Amazon Web Hosting Review: Buying Guide

amazon web hosting

If there is any company in the modern age that has dominated the online, virtual space, it is Amazon. Once a small operation run out of Jeff Besoz’s garage, and now a multimillion-dollar corporation, this company offers nearly every product or service under the sun, including Amazon web hosting services. You can have groceries shipped to your door, you can rely on this company for all of your family’s Christmas presents, or you can stream your favorite TV series or movies via Amazon’s platform.

It is an impressive company, blossoming into a service we all know and use. Their services don’t stop there, however, and if you are looking to build your website for a personal blog, business, or other venture, you should check out their web hosting services.

Amazon web hosting receives fairly decent reviews, and their platform runs giants like Netflix and AirBnB. So, if you are looking to launch your very own website, perhaps you should be looking into what Amazon has to offer.

Comparison Table

Product

Name

Pricing

Amazon Web Hosting

Amazon Web Hosting

Weebly

Weebly

HostGator

HostGator

 a2hosting

A2Hosting

What Is Amazon Web Hosting?

Amazon web hosting is the foundation of any website you might build. Put simply, if you want to create your own online space, you have to rent a room first, and that is what web hosting is. You rent a space that hosts, runs and manages the content you wish to run online.

Amazon was one of the first web hosting services to enter the cloud space. This made it one of the more powerful hosting services as it allowed the use of cloud storage.

Product Specs of Amazon Web Hosting

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It seems that most of Amazon’s clientele are individuals or companies that utilize their selling platform. In other words, if you are a merchant with products to move via Amazon’s retail market, then using their web hosting services will streamline your operation. It is safe to say that this hosting service is targeted towards the said audience, offering highly customizable features and customer autonomy. 

What you get depends on what hosting service you select with Amazon. For instance, they offer a C4HighCPU package to get businesses up and running, or a higher tier, more comprehensive M4 Standard Server. All of these web hosting services offer basic storage and content delivery, networking capabilities, databases, and computing power.

All come with a reliable automatic backup protocol, so all of your work and information is safe in case of technical failure. You can also run third-party programs and application programs with Amazon web hosting.

This product is designed for the technologically savvy. If you are a novice when it comes to web hosting, using Amazon might not be your safest option. Their services are designed for larger companies with a capable, hard-working development team.

Pricing  

amazon package delivery

For the first tier, C4HIghCPUpackage, you end up paying roughly 77 dollars per month. For the higher tier, M4 Standard Server, you end up investing a whopping 87 dollars per month.

This price fluctuates based on how many visitors you get on your website and how much memory you wish to purchase on the cloud. The more visitors and the more GB space, the more expensive the package becomes.

Amazon also runs something called an Amazon Lightsail web hosting service. This is designed for the less technologically savvy, and you are given a far more affordable range of monthly payments. If you want to run a small blog with minimal storage, you can choose their 512 MB hosting option for only 4 dollars month.

If you want to run something that is a little bit bigger but still want a web hosting service that is easier to use and understand, you can choose to purchase up to 32 GB of memory for 160 dollars a month.

The pricing varies and is highly dependent on the size of your business or operation. All in all, the Amazon web hosting service seems to be on the most expensive on the market.

How It Compares

We picked a few similar products available on the market to see how they compare.    

  • Weebly
  • HostGator
  • A2Hosting

Amazon Web Hosting

amazon web hosting

Price:

Heavily variant on what plan you choose: around $ per month, $ per month, $ per month, or $$ per month.

Ease of Use   

As previously mentioned, if you have little to no previous web development experience, using the Amazon web hosting service will provide more of a challenge than it would convenience. When purchasing a web hosting service, you want something that will help you streamline your current operation, offering you reliability, power, customizations, and convenience. 

For those that don’t have this essential experience, Amazon is hard to use. For those that do, Amazon web hosting makes for a wonderful, reliable hosting experience.

Uptime

Amazon is one of the largest retailers in the world with a notable reputation. Their reported uptime is fantastic.

Features

If you are a large business that uses the Amazon selling platform, then this hosting service offers a perfect suite of comprehensive services. You are giving the ability to customize the security and monitoring of your website. You are also provided with, depending on the plan you choose, a substantial amount of space on the cloud for storage, automatic backups, full redundancy, full security, and server cloning.

Customer Support  

Amazon’s customer service is top notch. You can contact them via email, live chat or phone 24/7. The customer service representatives are willing to walk you through any part of the web hosting process, no matter your experience.

Pros

  • Large package of features 
  • High uptime
  • Powerful platform
  • Great customer service
  • Reliability due to frequent data backups

Cons

  • Pricing can be very hard to understand and varies greatly
  • Hard to understand for novice web developers
  • Very expensive

Weebly

weebly

This is a web hosting service that is referred to as a quick, easy launching pad for beginners. If this is your first time designing your very own website, then Weebly has all of the essentials you need to get started.

You can do anything from setting up a personal blog or an e-commerce site that displays and sells your goods. If you are a larger business that uses a CRM sales funnel, however, Weebly won’t come with the processing power you need.

While this service does provide the more technologically advanced with some plug-ins, apps, and marketing services, it will not serve those larger operations that might rely on Amazon web hosting services.

Price:

Relatively affordable and dependent on your plan of choice. Free subscription, with pay-to-use features that run between $ per month to $ per month.

Ease of Use

This is designed to make website building easy. Their pre-designed templates and streamlined service makes building a website incredibly easy with Weebly.

Uptime

The platform is not as powerful as Amazon, so uptime is slightly lower.

Features

The free subscription comes with unlimited web pages and 500 MB of memory space. As you continue to build your website, you can take advantages of things such as SSL certificate, SEO marketing to enhance website traffic, and various web design templates. Weebly also offers e-commerce to help you build your online store

Customer Support

There is no customer service phone number listed on the website. Once you purchase a Weebly plan, perhaps you are given a phone number or email on which you can rely. Overall, very mediocre customer service.

Pros

  • Easy to use
  • Very affordable
  • Pre-designed web templates

Cons

  • Mediocre customer service
  • Not meant for large retail-based businesses
  • Not as versatile

Hostgator

hostgator

HostGator is famous in the web hosting world. You can use HostGator for Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting, shared hosting, cloud hosting, or dedicated hosting. The services you receive and the price you pay depends entirely on the plan you choose.

You can run a full, e-commerce website with HostGator or a simple, daily blog that keeps your clientele up to date on your business.

Price:

Very affordable, basic packages that are perfect for the novice designer. Pay between $ and $$ a month, depending on what you want.

Ease of Use

Great, universal service that is perfect for novice web designers or professional builders.

Uptime

HostGator has been around for a long time, making it one of the best web hosting services regarding uptime. Very few customers experience any problems with the hosting service entering downtime.

Features

Features include e-commerce, excellent shared hosting in Windows or Linux, useful site building software, flexible pricing plans, and SSL security

Customer Service

They are known to have decent customers service. They manage to help their customers with all of their needs, no matter their web building experience. The wait time to get in contact with a customer service representative is long, however.

Pros

  • Affordable
  • Easy to use
  • Best shared web hosting available

Cons

  • Not designed for large businesses
  • Locked into long-term contracts, sometimes up to three years
  • Long wait for customer assistance

A2 Hosting

A2 Hosting

A2 Hosting is all about power. Their high-speed processing platform allows for quick load times and faster download speeds. You can do shared hosting, reseller hosting, VPS hosting or dedicated hosting.

Customers seem to be largely in love with their Turbo features, which gives you more speed and faster processing times. If you are looking for speed, A2 hosting has you covered.

Price:

Shared hosting is some of the least expensive with A2. For just $ a month, you can get a website that boasts speed and impresses customers. Pay $ per month (Lite) or $ per month (Turbo).

Ease of Use 

Some customer reviews revealed that while A2 offered a wide array of services, their web hosting platform wasn’t always the easiest to understand for beginners or novices. HostGator and Weebly seemed to have the best regarding customer retention.

Uptime

Fantastic uptime as a web hosting service.

Features

Their most affordable plan offers unlimited data storage and transfer, a free SSD speed boost, free SSL security, cPanel control panel, and five databases. A2 is a fantastic choice for small designers. It will not provide larger retailers with professing power they need, however.

Customer Support  

Excellent customer support that will help any designer at any level of experience build the website they need.

Pros

  • Very affordable
  • High load and processing times
  • Great customer service

Cons

  • Not meant for large businesses
  • Not as easy to use as HostGator or Weebly

Conclusion

So, while Amazon may be dominant in terms of goods and services, it does not dominate the web hosting market. It may have some large players, like Netflix and AirBnB, but its high power, hard-to-understand web hosting service means it is a product designed for a niche clientele.

Unless you have the money and knowledge necessary to build a large online retail space, the Amazon web hosting service will not work for you.

Because of the exclusivity of the market, we give Amazon’s web hosting service a 3 out of 5 stars. Companies such as HostGator and A2 will give the common customer the tools they need to build a robust online store or website. These companies don’t pack their product with unnecessary bells and whistles, but instead, give you the basics to help you launch your dream.


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