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Amazon EC2 vs OVH: What are the differences?
Introduction
In this article, we will compare and highlight the key differences between Amazon EC2 and OVH, two popular cloud hosting providers.
Pricing Models: One significant difference between Amazon EC2 and OVH is their pricing models. Amazon EC2 offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model where customers are only charged for the resources they consume. OVH, on the other hand, provides both hourly and monthly billing options, allowing users to choose the pricing model that best suits their needs.
Data Centers: Another key difference between Amazon EC2 and OVH is the number and location of their data centers. Amazon EC2 has a vast global infrastructure with data centers spread across various regions worldwide, providing users with a wide range of options. In contrast, OVH has fewer data centers, primarily located in Europe and North America, which may limit the geographical reach for certain users.
Service Offering: While both Amazon EC2 and OVH offer cloud hosting services, they have different service offerings. Amazon EC2 provides a more comprehensive range of services, including additional features like load balancers, auto-scaling, and managed databases. OVH, on the other hand, focuses more on providing basic cloud computing services without as many advanced features.
Ease of Use: When it comes to the ease of use, Amazon EC2 has a more user-friendly interface and offers better documentation and support resources. It provides a robust management console and a wide range of tools and APIs for easy management of instances. OVH, on the other hand, may have a steeper learning curve and fewer resources available for assistance.
Scalability and Flexibility: Amazon EC2 is known for its high scalability and flexibility. It allows users to easily scale their resources up or down based on demand and offers a wide range of instance types to choose from. OVH, while offering some scalability options, may not provide the same level of flexibility as Amazon EC2, especially in terms of instance types and configuration options.
Integration with Other Services: Amazon EC2 seamlessly integrates with other services within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) ecosystem, such as Amazon S3 for storage, AWS Lambda for serverless computing, and Amazon RDS for managed databases. These integrations provide a holistic cloud infrastructure. In contrast, OVH may have limitations in terms of integration with other services or may rely more on third-party integrations.
In summary, key differences between Amazon EC2 and OVH include their pricing models, data center locations, service offerings, ease of use, scalability and flexibility, as well as integration with other services.
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.
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.
GCE is much more user friendly than EC2, though Amazon has come a very long way since the early days (pre-2010's). This can be seen in how easy it is to edit the storage attached to an instance in GCE: it's under the instance details and is edited inline. In AWS you have to click the instance > click the storage block device (new screen) > click the edit option (new modal) > resize the volume > confirm (new model) then wait a very long time. Google's is nearly instant.
- In both cases, the instance much be shut down.
There also the preference between "user burden-of-security" and automatic security: AWS goes for the former, GCE the latter.
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.
Pros of Amazon EC2
- Quick and reliable cloud servers647
- Scalability515
- Easy management393
- Low cost277
- Auto-scaling271
- Market leader89
- Backed by amazon80
- Reliable79
- Free tier67
- Easy management, scalability58
- Flexible13
- Easy to Start10
- Widely used9
- Web-scale9
- Elastic9
- Node.js API7
- Industry Standard5
- Lots of configuration options4
- GPU instances2
- Simpler to understand and learn1
- Extremely simple to use1
- Amazing for individuals1
- All the Open Source CLI tools you could want.1
Pros of OVH
- Cost effective57
- Dedicated Hardware34
- DDoS Protection29
- Unmetered Bandwidth27
- Fun9
- SSH root access6
- Low cost4
- Fast delivery4
- Own network4
- Openstack4
- ceph4
- Ip address fail over support1
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Cons of Amazon EC2
- Ui could use a lot of work13
- High learning curve when compared to PaaS6
- Extremely poor CPU performance3
Cons of OVH
- Incidents2
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