Is Amazon the host for you?

Amazon may be best known as the world's favorite online retailer, but the company has consistently beaten market predictions and stayed way ahead of the competition by reinventing itself time and again to fit changing dynamics and meet customer needs.

AWS, or Amazon Web Services, is a vast and comprehensive platform that provides thousands of businesses, large and small, public and private, with end-to-end online solutions. From webpages and web hosting to cloud computing, business applications, digital marketing and mobile services, to health, financial services, support plans, dev ops, and Big Data, Amazon is an elite provider of web hosting services and has a plan to meet every need.

With Amazon web hosting, you can set up and launch a website within minutes. Depending on what your needs are (e-commerce website, blog, forum, etc.), you can find a plan and select hosting options that are specific to what you need for your website. Mobile and desktop optimizations will further enhance the function of your website.

LAMP applications that run Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, all of which are free and open-source, are suitable for building high-uptime, dynamic websites that can serve tens of thousands of requests in parallel. Windows servers can be used for websites that use .NET web applications, and WordPress is a popular software tool used for creating beautiful websites and blogs.

Amazon has an expansive international network of data centers which are key to providing unmatched speeds, customer support, and uptime. To quantify this in terms of actual metrics, it is helpful to think of target uptime goals, which is often described as being five nines, or 99.999% uptime. While a handful of boutique hosts do in fact boast such figures, Amazon Web Services is the only host amongst large players that even comes close to this figure.

Doing this requires scaling offerings while maintaining generally high reliability and performance, which is not very easy to do. In fact, AWS states that the provision of highly scalable, reliable, fast, and inexpensive data storage infrastructure to run customer web sites is a guaranteed deliverable, backed by the company's standard Service Level Agreement.

AWS does a great job of securing their physical data centres and the server hardware. It gives you a range of security services and tools to help make your site safe and secure. These services include certificate management, encryption tools, Hardware Security Modules to store private keys, as well as firewalls for web apps.

From customers who are new to AWS to those continuing to increase their adoption of services as they develop applications and build business solutions, AWS strives to provide the right resources to support the success of their clients. Based on the plan you enroll in, AWS can support you in a number of ways to enable you to do amazing things with the service. Small-scale users who are just exploring the potential of AWS and who want access to basic technical support resources are given them in the form of customer helplines and access to online tickets to help them quickly and effectively get started.

Business that needs a higher level of support can turn on active (in place of reactive) support. Finally, for businesses whose success is directly linked to the performance of their website, they can opt for proactive and preventive customer support services. These not only help resolve customer issues but also take care of potential problems, downtimes or attacks before they happen.

Run from the cloud, our review team found the beauty of AWS and Amazon hosting is that it allows individuals and businesses to use resources and run applications that are entirely hosted online. This means they can lower their costs and pay only for what they consume, while enjoying seamless and quick upgrades in terms of functionality. It also allows immediate and pain-free integration with whatever existing data and infrastructure systems you already have in place.

Our review of Amazon web services found that you can use any platform that you like. Java, Ruby, PHP, Node.js and more are all supported. As for tools, the same applies. Run a Drupal server, or a WordPress, or a Joomla one. Grow and shrink your website resources as you need, and spend money where you get the most return. Detailed analytics, AI applications, mobile services, messaging, business tools, game development, management tools and security features are all packaged into all Amazon hosting plans.