Amazon Web Services
The world's largest and most comprehensive cloud platform.
The verdict
Amazon Web Services is the global leader in cloud infrastructure, serving millions of customers with over 200 fully featured services spanning compute, storage, databases, AI/ML, networking, and analytics. AWS runs approximately one-third of the internet and powers some of the world's most demanding workloads.
The full picture
Amazon Web Services is the largest cloud platform in the world, with roughly a third of global market share, over thirty-four geographic regions, more than a hundred availability zones and a catalogue of over two hundred services. It effectively invented the public cloud in 2006 with S3 and EC2, and it remains the default choice for enterprises, startups with venture funding, and anyone whose architecture needs a service that does not exist anywhere else.
For hosting a website specifically, AWS is powerful and indirect. There is no cPanel, no email hosting in the traditional sense, and no one-click WordPress that a beginner would recognise. What there is: EC2 virtual machines, Lightsail for simple fixed-price instances, S3 with CloudFront for static sites, RDS for managed databases, Elastic Beanstalk and App Runner for application deployment, and Amplify for modern front ends.
The two things to understand before committing are cost and complexity. AWS pricing is usage-based across dozens of dimensions, egress bandwidth is expensive, and a misconfigured resource can generate a large bill silently. The learning curve is real, and the certification industry that surrounds AWS exists because of it.
What you get
- 200+ cloud services
- Global network of 30+ regions
- Pay-as-you-go pricing
- EC2 compute instances
- S3 object storage
- Lambda serverless functions
- Free tier for 12 months
Every hosting type it sells
| Product | From | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Lightsail | $3.50/mo | Fixed-price virtual servers with bundled bandwidth, the simplest entry point. |
| EC2 | Usage | Full virtual machines with hundreds of instance types. |
| S3 + CloudFront | Usage | Static site hosting served from a global CDN. |
| Amplify | Usage | Git-based deployment for modern front-end frameworks. |
| RDS / Aurora | Usage | Managed relational databases with automatic failover. |
| Elastic Beanstalk | Usage | Managed application deployment on EC2 without managing servers directly. |
Plans & pricing
- 2 vCPU
- 0.5 GB RAM
- Pay-as-you-go
- 2 vCPU
- 2 GB RAM
- EBS storage
- 2 vCPU
- 8 GB RAM
- Latest Intel
What the price actually costs you
- Usage-based across many dimensions — compute, storage, requests, egress and more.
- Egress bandwidth is expensive and is the most common source of bill surprises.
- Reserved Instances and Savings Plans cut compute costs substantially for steady workloads.
- Set billing alarms on day one; a misconfigured resource can run up costs unnoticed.
Technical specification
| Control panel | AWS Management Console, CLI, SDKs, CloudFormation and Terraform |
|---|---|
| Regions | 34+ geographic regions and 108+ availability zones worldwide |
| Service count | Over 200 services spanning compute, storage, data, AI and networking |
| Storage | EBS block storage, S3 object storage, EFS shared file systems |
| Networking | VPC, Route 53 DNS, CloudFront CDN, Global Accelerator, Direct Connect |
| Compliance | Effectively every major certification: SOC, ISO, PCI DSS, HIPAA, FedRAMP, IRAP |
| Free tier | 12-month free tier plus always-free allowances on many services |
| Support | Basic free, with Developer, Business and Enterprise tiers priced as a percentage of spend |
| Marketplace | Thousands of third-party machine images and SaaS integrations |
| Uptime SLA | 99.99% on most compute services with service credits |
Performance in practice
Exceptional, if you configure it well. The region and availability zone footprint is the largest in the industry, CloudFront is one of the strongest CDNs, and instance types exist for every workload shape from burstable micro instances to bare-metal machines with hundreds of cores. Performance problems on AWS are almost always architecture problems rather than platform limits. Lightsail, the simplified product, is competent but noticeably less flexible than EC2.
Infrastructure & support
Support channels
- Documentation & forums (free)
- AWS Developer Support ($29/mo)
- Business Support ($100/mo)
- Enterprise Support (custom)
Data centers
- United States (6)
- Europe (7)
- Asia-Pacific (11)
- South America
- Middle East
- Africa
- 30+ regions globally
Security & compliance
- Identity and Access Management with fine-grained, policy-based permissions
- Shield Standard DDoS protection free, Shield Advanced for large-scale attacks
- WAF, GuardDuty threat detection, Inspector vulnerability scanning and Security Hub
- Encryption at rest and in transit with KMS-managed keys
- The broadest compliance portfolio in the industry including FedRAMP and HIPAA
- A shared responsibility model: AWS secures the cloud, you secure what you run in it
Moving a site in
AWS provides extensive migration tooling including Application Migration Service, Database Migration Service and the Migration Hub, plus a large partner ecosystem. For a single website this is overkill; for an enterprise estate it is the most complete toolset available.
The trade-off
In its favour
- Unmatched breadth of services
- Global availability and reliability
- Industry-standard enterprise platform
Worth knowing
- Complex pricing can be unpredictable
- Steep learning curve for beginners
- No traditional cPanel hosting
Who should look elsewhere
- Simple websites where a managed host would cost less and take an hour to set up
- Anyone without cloud engineering skills or budget to hire them
- Cost-sensitive workloads with heavy outbound bandwidth
- Buyers who want predictable flat monthly pricing
The company behind it
| Ownership | Amazon.com, publicly traded (NASDAQ: AMZN) |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Seattle, Washington, United States |
| Founded | 2006 |
| Scale | 34+ regions, 108+ availability zones, ~31% global cloud market share |
| Notable | The service that created the modern public cloud market |
How it got here
- 2006 Launches S3 and EC2, creating the modern public cloud.
- 2009 Introduces RDS managed databases and CloudFront CDN.
- 2014 Launches Lambda, popularising serverless computing.
- 2016 Introduces Lightsail, a simplified fixed-price VPS product.
- 2021 Passes $60 billion in annual revenue, the largest cloud business in the world.
Common questions
Does AWS offer a free tier?
Yes, AWS Free Tier includes 12 months of limited free access to many services including EC2, S3 and RDS.
Is AWS suitable for small businesses?
Yes, though AWS is best suited to developers or businesses with technical staff; managed alternatives like Cloudways simplify the experience.
The bottom line
The right platform when your requirements exceed what a managed host can do, and the wrong one when they do not. For a WordPress site, Lightsail or a managed host is the sensible path. For anything that needs to scale, integrate and comply at enterprise level, nothing else has the breadth.