Have you ever wondered if Amazon Web Service is suitable for your small but flourishing business?
Maybe you are planning to take start an online business and have heard established internet marketers rave about AWS but are still not sure what it is and its advantages?
If yes, this post is just for you because we’ll be discussing some of the most frequently asked questions about AWS web hosting, including its definition, advantages, and suitability for small businesses.
So, let’s dive in.
What is AWS?
Amazon Web Services (or AWS for short) provides comprehensive cloud web hosting to individuals, businesses, governmental, and non-profit organizations. It makes creating top-quality websites and applications easier and cheaper than ever before.
Launched in 2002, is one of the most famous virtual web hosting services today. Some of the more popular companies hosted on Amazon servers include, among others, Pinterest, AOL, Netflix, and Reddit.
Earlier this year, GoDaddy, the biggest domain registration company in the world, decided to migrate most of its infrastructure, excluding 75M domains that it manages, to AWS.
When you consider the fact that in the past GoDaddy and AWS competed with each other to provide web services to small and mid-sized business, GoDaddy’s migration to AWS in multi-year partnership is a clear indication of the latter’s increasing popularity and reach in the world of web hosting.
What are the advantages of using AWS for Web Hosting?
Some of the main advantages of AWS are as follows:
- Easy to use – It allows you to host your applications in no time at all.
- Flexible – AWS provides you with a virtual environment that allows you to load whatever services and software your application needs.
- Cost-effective – There are no up-front commitments or long-term contracts. You pay only for the resources you use.
- Scalability – This is another big advantage of using AWS. You can scale resources like CPU and RAM up or down as per your needs.
What Kind of Downtime Record Does AWS Have?
AWS has had its share of major outages, the latest one occurring in March, 2018 which affected over 240 online services, including its major cloud customers like Slack, Twilio, and Atlassian. One of the biggest outages in the history of AWS was reported in June, 2016 in which many prime websites became offline for more than 10 hours.
Is AWS Suitable for Small Business?
Yes, it is. The Simple Website Hosting plan from AWS is ideal for startups with websites built on popular applications such as WordPress, Magento, Drupal, or Joomla and which are not likely to scale beyond 5 servers. Another appeal of this plan for small businesses with tight budget is that it is typically low-cost. One drawback of this solution is that you’ll have to manage your web server and resources yourself.
Want to know more about AWS Web Hosting? If yes, check out this fact-packed infographic. It contains tons of information about this cloud solutions giant which is growing with each passing day.