Amazon EC2

We've hosted with them for many years. Despite some little drawbacks, we wouldn't consider switching to another cloud provider. A technical project can thrive in the AWS ecosystem, with EC2 as the foundation for server capacity.

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.

We needed a diverse server platform setup each instance serving a different purpose. AWS allowed for us to do that but we had to outsource the whole project as it's just not simple to set that up. So all in all it's been a pain to use and manage.

The creation of cloud architectures with great cost management services. We are maintaining several clients' infrastructures on the Cloud, and we can use a common set of tools to do it all in the most efficient manner. The elasticity of services allows us to react to business requirements in no time.

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!