Amazon Web Services is a huge subsidiary of Amazon offering on-demand cloud services and APIs to individuals, businesses, and organizations, on a pay as you go basis. The company also offers its own cloud services and an extensive library of related software and utilities. To date, more than two hundred and fifty million customers have chosen the pay as you go approach, which has been shown to be an immensely successful strategy. The company’s aim is to provide its customers with the easiest way to launch and expand online ventures. This was revealed at their recent shareholders meeting where they also discussed the growth and profitability of their cloud services division.
Amazon Web Services has established a good customer-client relationship through the years. The growing demand for their hosted software and solutions have provided the company with the impetus to explore different verticals. At present, Amazon web hosting services currently offer three main solutions which are: development, personal and business, and SaaS.
Amazon Web Services was initially sold only to big organizations and businesses. Fast forward to today, almost all the Fortune 500 companies use the Amazon Web Services, including General Mills, Wal-Mart, Kinkos, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Citibank, and IBM. Amazon Web Services today offers an extremely versatile platform for deploying business applications and automating business processes. The most common areas where these web services are used are: Customer Management, Content Management, Customer Service, Virtual Assistant, Marketing, Business Intelligence, and Workforce Management.
Amazon Web Services now supports a fully featured open source tool called EC2. EC2 is an extremely popular virtual private server, or VPS, designed to give enterprises the power and speed of a dedicated server without the high costs. Through EC2, Amazon web services providers can easily create a private cloud network for storage, application hosting, infrastructure maintenance, and other web hosting needs. As a customer you will get guaranteed cloud services with a full 24 month free trial.
If you are a customer of Amazon Web Services you will first need to decide what type of Amazon web hosting services you require. If you require basic functionality in your web pages, you will only require an account with the basic plan. These plans offer unlimited domains, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited MySQL databases, unlimited EC2, and limited security features. This plan is great for those who require little to no IT expertise. However, if you need higher levels of security, greater flexibility, more bandwidth, and a more robust management system you will need to look into the medium level plan.
Large corporations and businesses utilize their own high-end server platform called Virtual Private Servers (VPS). The most popular VPS platform is called Xen, a powerful database management tool, along with several other technologies. If you’re looking to purchase or run your own cloud services using Amazon Web Services, you will not be able to take advantage of the benefits of a VPS. However, for smaller companies and personal web pages, VPS can provide many of the capabilities of a virtual dedicated server without the cost and overhead of buying and maintaining one.
When it comes to running applications and websites, most people prefer to use terminal commands. Amazon’s own installation method and tool for its own servers, called Amazon Simple Terminal, is not compatible with any other web hosting services. With the use of this terminal commands you can install applications such as WordPress, Joomla, phpBB and Drupal. All of these tools will work flawlessly with Amazon web services, but they are not supported by the Amazon Simple Terminal application and therefore must be used via third party tools.
Although it may seem that you are losing a lot of functionality to switch to VPS in lieu of traditional web hosting services, there are several advantages in doing so. The biggest benefit is that you won’t have to learn a new server operating system. The lack of technical knowledge required to manage servers running multiple operating systems is another huge benefit. And lastly, the cost of maintaining and running your website will be dramatically reduced when running VPS instead of a traditional dedicated solution.
