per GB. Transferring 150TB would cost approximately $50 per month.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Amazon AWS
    • Huge Diverse range of machine shapes are available which cater to our demand.
    • Ability to combine the machines and integrate them with any other service in AWS (Ex: RDS, S3)
    • Handling performance and scalability using auto-scaling, ELB configuration and high performance machine shapes.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    • Fantastic developer API, including AWS command line and library utilities.
    • Strong integration with the AWS ecosystem, especially with regards to access permissions.
    • It's astoundingly stable- you can trust it'll stay online and available for anywhere in the world.
    • Its static website hosting feature is a hidden gem-- it provides perhaps the cheapest, most stable, most high-performing static web hosting available in PaaS.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Amazon AWS
    • The choices on AMIs, instance types and additional configuration can be overwhelming for any non-DevOps person.
    • The pricing information should be more clear (than only providing the hourly cost) when launching the instance. AWS DynamoDB gives an estimated monthly cost when creating tables, and I would love to see similar cost estimation showing on EC2 instances individually, as not all developers gets access to the actual bills.
    • The term for reserving instances are at least 12 months. With instance types changing so fast and better instances coming out every other day, it's really hard to commit to an existing instance type for 1 or more years at a time.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    • Web console can be very confusing and challenging to use, especially for new users
    • Bucket policies are very flexible, but the composability of the security rules can be very confusing to get right, often leading to security rules in use on buckets other than what you believe they are
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Amazon AWS
    Due to princing, availability and scalability.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Amazon AWS
    You an start using EC2 instances immediately, is so easy and intuitive to start using them, EC2 has wizard to create the EC2 instances in the web browser or if you are code savvy you can create them with simple line in the CLI or using an SDK. Once you are comfortable using EC2, you can even automate the process.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    It is tricky to get it all set up correctly with policies and getting the IAM settings right. There is also a lot of lifecycle config you can do in terms of moving data to cold/glacier storage. It is also not to be confused with being a OneDrive or SharePoint replacement, they each have their own place in our environment, and S3 is used more by the IT team and accessed by our PHP applications. It is not necessarily used by an average everyday user for storing their pictures or documents, etc.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Amazon AWS
    AWS's support is good overall. Not outstanding, but better than average. We have had very little reason to engage with AWS support but in our limited experience, the staff has been knowledgeable, timely and helpful. The only negative is actually initiating a service request can be a bit of a pain.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    AWS has always been quick to resolve any support ticket raised. S3 is no exception. We have only ever used it once to get a clarification regarding the costs involved when data is transferred between S3 and other AWS services or the public internet. We got a response from AWS support team within a day.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Amazon AWS
    Amazon EC2 is super flexible compared to the PaaS offerings like Heroku Platform and Google App Engine since with Amazon EC2, we have access to the terminal. In terms of pricing, it's basically just the same as Google Compute Engine. The deciding factor is Amazon EC2's native integration with other AWS services since they're all in the same cloud platform.
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    Overall, we found that Amazon S3 provided a lot of backend features Google Cloud Storage (GCS) simply couldn't compare to. GCS was way more expensive and really did not live up to it. In terms of setup, Google Cloud Storage may have Amazon S3 beat, however, as it is more of a pseudo advanced version of Google Drive, that was not a hard feat for it to achieve. Overall, evaluating GCS, in comparison to S3, was an utter disappointment.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Amazon AWS
    • It reduced the need for heavy on-premises instances. Also, it completely eliminates maintenance of the machine. Their SLA criteria are also matching business needs. Overall IAAS is the best option when information is not so crucial to post on the cloud.
    • It makes both horizontal and vertical scaling really easy. This keeps your infrastructure up and running even while you are increasing the capacity or facing more traffic. This leads to having better customer satisfaction.
    • If you do not choose your instance type suitable for your business, it may incur lots of extra costs.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    • It practically eliminated some real heavy storage servers from our premises and reduced maintenance cost.
    • The excellent durability and reliability make sure the return of money you invested in.
    • If the objects which are not active or stale, one needs to remove them. Those objects keep adding cost to each billing cycle. If you are handling a really big infrastructure, sometimes this creates quite a huge bill for preserving un-necessary objects/documents.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
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