What are the top 5 reasons for a business to use Amazon Web Services? There are many advantages to using the cloud hosting services provided by Amazon as opposed to a more traditional web hosting service but we have narrowed it down to what we feel like are the top 5 reasons. Amazon Web Services provides a cloud computing service that is scalable to meet the needs of small to large businesses, as well as government and non-profit organizations. Cloud computing, in a nutshell, is the on-demand delivery of IT resources using the Internet as opposed to having set resources on one (or several) physical machine(s) housed in an individual datacenter.

Top 5 Reasons to Use Amazon Web Services

#1 Flexibility

We have chosen flexibility as the number one reason to use Amazon Web Services because it describes the whole system; each client defines exactly what they need and want and scales the resources up or down based on demand. Because of the huge fluctuation for demand of resources, most businesses end up paying for way more resources than they actually need just for those few peak times that are crucial to the profitability of the company.  The up-front costs can be very daunting because of the hardware that needs to be purchased and configured before you can even start using them and then the continued cost of monitoring, upgrading, and maintaining not just hardware but software and programs, it all adds up to a lot of money and a lot of time. But with a cloud solution like that provided by Amazon Web Services, this process is virtually eliminated and each customer is able to scale their service to meet current needs at any given time. This also eliminates a lot of  the time and money put into selecting the right hardware, finding a reliable and secure datacenter, and then hiring someone to configure and maintain it all.

With Amazon Web Services each customer has flexibility to choose the type of server, preferred operating system, scripting language, database, and of course tools and applications that will benefit and serve their organization in the best possible way. The service works in a self-serve environment allowing users to deploy the resources of hundreds or even thousands of servers in minutes. This provides a lot of flexibility for high-traffic events, application development and testing, and so much more. No matter what type of organization or industry you are in, the Amazon Web Services are flexible enough to meet those specific demands. Users can choose specific products or use any combination of them to meet the business or organization’s needs, some options include: computing, networking, content delivery, storage, database, deployment, management, application services, and other miscellaneous products.

#2 Performance

Performance and reliability are crucial in any web service. There are many separate applications, software programs, and hardware pieces that all come together to support the Amazon Web Services. Oftentimes a company goes to several different providers to get each individual element and then pools the resources together to be used from one or two servers. The danger in this is that if one of those servers fails, your entire operation is shut down and you are scrambling to find the problem, correct the issue, restore backups, and get back “online”. This can easily add up to hours or even days of missed business, angry/frustrated customers, and a lot of expense. Amazon Web Services true cloud-hosting environment can prevent nearly, if not all, of this headache. When problems occur, yes problems are inevitable, their services are structured in such a way that the problem is immediately detected and all affected resources are immediately and automatically switched over to another device that is functioning normally.  You may have limited abilities to edit content or save new data but your sites will remain live, orders will be processed normally, and the end customer will never know there was any issue. Amazon Web Services report a 99.999999999% reliability rating.

#3 Low-cost

No one wants to pay more for something than they need to but when you have a service that varies so much in usage and demand that is what often happens. Because you want to make sure that you always have enough resources to support the spikes in traffic and usage you pay to have more available resources than what you are consistently using. With Amazon Web Services you don’t have to do this. Every account has the ability to scale particular resources to meet current demand. Let’s say you have a weekend trade show coming up, you know from past shows that this will be an incredibly busy time for your services. No problem, you have complete control to “turn on” the resource you need to cover the event and then auto-scale those back to previous levels after the event it over. You are only paying for what you use, not a lot of “just in case” resources that you never end up needing. With Amazon Web Services you choose and pay for only what you need. With many other providers the services are sold in a bundle and if you want to use something different than what came in that specific bundle you will have to pay for it. When you use the Amazon Web Services you select exactly what you want from the very beginning from the hardware, software, and programming, to the storage system, backups, and everything in between. If there is an element you don’t need, you don’t have to pay for it anyway.

#4 Timeliness

The fourth reason we’ve chosen for why you should use Amazon Web Services is the matter of timeliness. This affects many different aspects of your service, from initial setup and deployment to availability of resources and testing and deploying new products, applications, or services. The cloud hosting environment takes away virtually all of the “wait” time. No more waiting for the hardware to be delivered, setup, and configured. No more waiting for the support team to get in touch with you about updating software, adding more diskspace, and bandwidth. No more waiting for the host to determine why you are getting an error and then waiting some more while they are trying to fix the problem that created the issue to begin with. With Amazon Web Services cloud computing, everything is essentially real-time. Because of the use of the Internet and other web services, we have become a worldwide, 24 hour a day 7 days a week society. Web services need to be available all the time. Customers expect to be able to access your services at any time, if you choose to use Amazon Web Services they will be able to.

#5 Try it FREE

Too often we shy away from doing something because we don’t understand it all and aren’t sure if it is what we really need. We tend to stay with what is familiar and what we are comfortable with. Just because we are familiar and comfortable with something does not make it the best choice. Amazon Web Services understands this concept and has created a free account that will allow users a full 12 months access to the Free Tier, which includes:

• Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), with 750 hours per month of Windows and Linux Micro Instance usage
• Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), 5 GBs of Storage
• Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service), 750 hours per month of Micro Database Instance usage
• 24x7x365 Customer Service
• Support Forums
• Documentation, Best Practice Guide, and White Papers

Clients can use the Free Tier to gain hands on experience and see exactly how Amazon Web Services can benefit your organization.

You’ve got nothing to lose and a lot to gain. Visit Amazon today to learn more about AWS and get started with your complete cloud solution today.