--- description: Review of Amazon EC2 Software: system overview, features, price and cost information. Get free demos and compare to similar programs. image: https://gdm-localsites-assets-gfprod.imgix.net/images/software_advice/og_logo-55146305bbe7b450bea05c18e9be9c9a.png title: Amazon EC2 | Reviews, Pricing & Demos - SoftwareAdvice GB --- Breadcrumb: [Home](/) > [Virtual Machine Software](/directory/4688/virtual-machine/software) > [Amazon EC2](/software/390324/amazon-ec2) # Amazon EC2 Canonical: https://www.softwareadvice.co.uk/software/390324/amazon-ec2 Page: 1 / 8\ Next: [Next page](https://www.softwareadvice.co.uk/software/390324/amazon-ec2?page=2) > Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service designed to help businesses with cloud computing, video encoding, batch processing and big data analytics for developing graphic-intensive applications. Key features include data migration, SLA monitoring, load balancing, log access, network monitoring, configuration management, data security and performance monitoring. Teams using Amazon EC2 can manage their network's access permissions, launch instances with multiple operating systems and load them with a custom application environment. The Amazon Machine Image (AMI) provides pre-configured templates, which allow developers to create an image comprising data, libraries, applications, and associated configuration settings. Enterprises can also run the virtual computing environment in multiple locations, attach persistent block storage to existing instances and employ static IP endpoints. Amazon EC2 helps application managers with data warehousing, distributed file systems, NoSQL databases to ensure accelerated computing. Pricing is available on usage basis that is billed monthly and support is extended via documentation, FAQs and email. > > Verdict: Rated **4.7/5** by 173 users. Top-rated for **Likelihood to recommend**. ----- ## Quick Stats & Ratings | Metric | Rating | Detail | | **Overall** | **4.7/5** | 173 Reviews | | Ease of Use | 4.1/5 | Based on overall reviews | | Customer Support | 4.1/5 | Based on overall reviews | | Value for Money | 4.3/5 | Based on overall reviews | | Features | 4.7/5 | Based on overall reviews | | Recommendation percentage | 90% | (9/10 Likelihood to recommend) | ## About the vendor - **Company**: Amazon Web Services - **Location**: Seattle, US - **Founded**: 2006 ## Commercial Context - **Pricing model**: Usage Based (Free Trial) - **Pricing Details**: Amazon EC2 offers a free tier for the T2 and T3 instances, as well as the new T4g.micro instance. When you are ready to upgrade, choose one of the many pricing options available for your organization. - **Target Audience**: Self Employed, 2–10, 11–50, 51–200, 201–500, 501–1,000, 1,001–5,000, 5,001–10,000, 10,000+ - **Deployment & Platforms**: Cloud, SaaS, Web-based - **Supported Languages**: English - **Available Countries**: United States ## Features - API - Access Controls/Permissions - Activity Dashboard - Activity Management - Application Management - Backup and Recovery - Cloud Application Security - Cloud Computing - Collaboration Tools - Compliance Management - Configurable Workflow - Configuration Management - Customisable Reports - Dashboard Creation - Data Dictionary Management - Data Import/Export - Data Mapping - Data Migration - Data Security - Data Storage Management ## Integrations (3 total) - Amazon CloudWatch - Amazon RDS - Amazon S3 ## Category - [Virtual Machine Software](https://www.softwareadvice.co.uk/directory/4688/virtual-machine/software) ## Related Categories - [Virtual Machine Software](https://www.softwareadvice.co.uk/directory/4688/virtual-machine/software) - [Cloud Security Software](https://www.softwareadvice.co.uk/directory/4329/cloud-security/software) - [Big Data Software](https://www.softwareadvice.co.uk/directory/3299/big-data/software) - [Database Software](https://www.softwareadvice.co.uk/directory/4512/database-management-systems/software) - [Virtualisation Software](https://www.softwareadvice.co.uk/directory/4190/virtualization/software) ## Alternatives 1. [Microsoft Azure](https://www.softwareadvice.co.uk/software/397793/microsoft-azure) — 4.6/5 (1947 reviews) 2. [Vinchin Backup & Recovery](https://www.softwareadvice.co.uk/software/434653/vinchin-backup-and-recovery) — 4.7/5 (153 reviews) 3. [Google Cloud](https://www.softwareadvice.co.uk/software/172144/google-cloud-platform) — 4.7/5 (2263 reviews) 4. [Iperius Backup](https://www.softwareadvice.co.uk/software/441034/iperius-backup) — 4.5/5 (189 reviews) 5. [DigitalOcean](https://www.softwareadvice.co.uk/software/248046/digitalocean) — 4.6/5 (158 reviews) ## Reviews ### "EC2 Leads the Industry for a Reason" — 5.0/5 > **Matthew** | *17 May 2021* | Information Technology & Services | Recommendation rating: 10.0/10 > > **Pros**: Superb pricing. Very reliable. Lots of choices. Great dashboard tools. When connected with CloudWatch, monitoring is great. Tools for networking and security are very flexible. Perfect tool to pull out of the technical toolbox when you need a server. > > **Cons**: The variety of choices and configuration options increases the level of complexity. Ideally you know what you're doing before you get started. Windows pricing is a bit steep, but one is better off not running servers on Windows anyways. For paying customers with a certain volume, they need to include a free support level that at least allows bug reporting. We pay them more than $10K/month, and it's crazy we can't even send them a support email or do a chat without paying hundreds more per month. > > We've hosted with them for many years. Despite some little drawbacks, we wouldn't consider switching to another cloud provider. A technical project can thrive in the AWS ecosystem, with EC2 as the foundation for server capacity. ----- ### "The best PaaS" — 5.0/5 > **Saulo** | *4 November 2021* | Retail | Recommendation rating: 10.0/10 > > **Pros**: Elastic Bean Stalk is a very simple and reliable platform as a service. You can configure various aspects of your application like deploy, autoscaling and database. Lambda is also an extremely useful resource for small service development without having to set up a complete framework for it. > > **Cons**: Some functions are hard to learn like IAM for example. Also, managing costs well can be a challenge as there are many options to choose from. > > I've been using AWS for over 10 years and I don't remember having any problems, except for the ones I caused myself. It's extremely reliable, safe and affordable. ----- ### "EC2 decreases significant amount of time to go live\!" — 4.0/5 > **Verified Reviewer** | *26 September 2019* | Information Technology & Services | Recommendation rating: 9.0/10 > > **Pros**: Amazon EC2 has broad choices of setup and configuration depending on your budget. It provides you a lot that you nearly dont need to maintain the instance at all. It also provides you load balancers that you can use it with and you can be sure that your application will scale when needed. If you are using the EC2 with Elastic Beanstalk it will be very easy to deploy and go live. > > **Cons**: It is an expensive service full plus. But you can consider that you are not going to need that much of maintenance power so you can decrease your cost by looking from that perspective. > > We are using EC2 with Elastic Beanstalk for our large web application with both Tomcat and Nodejs apps. It is being scaled when the traffic increases and scales up very efficiently. Yet, it is being expensive but it provides us to focus on development instead of maintenance. ----- ### "AWS EC2 a great virtual machine service" — 5.0/5 > **Verified Reviewer** | *16 November 2022* | Information Technology & Services | Recommendation rating: 10.0/10 > > **Pros**: The ability to scale horizontally and vertically in automatic ways through configurations or by setting alarms. It is very easy to manage hundreds of instances from a central dashboard during stress' times for the application. It is also very easy to version and create templates to automate the creation of this resources and there are always ways of monitoring their health and even ways to avoid leaving instances on that don't represent income to the business. > > **Cons**: There is not an overwhelming bad point. The service works ok and makes what it must without complications. Since it is one of the first services from AWS, it has evolved and matured greatly. > > The creation of cloud architectures with great cost management services. We are maintaining several clients' infrastructures on the Cloud, and we can use a common set of tools to do it all in the most efficient manner. The elasticity of services allows us to react to business requirements in no time. ----- ### "EC2 - the computing in cloud computing" — 5.0/5 > **Verified Reviewer** | *31 May 2022* | Publishing | Recommendation rating: 10.0/10 > > **Pros**: \* ALB is a game-changer for managing multiple websites \* Instant scaling up if needed \* Spawn as many servers or instances as you like, in whatever categories you like \* Tag your instances to keep track of them > > **Cons**: \* Spawning instances is so much fun -- but it gets expensive \* The UI on huge services (like the ALB) is kind of crazy. Why is it hidden in the small left nav? \* Navigating to the right instance is not always easy > > I think EC2 was the first service we signed up for when we moved to AWS years ago. It was an eye-opening experience: we used to own hardware, and now we can just click buttons and make hardware appear? Insane. And yet, it worked. And still does. We have around 100 instances of varying sorts running at all times, most of them running either individual applications or (more recently) hosting a whole bunch of Docker containers via ECS. (This is the more powerful and better way to do things these days.) The other huge boon for us was when AWS announced their Application Load Balancer. What this allows you to do is inspect every request and route it to specific targets if the request meets certain criteria. Got a staging server at staging.example.com? Just add that route to your ALB, and send it to your staging machine. Done. It's so simple, but so powerful. Like much of AWS, the UI on EC2 has not quite kept up with the times. The almighty ALB, for instance, is hidden under a single small item in the left-nav, called "Load Balancers." Which is accurate, but doesn't exactly give them their due. Lots of other issues like that -- not always easy to find what you want to find, especially if you don't know exactly what you are looking for. But overall it's better than many other parts of AWS, so not complaining too much. If you're on AWS at all, you're likely using EC2 already. Definitely don't forget to integrate CloudWatch so you can easily get logging\! ----- Page: 1 / 8\ Next: [Next page](https://www.softwareadvice.co.uk/software/390324/amazon-ec2?page=2) ## Links - [View on SoftwareAdvice](https://www.softwareadvice.co.uk/software/390324/amazon-ec2) ## This page is available in the following languages | Locale | URL | | de | | | en | | | en-AU | | | en-GB | | | en-IE | | | en-NZ | | | fr | | ----- ## Structured Data