When comparing Amazon EC2 vs Cloud at Cost, the Slant community recommends Amazon EC2 for most people. In the question“What are the best VPS providers?” Amazon EC2 is ranked 16th while Cloud at Cost is ranked 19th. The most important reason people chose Amazon EC2 is:
You get 750 hours per month of free t2.micro usage for the first year.
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Pros
Pro One-year free tier
You get 750 hours per month of free t2.micro usage for the first year.
Pro New t2.nano tier makes it cost competitive
AWS has typically been much more expensive but the new tier brings them inline with a $5 per months starter.
Pro Excellent feature-set
The tools and features available on AWS are mind blowing. From blob store through load balancers, queuing and databases just for starters.
Pro Cheap. Like, really cheap...
With the coupons they offer all the time you really can't beat the price when you consider its a one time fee.
Pro Good variety of OS selections
You can load several variants of Linux (Ubuntu, Cent OS, Debian, etc.) and they even let you throw Windows 7 on them (security nightmare, but whatever). You have to enter your own Win 7 key.
Cons
Con Part of large infrastructure
Being part of huge Amazon services infrastructure, EC2 burrows you into bureaucracy of a large company, advertising other Amazon services, and making simple things look complicated.
Con Service
You get what you pay for. Don't expect stellar customer support or blazing fast boxes. I only use these for really basic things. I have one running GitLab to back up my code, a couple running Cloud 9 so I can dev straight on the server, and one as a proxy for when I'm on public wifi or something. Don't think you are going to run your company's web site on these servers.