Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) has found fans all over the world as a web service that both offers cloud capabilities along with resizable capacities. The result is an extremely flexible platform that can grow – or shrink – along with your company with minimal friction. It’s not hyperbole to state that AWS – specifically ECS – has changed the way cloud computing is done, especially for startups. Therefore, if you’re running a startup and looking for a solution, ECS makes a lot of sense.
However, no platform is perfect and the years have shown that even Amazon’s offering leaves something to be desired at times. If you’ve tried EC2 and want something else or you’re just in the market and would like to consider all your options, the following list is for you.
Digital Ocean
Digital Ocean is a great place to start this list because it’s also extremely scalable. It’s very affordable too, something all startups can get behind. For just $5/month, you’ll receive 512MB RAM and 20GB SSD cloud server in just 55 seconds. Is it simple? Yes, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, especially if your startup is just at its inception. Plus, you’re basically getting 10 times the performance you would with Amazon for only a third the cost; it’s hard to beat that.
Rackspace
The great thing about Rackspace is that you can create as many cloud virtual servers as you like and just pay for each one as you go; there are no long term contracts. This makes it another great alternative to AWS because of its scalability. If you needed to, you could go from one to 50 servers in a matter of minutes! Each server can be customized in terms of size too.
Rackspace provides owners with an open API to play with as well as an online control panel, so you’ll really enjoy getting to mold your server(s) however you like.
Clouder
Clouder may not be a perfect replacement for Amazon EC2, but we’re not necessarily comparing apples and oranges here either. What you’ll get with Clouder is industry-leading technology featuring the latest in cloud virtualization innovations.
The reason it’s not directly comparable to EC2 is because a major goal of Clouder’s is to get rid of the “middle layers” of the virtualization of the cloud. If you want to see what this is like before investing any funds, Clouder gives you three free months.
Media Temple
Media Temple hosts Amazon AWS alternatives to websites of every size from all over the world. Their approach is simple and their interface is clean, so if you don’t have any irregular needs for your startup’s site, Media Temple is an affordable alternative to AWS that should be especially attractive to those who don’t have a lot of IT experience.
Google Compute Engine
Any product from Google is probably worth exploring and the Google Compute Engine is no exception. It provides IaaS as well as cloud computing. Thanks to Google’s Compute Engine, you can easily run large-scale computing. Scalability won’t be a problem either.
Slicify
This is another alternative worth bringing up even though it isn’t going to be completely comparable to AWS. Slicify is a marketplace where you can purchase high-performance computer power from sellers through nothing more than a Windows PC. The cool thing is that they can provide CPU power for batch processing and other online workloads for a fraction of what it would cost to do through traditional cloud compute providers.
There’s no doubt that a lot of customers are very happy with AWS, including those who run startups. However, now you at least know that a number of very impressive alternatives exist that are also deserving of your consideration.