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Amazon EC2 2026: Benefits, Features & Pricing

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  • Overview
  • Pricing and Plans
  • Features
  • Integrations
  • User Reviews

Overview

Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
4.7
(173)

Pricing

Pricing available upon request

About Amazon EC2

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.

Amazon EC2 Screenshots

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Amazon EC2 Pricing and Plans

Free Trial
Free Version

Basic

Pricing available upon request

No plan information available

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    Amazon EC2 Features

    • Popular features found in Database
      Backup and Recovery
      Database Conversion
      Data Connectors
      Data Migration
      Data Replication
      Data Virtualization
      Multiple Programming Languages Supported
      Performance Analysis
      Secure Data Storage
    • More features of Amazon EC2
      Access Controls/Permissions
      Activity Dashboard
      Activity Management
      API
      Application Management
      Cloud Application Security
      Cloud Computing
      Collaboration Tools
      Compliance Management
      Configurable Workflow
      Configuration Management
      Customizable Reports
      Dashboard Creation
      Database Support
      Data Dictionary Management
      Data Import/Export
      Data Mapping
      Data Security
      Data Storage Management
      Data Visualization
      Data Warehousing
      Forecasting
      Load Balancing
      Log Access
      Monitoring
      Multiple Data Sources
      Network Monitoring
      Performance Metrics
      Performance Monitoring
      Predictive Analytics
      Real-Time Analytics
      Real-Time Data
      Real-Time Monitoring
      Reporting/Analytics
      Reporting & Statistics
      Role-Based Permissions
      Search/Filter
      Server Monitoring
      Service Level Agreement (SLA) Management
      Templates
      Third-Party Integrations
      Threat Intelligence
      Trend Analysis
      User Management
      Virtualization
      Virtual Server
      Workflow Management

    Amazon EC2 Integrations

    Amazon S3
    Amazon S3
    Integration rated 4.8 from 20 reviews
    Amazon RDS
    Amazon RDS
    Integration rated 4.9 from 17 reviews
    Amazon CloudWatch
    Amazon CloudWatch
    Integration rated 4.5 from 16 reviews

    Amazon EC2 User Reviews

    Overall Rating

    4.7

    Ratings Breakdown

    5

    75%

    4

    19%

    3

    5%

    2

    1%

    1

    1%

    Secondary Ratings

    Ease of Use

    4.1

    Value for money

    4.3

    Customer support

    4.1

    Functionality

    4.7

    Matthew's profile

    Matthew N.

    Verified reviewer

    Information Technology and Services

    2-10 employees

    Used daily for more than 2 years

    Review source

    Reviewed May 2021

    EC2 Leads the Industry for a Reason

    5

    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.

    Ratings Breakdown

    3
    Ease of use
    5
    Value for money
    3
    Customer support
    5
    Functionality
    icon
    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.

    Reasons for choosing Amazon EC2

    AWS had the most mature and comprehensive offerings at the time. Azure has caught up a lot and has some compelling offerings. But, the AWS ecosystem is still our preference for the best functionality, flexibility, breadth of offerings, and pricing.

    Reasons for switching to Amazon EC2

    Softlayer was very immature at the time. Compared to what AWS offered, it was like driving a model T versus a Ferrari. I'm sure Softlayer has improved by now, but they were so far behind (and it's IBM after all), that I can't imagine they've come anywhere close to catching up.

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    Saulo's profile

    Saulo A.

    Verified reviewer

    Retail

    2-10 employees

    Used daily for more than 2 years

    Review source

    Reviewed November 2021

    The best PaaS

    5

    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.

    Ratings Breakdown

    3
    Ease of use
    5
    Value for money
    5
    Customer support
    4
    Functionality
    icon
    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.

    Reasons for choosing Amazon EC2

    Previous knowledge of features, pricing and startup program.

    Reasons for switching to Amazon EC2

    Pricing, Support, Reliability, and Features Available Only on AWS

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    VR

    Verified
    Reviewer

    Information Technology and Services

    1001-5000 employees

    Used daily for less than 2 years

    Review source

    Reviewed September 2019

    EC2 decreases significant amount of time to go live!

    4

    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.

    Ratings Breakdown

    4
    Ease of use
    4
    Value for money
    5
    Functionality
    icon
    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.

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    VR

    Verified
    Reviewer

    Information Technology and Services

    2-10 employees

    Used daily for more than 2 years

    Review source

    Reviewed November 2022

    AWS EC2 a great virtual machine service

    5

    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.

    Ratings Breakdown

    5
    Ease of use
    5
    Value for money
    5
    Customer support
    5
    Functionality
    icon
    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.

    Reasons for choosing Amazon EC2

    It was the perfect fit for the client's current architecture.

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    VR

    Verified
    Reviewer

    Publishing

    51-200 employees

    Used daily for more than 2 years

    Review source

    Reviewed May 2022

    EC2 - the computing in cloud computing

    5

    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!

    Ratings Breakdown

    3
    Ease of use
    5
    Value for money
    2
    Customer support
    4
    Functionality
    icon
    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

    Reasons for choosing Amazon EC2

    AWS offered so much more than Google at the time -- Amazon's whole suite of services just feels that much more robust and well-developed. Not always elegant to use, but works.

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    sagar's profile

    sagar j.

    Verified reviewer

    Information Technology and Services

    501-1000 employees

    Used daily for less than 2 years

    Review source

    Reviewed May 2021

    Get ready your instance with few clicks

    4

    Easy configuration Easy to access with go performance Easy to customized Easy to suspend and terminate Preferable to go with EC-2 anytime.

    Ratings Breakdown

    4
    Ease of use
    4
    Value for money
    4
    Customer support
    4
    Functionality
    icon
    Pros:
    AWS EC2 allows you to create an instance i.e Elastic compute within a few clicks. For AWS EC2 you do not need to be worried about the installation and partitions and etc configurations. Instead of selecting the things you just choose your requirement and get it configured with fully installed Everything within few clicks. Here you get save your time Here you get to save you money as you have to pay only as you required. You have to option as well for free tier to the testing purpose of EC2. Even you have to option to choose a flavor as per your requirement you can have an option to choose the categories wise instance You can just say that: easy simple deployment with EC2
    Cons:
    If you have to configure the instance-EC2 you have to pay as per the billing criteria. You are not allowed to configured or customized your free tier instance-EC2. If you are not paying for your instance-EC2 your instance will be suspended.

    Reasons for choosing Amazon EC2

    AWS EC2 comes with Advanced features Easy to established connectivity with databases, firewalls, VPNs, Easy to install and experience good performance

    Reasons for switching to Amazon EC2

    Better performance Easy to understand Easy to access cost saving - as pay as use

    Read More

    Carlos Alberto's profile

    Carlos Alberto G.

    Verified reviewer

    Computer Software

    2-10 employees

    Used daily for more than 2 years

    Review source

    Reviewed September 2020

    Experience to grow

    5

    I have been able to solve many types of problems, from simple hostings, to applications that have grown and needed to scale. The configurations are simple for the most part, and you can really grow without the need for large expenses or investments of time in implementing astronomical solutions.

    Ratings Breakdown

    5
    Ease of use
    5
    Value for money
    5
    Customer support
    5
    Functionality
    icon
    Pros:
    I think the whole EC2 environment is impressive, the set of tools allows for implementations of all kinds and on the scale that is necessary. Currently there are many configuration options, the user interfaces have improved making the use fluid and very easy to understand. All the implementations that I have had to carry out have been fast and the integrations with the existing resources have not been a problem.
    Cons:
    In my case, I would like to have some extra tool available to manage the operating system of the instances.

    Reasons for choosing Amazon EC2

    The price commands many times, but in this case the amount of options and possibilities offered by the platform.

    Reasons for switching to Amazon EC2

    Poor support and few tools

    Read More

    VR

    Verified
    Reviewer

    Computer Software

    51-200 employees

    Used daily for less than 2 years

    Review source

    Reviewed February 2021

    Very good cloud service to host application servers!

    5

    Amazon EC2 has allowed us to host our application server very quickly and easily without worrying about the setup process and security measures, as it takes care of that. Amazon EC2 also has a lot of services for server monitoring and the ability to scale up or scale down servers when required which reduces operational costs as we only scale up when there is heavy load & scale down otherwise only paying for what we use. I am happy with Amazon EC2

    Ratings Breakdown

    5
    Ease of use
    4
    Value for money
    5
    Customer support
    5
    Functionality
    icon
    Pros:
    Amazon EC2 has a wide variety of instances with various operating systems and hardware options to choose from, this ensures that we are able to select the server we need and have to pay only for that which helps in cost saving. It has options to interact with the server via application libraries, command line terminal & its dashboard which helps in managing the server. Amazon AWS also has other products that integrate really well and easily with Amazon EC2 making it the go-to choice for hosting application servers.
    Cons:
    Amazon EC2 has a learning curve that a beginner may find difficult to grasp easily & quickly also its dashboard user interface is quite complex with a lot of options and it is easy for someone to get confused and overwhelmed by it.

    Reasons for choosing Amazon EC2

    The variety of services offered by Amazon is much greater and the fact that it has a very wide user community

    Read More

    NL

    Nir L.

    Verified reviewer

    Telecommunications

    51-200 employees

    Used daily for more than 2 years

    Review source

    Reviewed August 2023

    Top level elastic virtual machines

    5

    Overall I am, over the years, very happy with both the cost and quality of the EC2 platform specifically and the AWS services generally. It is my first choice for cloud infrastructure.

    Ratings Breakdown

    5
    Ease of use
    5
    Value for money
    5
    Customer support
    5
    Functionality
    icon
    Pros:
    Easy to set up both manually and scripted, with a very wide variety of machine types so you can select the most cost-effective machines for your different needs. It's hosted on one of the most popular cloud platforms there are so expect to get high-quality infrastructure for a fair cost.
    Cons:
    Permissions are complicated to set up, and load balancing is rather costly. Also, changing instance type requires a restart which is less than optimal.

    Reasons for choosing Amazon EC2

    In my humble opinion EC2 is easier to manage and set up than other platforms.

    Read More

    VR

    Verified
    Reviewer

    Computer Software

    11-50 employees

    Used daily for more than 2 years

    Review source

    Reviewed May 2020

    Extensible with Plentiful Integrations

    4

    EC2 gives us the ability to automate a lot of our infrastructure installations. Along with the ability to bid on spot machines to make our server costs low.

    Ratings Breakdown

    4
    Ease of use
    5
    Value for money
    5
    Customer support
    5
    Functionality
    icon
    Pros:
    Amazon EC2 handles a lot of our server infrastructure and has in incredible amount of features to help deploy our products in a fast and scaleable fashion. Having integrations with other software allows us to use EC2 in an automated simple "key-turn" clusters.
    Cons:
    The thing a least like about EC2 is how rigid creating resources are. Editing things like machine sizes, flavors, and such is not as intuitive. Along with having different sections/consoles for managing instance configurations like networks or security groups.

    Reasons for choosing Amazon EC2

    EC2 had the most stable APIs at the time and seemed more mature than other cloud offerings.

    Read More

    Showing 1 - 10 of 173 Reviews

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