
About Amazon EC2
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to facilitate web-scale computing for developers.
Select a pre-configured, templated Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to get up and running immediately. Alternatively you can create an AMI with your applications, libraries, data, and associated configuration settings.
Configure security and network access on your Amazon EC2 instance. Choose which instance type(s) you want, then start, terminate, and monitor as many instances of your AMI as needed, using the web service APIs or the variety of management tools provided. Determine whether you want to run in multiple locations, utilize static IP endpoints, or attach persistent block storage to your instances.
Pricing starting from:
N/A
- Free Version
- Free Trial
- Subscription
Top 5 alternatives to Amazon EC2
Key benefits of Amazon EC2
Devices
Business size
Markets
United States
Supported Languages
English
Pricing starting from:
N/A
- Free Version
- Free Trial
- Subscription
Top 5 alternatives to Amazon EC2
Images




Features
Total features of Amazon EC2: 42
Alternatives
Microsoft Azure

Google Cloud Platform

Heroku

vSphere

Reviews
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- Industry: Insurance
- Company size: 201-500 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Overall rating
- Ease of Use
- Likelihood to recommend 8.0 /10
Review of Amazon EC2
Reviewed on 19/05/2022
Overall I think EC2 is a good product especially if cost is not as important. The ability to...
Overall I think EC2 is a good product especially if cost is not as important. The ability to configure everything through the cloud plus the reliability of AWS is very hard to beat.
Pros
We like how quick it is to setup and clone instances with EC2. When doing development it is fairly easy to spin up test instances for little cost. Speaking of cost, since EC2 has so many options/tiers it is quite simple to choose a plan/tier that minimizes our costs but maximizes our output. The security aspect of EC2 is also very intuitive requiring that we have keys to access any particular server. This is an upgrade compared to when we had everything locally.
Cons
This is not built out of the box but we have had the situation come up where we wanted to start and stop an instance on a schedule. EC2 does not have a built in solution to handle both of these steps. Although I mentioned the flexibility of the configurations, the cost still is quite high especially coming from a local solution. However from our perspective it was worth it for the other features it provides.
- Industry: Publishing
- Company size: 51-200 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Overall rating
- Value for Money
- Ease of Use
- Customer Support
- Likelihood to recommend 10.0 /10
EC2 - the computing in cloud computing
Reviewed on 31/05/2022
I think EC2 was the first service we signed up for when we moved to AWS years ago. It was an...
I think EC2 was the first service we signed up for when we moved to AWS years ago. It was an eye-opening experience: we used to own hardware, and now we can just click buttons and make hardware appear? Insane. And yet, it worked. And still does. We have around 100 instances of varying sorts running at all times, most of them running either individual applications or (more recently) hosting a whole bunch of Docker containers via ECS. (This is the more powerful and better way to do things these days.)
The other huge boon for us was when AWS announced their Application Load Balancer. What this allows you to do is inspect every request and route it to specific targets if the request meets certain criteria. Got a staging server at staging.example.com? Just add that route to your ALB, and send it to your staging machine. Done. It's so simple, but so powerful.
Like much of AWS, the UI on EC2 has not quite kept up with the times. The almighty ALB, for instance, is hidden under a single small item in the left-nav, called "Load Balancers." Which is accurate, but doesn't exactly give them their due. Lots of other issues like that -- not always easy to find what you want to find, especially if you don't know exactly what you are looking for. But overall it's better than many other parts of AWS, so not complaining too much.
If you're on AWS at all, you're likely using EC2 already. Definitely don't forget to integrate CloudWatch so you can easily get logging!
Pros
* ALB is a game-changer for managing multiple websites
* Instant scaling up if needed
* Spawn as many servers or instances as you like, in whatever categories you like
* Tag your instances to keep track of them
Cons
* Spawning instances is so much fun -- but it gets expensive
* The UI on huge services (like the ALB) is kind of crazy. Why is it hidden in the small left nav?
* Navigating to the right instance is not always easy
Alternatives Considered
Google Cloud PlatformReasons for Switching to Amazon EC2
AWS offered so much more than Google at the time -- Amazon's whole suite of services just feels that much more robust and well-developed. Not always elegant to use, but works.- Industry: Computer & Network Security
- Company size: 2-10 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Overall rating
- Value for Money
- Ease of Use
- Customer Support
- Likelihood to recommend 1.0 /10
I was forced to leave after 6 years of happy use
Reviewed on 15/09/2020
What AWS don't tell you is that on top of your EC2 cost comes a whole range of other hidden costs....
What AWS don't tell you is that on top of your EC2 cost comes a whole range of other hidden costs. Costs that only creep up after you've been using the product for a long time. Almost as if it has been designed this way.
Specifically, I ran into trouble with CPU and Disk IO credits. This is not a thing on any other platform. EC2 allows you to "burst" your processing power or disk read/write speed. This is done automatically with no control from the administrator. Once the tokens run out, which is seemingly incalculable, the servers crash.
The only way to keep the servers up is to keep spending more money by increasing the tokens (by raising the capacity), even though I didn't need the extra capacity. My servers are running perfectly on another provider now, on the lowest capacity instances, with no concept of "tokens" to worry about.
Pros
EC2 is so easy to set up. It doesn't require any thought to what is happening "behind the scenes".
Cons
It doesn't require any thought to what is happening "behind the scenes". When something breaks, you're on your own (without a minimum $2,000/mo support contract). AWS slowly increase the cost of associated tech with no way to understand why.

- Industry: Information Technology & Services
- Company size: 10,000+ Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Overall rating
- Value for Money
- Ease of Use
- Customer Support
- Likelihood to recommend 10.0 /10
Deploying our containers is efficient for business application as EC2 provides effective...
Reviewed on 02/04/2022
1. We utilize EC2 services offered by Amazon for our container deployments through Docker in...
1. We utilize EC2 services offered by Amazon for our container deployments through Docker in Testing & Production environments.
2. Since the infrastructure is provided by AWS, we needn't worry about regional downtime or security updates as they are fully managed by Amazon.
3. We define our docker containers within EC2 instance and we can trust in the isolation between the containers are properly maintained.
4. We can leverage to stop the EC2 instances in case we need to retain the application configurations for a later point in time and start it again for future use.
5. Hosting multiple backend cloud-based applications is feasible with EC2 and all configurational changes can be viewed completely in its CLI.
Pros
1. Amazon EC2 offers exceptional capabilities to deploy our customer-centric application in cloud platform at ease.
2. We can effectively utilize its AMI to spin up any type of EC2 instances with any OS based on our business requirements within minutes.
3. Its auto-load balancing feature is helpful when we carry out web hosting with diversified incoming requests from the user.
4. We can also retain snapshots of our EC2 instances which can be used anytime to replicate our application configurations & deployments.
5. As it offers licensing within the charges of its EC2 instances, we are able to utilize various vendor applications and not worry about license renewal or request.
Cons
1. If you wish to perform custom updates, it needs updating a lot of security patches along with its Amazon Machine Image which is quite complex.
2, Network configurations & ACL should be maintained properly so that there isn't any connectivity issues with our EC2-hosted applications.
3. We need to ensure to terminate the EC2 instances if we no longer require the service of it. Charges may incur if its left unchecked.

- Industry: Retail
- Company size: 2-10 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Overall rating
- Value for Money
- Ease of Use
- Customer Support
- Likelihood to recommend 10.0 /10
The best PaaS
Reviewed on 04/11/2021
I've been using AWS for over 10 years and I don't remember having any problems, except for the ones...
I've been using AWS for over 10 years and I don't remember having any problems, except for the ones I caused myself. It's extremely reliable, safe and affordable.
Pros
Elastic Bean Stalk is a very simple and reliable platform as a service. You can configure various aspects of your application like deploy, autoscaling and database. Lambda is also an extremely useful resource for small service development without having to set up a complete framework for it.
Cons
Some functions are hard to learn like IAM for example. Also, managing costs well can be a challenge as there are many options to choose from.
Reasons for Choosing Amazon EC2
Pricing, Support, Reliability, and Features Available Only on AWSSwitched From
Dreamhost VPSReasons for Switching to Amazon EC2
Previous knowledge of features, pricing and startup program.Amazon EC2 FAQs
Below are some frequently asked questions for Amazon EC2.Q. What type of pricing plans does Amazon EC2 offer?
Amazon EC2 offers the following pricing plans:
- Free Trial: Available
Amazon EC2 offers a free tier for the T2 and T3 instances, as well as the new T4g.micro instance. When you are ready to upgrade, choose one of the many pricing options available for your organization.
Q. Who are the typical users of Amazon EC2?
Amazon EC2 has the following typical customers:
2-10, 11-50, 51-200, 201-500, 501-1,000, 1,001-5,000
Q. What languages does Amazon EC2 support?
Amazon EC2 supports the following languages:
English
Q. Does Amazon EC2 support mobile devices?
Amazon EC2 supports the following devices:
Q. What other apps does Amazon EC2 integrate with?
Amazon EC2 integrates with the following applications:
Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3
Q. What level of support does Amazon EC2 offer?
We do not have any information about what support options Amazon EC2 has
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