If you own a small website that is running on a VPS or Cloud services, especially the one in AWS EC2, your traffic range between 40k unique visitors a month, using wordpress, drupal or joomla website. And you are looking for an alternative provider away from AWS EC2 which is starting to bite you due cost of hosting in EC2 is getting higher by the months. You might have found the right article for your needs. Here we will explore 20 alternative to AWS EC2 machine!
Digital Ocean
Digital Ocean is one of the most popular cloud hosting provider among developers that even us is using them for our cloud hosting provider! Compare to Amazon Cloud, they are definitely cheaper and superior when their SSD runs at 500 Mbps read/write! They also offers the cheapest backup services at $1 for your instances! Signing up also get $10 credit for use, FREE.
VULTR
The best alternative to Digital Ocean but with more location! It’s cheaper and offer more attractive promotion than Digital Ocean. It also offers free snapshot services for your instances! This might be the next EC2 machine that i will recommend you to sign up if you are running away from EC2. Vultr provides both Windows and Linux based cloud services as compare to many other provider which only offers linux based ones. Signing up also gets you $30 credit to use their services, FREE!
VPS.NET
Alternatively if you are looking for a reliable speeds, support and ease of use., VPS.NET might be the next solution as they are one of the popular cloud provider in the world.
LeaseWeb
LeaseWeb is slightly more expensive you might just stick with EC2 but who knows!
Ubiquity Hosting
Ubiquity Hosting which is an alternative to your EC2, Linode, Digital Ocean and Vultr competitor. They implemented restriction to disk I/O where some of the people will welcome this move as a way to ensure the environment you are at is not being abused.
Colossus Cloud
Colossus Cloud is a brand of ServerPoint, one the most reputable hosting companies in the industry. They provides Enterprise Cloud Virtual Servers similar to Amazon AWS EC2 with 3 US locations. It is scalable similar to Amazon AWS EC2 but not as complete as Amazon AWS for sure.
Linode
Linode is a close competitor of Digital Ocean. They were very popular in the past, some still use them but most have move to Digital Ocean or Vultr as compare to EC2. And like EC2, they have load balacing feature unlike most of the cloud provider listed here.
Cloudsigma
CloudSigma provides a similar interface as Amazon AWS EC2. They charge based on your usage similar to Amazon AWS. However, this is only be able to view after you have logged into CloudSigma. They provides a lot of features for the little money you pay and provides very reasonable pricing.
Softlayer Cloud
Alternative to EC2, the closest in scale might just be Softlayer, pricing wise, they are pretty much close to EC2 but slightly on the higher tier in term of pricing.
RackSpace Cloud
Rackspace Cloud just offer a managed cloud services similar to CloudWays. They are pretty much similar to EC2 but they offer managed services which might be interesting for you
CloudWays
CloudWays is another interesting fellow which offers Manage services for both Amazon EC2, Google Cloud and Digital Ocean. They are adding more provider into their PaaS system. You might want to just use them if you want to dump that sysadmin of yours. Enter “WEBHOSTINEGG” as promo code when sign up to get $10 credit.
CloudWith.Me
If you are just looking for someone to manage your AWS integration, try CloudWith.ME, which is a PaaS that specialize in using AWS to ease your setup process. All you need to do is to setup with CloudWith.Me and let them manage your WordPress / Drupal / Joomla and etc for you using AWS services. They also provides 12 months free tiers for you to setup your AWS services similar to what AWS is offering!
XenPower
If you are going for 1GB ram, XenPower provides 1GB ram with 40GB of SSD drive and 4TB Bandwidth Transfer for merely Euro 6.9/month. Its not that well known but they are definitely one of the cheapest provider out there in Europe area!
Atlantic.Net
Atlantic.Net is another competitor of DigitalOcean which provider better offering but have lesser location. You can get $15 to try them out too! Just sign up.
100TB
100TB provides the most value for $5-$10 a month with more disk space and bandwidth allocation. I will fall for this with more swap than RAM. Definitely one of the better offering in the market!
1&1 Cloud
Similar to DigitalOcean offer, 1&1 provides 3 location with both Windows and Linux. And they offer one of the highest SSD disk for the price you will be paying. for $4.99, you will be getting 30GB SSD. You can get 1 month free to try them out too!
Codero
Codero provides both Windows and Linux Cloud services with offer quite similar to other competitors. However, they do provides Windows cloud services which most provider doesn’t and if you are looking for windows based alternative to EC2, they might just be the one that you are searching for. And boy, is EC2 expensive which they have placed it up nicely for you to see.
Google Cloud
If you are hosting a big site on Amazon AWS, you might just want to pay their closest competitor, Google, a visit. All their pricing is as close as Amazon can be!
ElasticHosts
ElasticHosts offer 10 locations with the ability of what you can do in Amazon AWS EC2!
Microsoft Azure
Looking at a direct competitor? Why don’t you just look at Microsoft Azure? They offer a better alternative to Amazon EC2 for sure!
Z.COM Cloud
How about trying Japan largest Internet provider, Z.COM CLOUD. They can definitely handle what you have in EC2!
AliCloud
Now, how about trying out the giant? AliCloud in China? They are offering Cloud services similar to Amazon AWS EC2 and with the options of Mainland China and Hong Kong! I bet Amazon doesn’t have that, do they?
VPS.NET
Well, you won’t see much people offering 1000% SLAs. VPS.NET does for its cloud. There is a 15% discount right around. Grab it and give it a try.
Alternative to Amazon AWS EC2
If you ask me, unless you are a huge bad ass website that is hosting on AWS EC2 with monthly payment of few thousand dollars, you can easily jump to their support and negotiate a discount with them which is what happen with a lot of their customers. Alternatively, you can look for one of these companies who can really offer you a better service for the buck you will be chalking out of your wallet!