CS3216: 3rd class on AWS

After having a "lecture"/introduction by Technology Evangelists, Simone from Amazon Web Service, I was really impressed with Amazon's cloud management, suite of solution to facilitate hosting and the automation of stuffs.

I'm actually looking for web hosting service having used Amazon's EC2 and a few other services I've came up with the following analysis. Well that also depends on your application's usage and specification.

Some factors to look out for:

- SLA may not be the main thing but technical support too

- Scalability (That is for your host)

- Shared, VPS, Dedicated (Depending on the scale and computation of your app)

- See specs that are given to you like Ram, Storage, CPU, Bandwidth

1) Slice Host (http://www.slicehost.com/) initial cost is $20USD/mth

Pros:

I've personally used this before.

Very good technical support, they have a "IRC" like thingy and the technical support guy will answer you within mins.

They have tutorials on how to set up SVN, Virtual host etc.

In terms of pricing i think its pretty cheap. You can start from 256 then slowly upgrade to a higher version. When really your app made it big, you can go to their parent company Rackspace which is a tier-1 host or upgrade up to 1GBslice(if is sufficient).

Cons:

Bandwidth kind of limited.

I think it doesn't support .NET

2) Amazon Web Service (http://aws.amazon.com) is approximately $60+USD/mth - this is pay as you use, they don't have price plans but charge you by the hour.

Pros:

I'm using it for my computing module.

This really can scale.

SLA: 99.95%

Alot of powerful tools that can be included

Cons:

I found the technical support not very friendly.

If your app is small scale, not recommended. Just go to GoDaddy etc

3) Godaddy (crossed out)