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Amazon EC2 VPS Review

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EC2

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Amazon EC2 was founded in 2006.
It is headquartered in the USA.
It offers VPS, Database, Storage and Networking hosting products.

It has datacenters in:
  • Australia
  • Bahrain
  • Brazil
  • Canada
  • China
  • France
  • Germany
  • India
  • Indonesia
  • Ireland
  • Italy
  • Japan
  • Singapore
  • South Africa
  • South Korea
  • Sweden
  • United Arab Emirates
  • United Kingdom
  • United States

Best VPS Awards

2nd Best VPS August 2019
2nd Best Value June 2019
3rd Best VPS February 2020

This provider is related to Amazon Lightsail

Lightsail is the low price, simple VPS offering from Amazon


Quick Links

Amazon EC2 plans specs and prices Plans
Amazon EC2 instance types Instance Types
How fast are Amazon EC2 servers? Check them out in the Screener Screener
Review CPU models found in Amazon EC2 trials CPUs
Performance variations of Amazon EC2 VPS over the long term Consistency

Sponsored: This is a self-managed VPS service, and if you find it too complicated, you can always opt-in for its AWS VPS hosting. fully-managed version provided by ScalaHosting.

Amazon EC2 VPS Features

Features not included in the VPS price are marked as missing below.

Feature Value Comment
Hourly Billing  Yes
DDOS Protection  No

Not included by default but AWS offers lots of tools to mitigate DDOS attacks for a fee.
Backups  No

Available but charged at the EBS pricing rate.
Control Panel  Builtin
SSH Keys Setup  Yes
Total Number of Datacenters  22
Number of Datacenter Continents  4
Monitoring Charts  Yes

Here again, the charts are the most detailed and varied of all providers.
Admin REST API  Yes

URL: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/APIReference/Welcome.html
Upgrade VPS from admin console  No
Mobile Friendly UI  No
Reverse DNS  Yes

Possible but only on optional Elastic IP addresses. Those addresses are free while attached to an instance.
Accepted Forms of Payment  Credit cards
Hidden CPU Model  No
Affiliate Program  No
Firewall  Yes

Allows creation of "security groups" with inbound and outbound rules. A security group can be assigned to an instance.
Shelving  Yes

"We don't charge usage for a stopped instance, or data transfer fees, but we do charge for the storage for any Amazon EBS volumes."
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/Stop_Start.html
Compare Features

Pros and Cons

Strengths

  • Numerous datacenter locations.
  • The largest catalog of cloud services you can find.

Weaknesses

  • Not the easiest UI.
  • Storage speed throttled based on volume size.

Amazon EC2 Extra Services

In addition to features included in VPS plans, Amazon EC2 also offers the following services (possibly for a fee):

Backups   Block storage   Object storage   Load balancer   Floating IP addresses  
Team Management   Managed databases   Serverless   DDoS protection   Kubernetes  
GPU instances   Private network  

VPS Instance Provisioning Time

For each Amazon EC2 VPS trial, we measured how long it took to provision the server from the moment it was ordered to the moment it accepted SSH connections.

See also VPS provisioning times for all providers.

Average Provisioning Time Min Provisioning Time Max Provisioning Time Number of VPS Samples
28s 10s 40s 7

Control Panel Screenshots


Cloud Storage Prices

For a comparison of storage features and prices from all providers, please check the Cloud Storage Prices page.

Storage Type Price / GB / month Description Restriction
Object $0.023 S3 standard. AWS S3 also offers infrequent access and Glacier object storage for lower prices.
https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ 		Price for the first 50TB, slightly cheaper for monthly transfers over 50TB.
Block $0.045 Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) Volumes
https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/
Block $0.100 gp2 is the default EBS volume type for Amazon EC2 instances (SSD).
https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/volume-types/
Block $0.080 General purpose SSD (gp3). IOPS and throughput are charged extra. AWS also offer cold HDD for $0.025/GB/month.
https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/

Network Bandwidth Prices

These are the network bandwidth prices charged by Amazon EC2 for outbound transfers from VPS to the internet.

For a comparison of bandwidth prices from all providers, go to the Network Bandwitdh Prices page.

Description Price / GB
Pricing model: Allowance Then Charged (the provider gives a free bandwidth allowance with each server. Bandwidth above the free allowance is charged by the provider.)
Free allowance: 100 GB / month (for a 2 core 4GB instance or closest available)
Transfer pool: yes
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/ 		Between 0TB and 10TB: $0.090/GB
Between 10TB and 50TB: $0.085/GB
Between 50TB and 150TB: $0.070/GB
Above 150TB: $0.050/GB

Amazon EC2 Instance Types and Plans

How fast are Amazon EC2 servers:  Screen all Amazon EC2 VPS Plans

All Amazon EC2 instance types

Note: All VPS prices reported at VPSBenchmarks are for one month without any further commitment and before promotions. The IPv4 charge is added to the VPS monthly price in case the provider doesn't include it by default.

Plan Number of CPU cores RAM Storage Price
Family:
General purpose
Instance Type:
M6a

Amazon EC2 M6a instances are powered by 3rd generation AMD EPYC processors and are an ideal fit for general purpose workloads.

  • Up to 3.6 GHz 3rd generation AMD EPYC processors (AMD EPYC 7R13).
m6a.large 2 8.0GB 40GB $65.12
Family:
Memory optimized
Instance Type:
R6a

Amazon EC2 R6a instances are powered by 3rd generation AMD EPYC processors and are an ideal fit for memory intensive workloads.

  • Up to 3.6 GHz 3rd generation AMD EPYC processors (AMD EPYC 7R13).
VPSBenchmarks has not tested any plan for this instance type yet.
Family:
Compute optimized
Instance Type:
C7g

Amazon EC2 C7g instances are powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton3 processors. They deliver the best price performance in Amazon EC2 for compute-intensive applications.

  • 20% higher enhanced networking bandwidth compared to C6g instances.
  • EBS-optimized by default.
c7g.medium 1 2.0GB 20GB $27.74
Family:
General purpose
Instance Type:
M5d

Amazon EC2 M5 instances are the latest generation of General Purpose Instances powered by Intel Xeon® Platinum 8175M processors. This family provides a balance of compute, memory, and network resources, and is a good choice for many applications.

  • Up to 3.1 GHz Intel Xeon Scalable processor (Skylake 8175M or Cascade Lake 8259CL) with new Intel Advanced Vector Extension (AVX-512) instruction set.
  • With M5d instances, local NVMe-based SSDs are physically connected to the host server and provide block-level storage that is coupled to the lifetime of the M5 instance. 75GB for every 2xvCPUs.
m5d.large (Off rankings) 2 8.0GB 75GB $81.36
m5d.xlarge (Off rankings) 4 16.0GB 150GB $162.72
m5d.2xlarge (Off rankings) 8 32.0GB 300GB $325.44
Family:
General purpose
Instance Type:
M5

Amazon EC2 M5 instances are the latest generation of General Purpose Instances powered by Intel Xeon® Platinum 8175M processors. This family provides a balance of compute, memory, and network resources, and is a good choice for many applications.

  • Up to 3.1 GHz Intel Xeon Scalable processor (Skylake 8175M or Cascade Lake 8259CL) with new Intel Advanced Vector Extension (AVX-512) instruction set.
m5.large 2 8.0GB 40GB $73.12
Family:
General purpose
Instance Type:
M6g

Amazon EC2 M6g instances are powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors. They deliver up to 40% better price/performance over current generation M5 instances and offer a balance of compute, memory, and networking resources for a broad set of workloads.
VPSBenchmarks has not tested any plan for this instance type yet.
Family:
General purpose
Instance Type:
M6i

Amazon EC2 M6i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code named Ice Lake). This family provides a balance of compute, memory, and network resources, and is a good choice for many applications.

  • Up to 3.5 GHz 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Ice Lake 8375C).
  • Up to 50 Gbps of networking speed.
VPSBenchmarks has not tested any plan for this instance type yet.
Family:
Compute optimized
Instance Type:
C6a

Amazon C6a instances are powered by 3rd generation AMD EPYC processors and are designed for compute-intensive workloads.

  • Up to 3.6 GHz 3rd generation AMD EPYC processors (AMD EPYC 7R13).
c6a.large 2 4.0GB 40GB $59.08
Family:
Compute optimized
Instance Type:
C6g

Amazon EC2 C6g instances are powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors. They deliver up to 40% better price performance over current generation C5 instances for compute-intensive applications.
c6g.medium 1 2.0GB 20GB $26.08
c6gd.medium 1 2.0GB 67GB $28.44
c6g.large 2 4.0GB 40GB $52.96
Family:
General purpose
Instance Type:
T4g

Amazon EC2 T4g instances are powered by Arm-based custom built AWS Graviton2 processors and deliver up to 40% better price performance over T3 instances for a broad set of burstable general purpose workloads.

T4g instances accumulate CPU credits when a workload is operating below baseline threshold. Each earned CPU credit provides the T4g instance the opportunity to burst with the performance of a full CPU core for one minute when needed. T4g instances can burst at any time for as long as required in Unlimited mode.
t4g.small 2 2.0GB 40GB $16.10
t4g.medium 2 4.0GB 40GB $28.20
Family:
General purpose
Instance Type:
T3

Amazon EC2 T3 instances are the next generation burstable general-purpose instance type that provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst CPU usage at any time for as long as required. T3 instances offer a balance of compute, memory, and network resources and are designed for applications with moderate CPU usage that experience temporary spikes in use.
t3.micro 2 1.0GB 20GB $7.49
t3.small 2 2.0GB 8GB $14.98
t3-medium 2 4.0GB 8GB $29.95
Instance Type:
Other

No description
t2-small (Off rankings) 1 2.0GB 8GB $16.56
a1.medium (Off rankings) 1 2.0GB 20GB $18.36
t3a.medium 2 4.0GB 40GB $31.00
t2-medium (Off rankings) 2 4.0GB 8GB $33.41
c5a.large 2 4.0GB 40GB $59.44
c5.large 2 4.0GB 40GB $65.20
m5a.large 2 8.0GB 40GB $65.90

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