Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) vs. UpCloud

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

If you're looking for a cost-effective solution then this is a good choice, be sure to keep on top of your balance! The 100% uptime is also a nice addition, although not unique in a cloud hosting service.

Incentivized

• A great variety of choices in Amazon Machine Image (AMI) types. Users can select a more basic type to run generic workloads, but also have the choice to pick an AMI pre-installed with specific services in the AWS Marketplace.
• The range of instance types can support the usage from a student's exploration (inexpensive general-purpose nano instances) to an enterprise's most intense workloads (memory or storage-optimized instances with terabytes of memory and ultra-fast network connection).
• The pricing options, from regular instances, reserved instances to spot instances allow users to get the job done and make smart choices about how much they want to pay and when they want to pay.

Incentivized

• Pricing
• Ease of use - super easy to manage existing servers and deploy new ones
• Great customer service

Incentivized

• This service is a bit difficult to consume. New users need a big learning curve to use this service effectively.
• UI for EC2 service is a little complex and at many places, it misses detailed explanation.
• Sometimes it takes too long to create images of EC2 instances. This keeps your EC2 up for that extra time. When instances are heavy, it penalizes a lot of money.

Incentivized

• The billing reports are quite hard to read, could be simplified
• A control panel function would be useful
• The re-billing process could be better, not so cut throat if you miss a payment!

Incentivized

It's easy and straightforward for a technical person to use it via SSH, but when working in cross-functional teams, using Amazon's web console is difficult for this particular service. Most modern cloud providers provide a more seamless user interface to interact with their cloud machines, and the same should have been the case with EC2.

Incentivized

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

Azure VM Builder offers good service, but the options are quite limited (Too much inclined to Windows as it is prepared by Microsoft). EC2 image building capabilities are the best in the market, and offer Windows, Linux (CentOS, rh2, debian, ubuntu), along with other distros, which helps customers choose according to their needs.

Incentivized

We trialed UpCloud to see if it would be better than DigitalOcean but for our needs, it was not. On DigitalOcean once a droplet is created, almost no thought needs to go into maintenance, outages, or other reliability-based issues.

Incentivized

• With EC2 you pay only when is Running, so you can save up to 75% on Dev environments which are running only on office hours
• You have several ways to pay for EC2, with EC2 Reserved Instances you pay with a discount of up to 72% if you make a commitment of using them from 1 or 3 years
• With EC2 spot you can use spare AWS EC2 capacity with a discount of up to 90%, your workload must be interrupt tolerant as your EC2 could be reclaim by AWS and the EC2 terminated

Incentivized

• The low cost means you don't really need to worry about pricing
• To us as a business it was not as useful as DigitalOcean

Incentivized