AWS Versus Dedicated Server Solutions

[SenseiSteve]

Just throwing this out there for discussion

Pros and Cons of AWS versus Dedicated Server Solutions - simply looking for real world "story" and industry expert's opinion of the two.

Possibly:
Differences between "customizing" a virtual environment (cloud) versus a dedicated hardware/software solution?
Scalability versus Price - Cloud solutions are known for their scalability, but how does pricing compare?
Reliability - both are relatively reliable, so why would you select one over the other?

 

[bigredseo]

We've used AWS for a large eCommerce client that likes to run flash sales. The site is WordPress with WooCommerce and a heavily customized database. The reason we went the AWS route is scalability.

Since they run flash sales, they don't always need the power, but every 2 or 3 months they'll run a flash sale that starts at a specific time and ends within a few hours. During that peak they could have 5,000+ users on the site all buying one-off items, so the checkout gets really busy!

When the sale is running, we beef up the allotment on how many CPUs and Memory we want to allow the site to scale to. Once it's all over, the site returns back to lower 1 CPU, 8GB memory settings and maybe 50 users in a day.

Reliability doesn't seem to be an issue on AWS but with the dedicated, because of the flood of traffic, the server just can't keep up with it. And while we know when the sales are going to happen, pushing a request to beef up a server, then downgrade it again just doesn't make sense to do.

At the end of the day, the big reason for the move to AWS was price and scalability.

We've had similar instances with clients on Google Cloud, and the difference between AWS and Google Cloud are minimal (when it comes to serving web pages and databases). Location can play a factor when it comes to Datacenter locations and delivery.