Amazon AWS is the big dog of cloud hosting. however, many people are finding it to be more confusing and more expensive that they originally thought. The premise is great — a cloud based server you can scale up or scale down at will. However, as this discussion over at Web Hosting Talk illustrates, AWS isn’t necessarily the best solution for everyone.
Some find the control panel extremely confusing (myself included). Others don’t understand the pricing, and if you aren’t careful, you will see crazy overages for what you’re actually getting.
Here at Small Planet Hosting, we use “virtual dedicated” servers that can be made larger or smaller easily, with straightforward fixed pricing. Unless you’re planning on running a Superbowl advertisement, you probably don’t need the kind of capability that AWS will give you. If you are running a large business, sure look into something like AWS, but for most companies, virtual dedicated is just as robust and the pricing is lower in most cases.
Another disadvantage of AWS — lack of support. You won’t find personal support like you will with a small business like ours.