AWS is great. We use it a work and I spun up extra server capacity for a once a year open studios event.
That being said as someone who's been in the Unix world for a while figuring out which AWS services to use is not obvious at all. It took me some time to figure out the alphabet soup of sevices and I was familiar from work. I ended up using "cloud formation" which builds you a server (LAMP or other) and optional database/loadbalances configuration. Its was that or selecting a LAMP ami (Amazon machine image). They have a lot of documentation but its hard to get an overview of what everything is (S3, elastic storage....) Plus configuring web server/ database servers for best performance can be non-trivial.
I get better speeds from our organizations cheap "shared hosting", during low loads. I was pretty sure the one week of very high loads would have crushed the shared host, thus AWS was perfect.
That being said as someone who's been in the Unix world for a while figuring out which AWS services to use is not obvious at all. It took me some time to figure out the alphabet soup of sevices and I was familiar from work. I ended up using "cloud formation" which builds you a server (LAMP or other) and optional database/loadbalances configuration. Its was that or selecting a LAMP ami (Amazon machine image). They have a lot of documentation but its hard to get an overview of what everything is (S3, elastic storage....) Plus configuring web server/ database servers for best performance can be non-trivial.
I get better speeds from our organizations cheap "shared hosting", during low loads. I was pretty sure the one week of very high loads would have crushed the shared host, thus AWS was perfect.