AWS stands for Amazon Web Services and it is a secure ‘cloud’ based services platform. The ‘cloud’ being an on-demand array of computer system resources, data storage and processing power, all without the need of direct maintenance by the end user. Maintenance, security and backups are all dealt with externally.

Advantages of AWS

Summary: Cost effective, secure, reliable and flexible.
  • The pay-per-use model is very attractive to businesses.
  • AWS has 100+ services and tools that can fulfil almost any business need.
  • AWS is (relatively) easy to use and it can be Cost-Effective
  • AWS is reliable, flexible, highly scalable and secure.

Although this is a very impressive list, AWS is far from perfect. In fact, at the time of writing this post, simply trying to understand their services, available tools and terms has been incredibly confusing. Even after the monumental feat of being able to reach their support team, they weren’t particularly useful but very polite.

Disadvantages of AWS

Summary: Amazing but incredibly complex compared to the usual VPS offerings.
  • A huge amount of products often with shockingly awful documentation.
  • AWS having 100+ tools and services is a nightmare to navigate.
  • AWS can be Cost-Effective, but likely not for smaller businesses.
  • AWS reliability and security is highly dependent on location and internet.

My Summary of AWS:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers an incredible set of cloud-based products which can allow you to easily compute, store, analyse, network, develop and manage a private server without needing to purchase expensive hardware and is an excellent alternative to having a locally hosted server.

Allowing businesses to add new services quickly without the upfront fixed cost and respond quickly to a change in a businesses requirements. In my opinion though, for a small business looking to simply host a website such as WordPress, I would not recommend it. Their services are convoluted and the UI is un-intuitive.

Unless you have quite a lot of time to dedicate to learning how to setup all of the necessary user, security and networking configurations, you may be better off approaching one of the thousands of extremely cheap hosting providers who cover a lot of this for you for $4 per month.

I would, however, highly recommend it for a rapidly growing SME who does not mind the cost and requires on-demand scalability and reliability. Just make sure your offices have a good internet connection first.. long story!

“The code you write makes you a programmer. The code you delete makes you a good one. The code you don’t have to write makes you a great one.” – Mario Fusco.