So I am willing to try out almost every different type of hosting company out there.  I personally have over 600 websites that have several hundred thousand unique visitors a month.  I love GoGrid but wanted to try out EC2. After playing around with EC2 for several days, I came with the following conclusions. GoGrid & EC2 only looks similar. They are actually two different offering targeting different types of scenarios.

Here are my 4 pet peves with Amazon Ec2 Cloud hosting:

1. Amazon EC2 doesn’t support Windows 2008. Can anyone say annoying?  Both because there are some features that I could have used and because Windows 2003 (their only Windows offering) is not supporting RDP saved passwords, and doesn’t support copy/paste in the login screen. Both of which make it horrible login experience with the crazy passwords Amazon assign.
2. Spinning up a new instance in EC2 seems to take about 15 – 30 minutes, which is annoyingly long.  Long instance provisioning time sucks. Yes, I know about reserved instances, not applicable for my scenario. (GoGrid feels faster, but I don’t have any data to say if it is faster).
3. Why does support cost so much?  We all need good cloud hosting support but paying $100’s a month for support blows when you can get it for free at other places.
4. I setup an instance, told it to install security updates, and rebooted it. It never came up. I am not sure what I am supposed to do in this case. You have to enter a support contract to recover this, as far as I could tell. It seems that the response would have been: ‘just recreate the instance’.   There seems to be no good way to recover an instance.  Amazon Ec2 should fix this.
   

Here are my 2 pet peves with GoGrid Cloud Hosting

1. When I was trying to send large amounts of data over FTP the connection kept being reset. This isn’t a normal use case but it made me wary of their connection.
2. Tried to setup your SAN storage was rocket science and after 30 minutes of messing with network settings it still wasn’t working.

So what do I do?  Well as of right now I’m going to stick with GoGrid for some of my sites and keep looking for other cloud hosting companies that are better and will help with FTP and SAN problems both of which are a primary use of that platform for me.  What are your thoughts about this?