Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
Amazon EC2 vs OVH: What are the differences?
Developers describe Amazon EC2 as "Scalable, pay-as-you-go compute capacity in the cloud". Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. On the other hand, OVH is detailed as "Dedicated infrastructure for your business". Hundreds of new servers are installed in our 12 datacenters everyday. For our clients, this guarantees bare-metal resources accessible in less than an hour, and the liberty to use it to rollout the software of their choice. The many functions available on our dedicated servers allow our clients to manage their infrastructure autonomously.
Amazon EC2 belongs to "Cloud Hosting" category of the tech stack, while OVH can be primarily classified under "Dedicated Cloud Hosting".
Some of the features offered by Amazon EC2 are:
- 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.
On the other hand, OVH provides the following key features:
- Delivery of servers in less than an hour 24/7/365
- Full user control
- Guaranteed bandwidth
"Quick and reliable cloud servers" is the primary reason why developers consider Amazon EC2 over the competitors, whereas "Cost effective" was stated as the key factor in picking OVH.
According to the StackShare community, Amazon EC2 has a broader approval, being mentioned in 3580 company stacks & 1569 developers stacks; compared to OVH, which is listed in 66 company stacks and 24 developer stacks.
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-scaling270
- 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
- Extremely simple to use1
- Amazing for individuals1
- All the Open Source CLI tools you could want.1
- Simpler to understand and learn1
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
Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions
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
Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions
What is Amazon EC2?
What is OVH?
Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions
What tools integrate with Amazon EC2?
What tools integrate with OVH?
Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions
Blog Posts
+4
+3
+7
+4
+9
+4+8
+12