Why we picked Amazon AWS over Rackspace and dedicated hosting

Last saturday we switched Wedoist from Rackspace's Cloud to Amazon AWS. In this post I will present why we have done this and why we picked Amazon AWS instead of Rackspace's Cloud or dedicated hosting.

Why not Rackspace's Cloud?

We initially used Rackspace because we thought they had lots of experience and expertise in hosting. Now we are not so sure and we don't have a huge trust in their systems or their network.

Our problem was that a lot of users had reported performance issues. Wedoist is used in about 50 countries and each time we debugged these issues they were from users that came from "remote countries" such as Brazil, Hong Kong or Taiwan. Having developed web-applications for a long time we were sure it was a network issue and even I could reproduce this issue in Chile. This was our main reason for moving to Amazon AWS: Rackspace's network does not seem to work that well in "remote areas" of the world.

The second reason is that Amazon AWS seems to be a superior product that offers more solutions such as:

• Amazon RDS: Managed SQL databases
• Amazon SES: Simple Email Service
• Amazon DynamoDB: Fully managed NoSQL database

Amazon AWS also seems to be in rapid development, for example, Amazon DynamoDB was released last week (and it seems to be an awesome database solution!)

Why not dedicated hosting?

You will get a lot more hardware by going for dedicated hosting (either buying or leasing servers). For example, if you read pinboard's article on dedicated hosting, A Short Rant About Hosting, you will find prices that are much cheaper than Amazon's.

Here are our reasons why we didn't go the dedicated hosting route:

Cost isn't everything:
For us cost isn't the only thing we care about. Our focus is on building software and serving our users in best ways possible. Setting things up ourselfs would save money, but would require a lot more work, be more limited and possible produce more errors.

We don't have resources to use multiple data centers:
Some things would not be possible at all, because setting it up would be very expensive - - an example is minute snapshots of our databases that are stored in 3 different data centers and can be restored with a few clicks. Implementing backup strategies is complex, especially if you have a lot of data, and Amazon AWS saves us a lot of headaches in this area.

We can easily scale:
With Amazon AWS scaling up or down is easy: we can add servers, we can upgrade to bigger machines, we can downgrade, we can script everything so extra machines are added in the morning and shutdown in the afternoon. All this with a few clicks or a few scripts and in matter of minutes.

Our focus isn't on managing servers:
The bottom line is that we can focus on building great software. Using Amazon AWS is more costly than dedicated hosting, but our products aren't free, so paying for premium hosting isn't a huge deal.

Amazon AWS seems to be a marketleader
Amazon AWS has an impressive customer base that includes Dropbox, Netflix or Yelp (just to name a few). We feel in good company by being there as well.