I’ve recently delved into the AWS (Amazon Web Services) world, and it’s awesome!  Goodbye hardware issues and renting physical servers.  AWS (and other cloud platforms) offers a full spectrum of virtual server space and services which are easily scalable, fault tolerant, and easy to replicate and deploy in minutes.

It’s difficult to sum up the full spectrum of what’s offered, but here are some examples of what I’ve done so far:

• Set up website hosting using the AWS “lightsail” product
• Set up EC2 servers to host larger projects and development
• Used Route 53 for DNS load balancing (using Elastic load balancer)
• Used RDS for scalable remote database services.

This just scratches the surface of what could be done with AWS.  The costs so far are very reasonable, and based more on actual usage than the normal flat fee hosting services out there.  It seems to me that some technical expertise (sys admin / sys architect) is still needed – these are not turnkey setups with cpanel and fancy dashboards that hosting companies provide.  But if you have some skills, or can hire someone who does, you can save money, and get your website / application into the “cloud” for better and more reliable performance.