Overview

Amazon EC2

Stacks48.9K

Followers36.0K

Votes2.5K

DreamHost

Stacks29

Followers25

Votes0

Amazon EC2 vs DreamHost: What are the differences?

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and DreamHost are two popular web hosting services that offer different features and functionalities for hosting websites. Here are the key differences between them:

Scalability: Amazon EC2 provides highly scalable computing resources that allow users to easily increase or decrease their server capacity based on demand. This is achieved through EC2 instances that can be rapidly provisioned and scaled up or down as needed. In contrast, DreamHost offers fixed shared hosting plans with limited scalability options, making it less suitable for websites with fluctuating traffic or resource requirements.
Flexibility: Amazon EC2 offers a wide variety of instance types with different specifications, such as CPU, memory, storage, and networking capabilities. This allows users to choose the most appropriate instance type for their specific workload requirements. On the other hand, DreamHost offers a standardized hosting environment with less flexibility in terms of customizing server configurations.
Pricing Structure: Amazon EC2 follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where users are charged based on actual usage of their EC2 instances. This provides flexibility and cost-effectiveness, especially for small businesses or websites with variable traffic patterns. In contrast, DreamHost offers fixed pricing plans with limited resources, which may not be as cost-efficient for websites with high resource demands or require flexible payment options.
Managed Services: Amazon EC2 offers various managed services and tools that assist users in managing their infrastructure, such as load balancing, auto-scaling, and database services. These services help streamline operations and reduce the administrative burden on website owners. On the other hand, DreamHost provides a more basic hosting environment without extensive managed service offerings.
Availability Zones: Amazon EC2 enables users to deploy their instances across multiple Availability Zones, which are distinct data centers within a region. This provides increased availability and fault tolerance for applications, as instances can be distributed to different zones. In contrast, DreamHost does not offer a similar distributed infrastructure, potentially making it less resilient in case of a hardware failure or outage.
Global Infrastructure: Amazon EC2 has a vast global infrastructure with multiple regions and Availability Zones around the world. This allows users to deploy their applications closer to end-users in different geographic regions, reducing latency and improving performance. DreamHost, on the other hand, has a more limited infrastructure, mainly located in the United States.

In summary, Amazon EC2 offers greater scalability, flexibility, and a comprehensive set of managed services compared to DreamHost. EC2's pay-as-you-go pricing model and global infrastructure make it a more versatile and cost-effective solution for businesses with varying resource demands or a global user base.

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Advice on Amazon EC2, DreamHost

Craig

Principal Consultant at Rootwork InfoTech LLC

Jul 16, 2020

Decided

We first selected Google Cloud Platform about five years ago, because HIPAA compliance was significantly cheaper and easier on Google compared to AWS. We have stayed with Google Cloud because it provides an excellent command line tool for managing resources, and every resource has a well-designed, well-documented API. SDKs for most of these APIs are available for many popular languages. I have never worked with a cloud platform that's so amenable to automation. Google is also ahead of its competitors in Kubernetes support.

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Comments

Jerome/Zen

Software Engineer

Aug 2, 2020

Needs advice

DigitalOcean was where I began; its USD5/month is extremely competitive and the overall experience as highly user-friendly.

However, their offerings were lacking and integrating with other resources I had on AWS was getting more costly (due to transfer costs on AWS). Eventually I moved the entire project off DO's Droplets and onto AWS's EC2.

One may initially find the cost (w/o free tier) and interface of AWS daunting however with good planning you can achieve highly cost-efficient systems with savings plans, spot instances, etcetera.

Do not dive into AWS head-first! Seriously, don't. Stand back and read pricing documentation thoroughly. You can, not to the fault of AWS, easily go way overbudget. Your first action upon getting your AWS account should be to set up billing alarms for estimated and current bill totals.

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Abigail

Dec 10, 2019

Decided

Most bioinformatics shops nowadays are hosting on AWS or Azure, since they have HIPAA tiers and offer enterprise SLA contracts. Meanwhile Heroku hasn't historically supported HIPAA. Rackspace and Google Cloud would be other hosting providers we would consider, but we just don't get requests for them. So, we mostly focus on AWS and Azure support.

156k views156k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Amazon EC2	DreamHost
It is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.	It is the leader in shared web hosting, vps hosting, dedicated hosting, WordPress hosting, cloud storage and cloud computing.
Elastic – Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously.;Completely Controlled – You have complete control of your instances. You have root access to each one, and you can interact with them as you would any machine.;Flexible – You have the choice of multiple instance types, operating systems, and software packages. Amazon EC2 allows you to select a configuration of memory, CPU, instance storage, and the boot partition size that is optimal for your choice of operating system and application.;Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services – Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to provide a complete solution for computing, query processing and storage across a wide range of applications.;Reliable – Amazon EC2 offers a highly reliable environment where replacement instances can be rapidly and predictably commissioned. The Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement commitment is 99.95% availability for each Amazon EC2 Region.;Secure – Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon VPC to provide security and robust networking functionality for your compute resources.;Inexpensive – Amazon EC2 passes on to you the financial benefits of Amazon’s scale. You pay a very low rate for the compute capacity you actually consume.;Easy to Start – Quickly get started with Amazon EC2 by visiting AWS Marketplace to choose preconfigured software on Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). You can quickly deploy this software to EC2 via 1-Click launch or with the EC2 console.	Custom dashboard; A one-click automatic WP install; Automatic WP updates; Unlimited storage and bandwidth; Free SSDs.
Statistics
Stacks 48.9K	Stacks 29
Followers 36.0K	Followers 25
Votes 2.5K	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 647 Quick and reliable cloud servers 515 Scalability 393 Easy management 277 Low cost 271 Auto-scaling Cons 14 Ui could use a lot of work 6 High learning curve when compared to PaaS 3 Extremely poor CPU performance	No community feedback yet
Integrations
No integrations available	PayPal WordPress WooCommerce

What are some alternatives to Amazon EC2, DreamHost?

DigitalOcean

We take the complexities out of cloud hosting by offering blazing fast, on-demand SSD cloud servers, straightforward pricing, a simple API, and an easy-to-use control panel.

Microsoft Azure

Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. You can build applications using any language, tool or framework. And you can integrate your public cloud applications with your existing IT environment.

Google Compute Engine

Google Compute Engine is a service that provides virtual machines that run on Google infrastructure. Google Compute Engine offers scale, performance, and value that allows you to easily launch large compute clusters on Google's infrastructure. There are no upfront investments and you can run up to thousands of virtual CPUs on a system that has been designed from the ground up to be fast, and to offer strong consistency of performance.

Linode

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DomainRacer

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Scaleway

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Rackspace Cloud Servers

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Namecheap

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Google Cloud Platform

It helps you build what's next with secure infrastructure, developer tools, APIs, data analytics and machine learning. It is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search and YouTube.