Amazon EC2 is a subset of offerings from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and it's arguably the most expansive and customizable cloud infrastructure platform of them all. EC stands for "Elastic Compute Cloud." C squared, get it? It's a service from which you can "rent" for a monthly or hourly fee, virtual servers in the cloud and also build custom applications on those servers. The "elasticity" refers to the ease in which you can scale server and application resources as your computing demands need.
We reviewed EC2 by building a fairly simple Windows Server 2012 cloud server and compared the process and pricing with competing services, Microsoft Azure and Rackspace Cloud Servers. EC2 can save you a few dollars over Azure for the same type of small business Windows server, but it doesn't offer as much bang for your buck as Rackspace. More importantly, it doesn't come close to offering the sort of wizard-driven help offered by Editors' Choice Azure. Despite the staggering number of services EC2 offers, cloud newbies get very little guidance within the EC2 interface, and there's little support unless you pay an extra monthly fee.
Signup
Amazon offers a free tier of support for Linux and Windows micro-server instances. These are low-performance servers designed to help you try the server out or to run applications or services that require little processing. A credit card is required to sign-up to even try EC2, as with Azure and Rackspace trials, but you aren't billed for your first month. Amazon also has a more secure verification process than Azure and Rackspace, though it's also kind of annoying. You have to enter in your phone number during sign up. A PIN number is displayed on screen. You have to answer an automated call and then enter the shown PIN. Only after this can you complete signup.
Next, you are asked to select a support plan. The free, default plan is Basic, which gives you a few more help options than Azure's free support level, but nothing approaching Rackspace's free support. With Amazon Basic support, you get to ask customer service account and billing questions, help with any system check failings of your hosted server, and access to the AWS support forums. Escalated help options are fee-based, starting at $49 per month. You can click on the below link for more details on EC2's available support plans.
Hosted Server Support Pricing
As with Microsoft Azure and Rackspace, Amazon EC2's server instance subscriptions are rated per minute and billed on a monthly basis. EC2 is a bit cheaper overall than Azure for the small business subscriptions I looked at, but you get less with EC2 than you do with a similar Rackspace small business server subscription. Here's the breakdown:
With EC2, a $54.90 monthly charge gets you a single virtual-core processor general-purpose Windows 2012 server with 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of data storage, and a basic support subscription.
A Windows 2012 server in Azure with one virtual-core processor, 1.75GB of RAM, and basic support runs $0.075 per hour—about $56 per month. However, Azure requires you to pay extra for storage, including its basic blob block of locally redundant storage option—this is simply storage for large files that gets replicated for high-availability within a single geographic region.
Rackspace offers the most bang for your buck on specs: For $73 per month, you get a Windows Server 2012 instance configured with 2 CPUs, 2GB RAM, and 20GB of SSD storage. That's just flat storage, however. To make a change, you have to download data, make the change and reupload it. You can't access it or work with that data while it's on your server. That price does, however, include a generous support plan complete with 24/7 support from cloud engineers, making it a better value for those new to hosted services over Azure and Amazon, both of which provide little support outside of access to free community forums.
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