# Amazon EC2 73 Hacker News commenters recommended Amazon EC2 and 57 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 5 years (3 owners). **Verdict:** People recommend EC2 for reliable servers, easy backups and patching, but critics say it often costs far more than a VPS or dedicated server. ## Why people recommend it - Good for personal and small servers (4 comments): "EC2 is similarly great for normal people as long as you only need a part-time server for a short amount of time." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49612102)) "All my personal services are running on one EC2 instance and I use subdomains to separate them." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49134380)) "I can toss pennies per hour at Amazon for a relatively small VM with like 4GB of RAM" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48456643)) - Saves money over dedicated machines (2 comments): "The last one has probably already saved me hundreds of dollars that I would otherwise pay for a dedicated machine" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50015075)) "now suddenly EC2/EBS/etc costing is so cheap it's a no brain choice" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47240407)) - Easy patching and backups (2 comments): "If I have a fleet of 10 EC2 instances, I can keep them patched with Systems Manager without having to build any of that automation myself." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45822538)) "Not to mention how easy it is to backup mediawiki + mysql in AWS vs having to spin up ANOTHER vps." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50013993)) - Trusted core AWS infrastructure (2 comments): "I wouldn't trust anything more than the ec2, RDS, S3 layer which are more "completed" products" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46610232)) "the basic infrastructure we know and love like S3, EC2, etc." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49478967)) ## What people warn about - Often costs more than a VPS (4 comments): "I have come across a lot of people who use EC2 (usually just a single instance) when a VPS would work fine for them." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46821987)) "Don't you know EC2 is so much more expensive than self hosting?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49381685)) "If all you are using on AWS is EC2, I agree that it has no value. You should switch to a much cheaper option." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48544335)) - Full VM adds management overhead (2 comments): "You might even get away with EC2s but they bring extra overhead of management such as patches and os upgrades" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48875116)) "EC2 gives you a full VM which means slow boots, manual cleanup, big blast radius if your agent breaks out." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47468223)) - Outages can break autoscaling (3 comments): "Existing workloads were fine but I had to go and tell my marketing department to not do anything until it was sorted because auto-scaling was busted." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46879582)) "I can't say that EC2 will never made a breaking change that causes RDS, lambda, auto-scaling to break, but if they do, it'll be front page news." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259968)) "I've seen US East 1 outages cause autoscaling issues in other regions including failing to start new EC2s." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50176241)) - Deprecations and API changes (2 comments): "Networking is probably the most frustrating thing you'll ever encounter and beware when they change their APIs and parameters" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47339443)) "it just vanished one day because Amazon sunsetted EC2 clasic and I didn't have time to deal with that" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47774527)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Hetzner](https://hackerapproved.com/p/hetzner.md): 415 recommend - [DigitalOcean](https://hackerapproved.com/p/digitalocean.md): 133 recommend - [exe.dev](https://hackerapproved.com/p/exe-dev.md): 115 recommend - [Hetzner Cloud](https://hackerapproved.com/p/hetzner-cloud.md): 99 recommend - [OVH hosting](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ovh.md): 81 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Amazon EC2", https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-ec2/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).