Amazon EC2
Ranked 6 of 21 VPS hosts by recommenders
People recommend EC2 for reliable servers, easy backups and patching, but critics say it often costs far more than a VPS or dedicated server.
People recommend EC2 for reliable servers, easy backups and patching, but critics say it often costs far more than a VPS or dedicated server.
130 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 73
- criticize it
- 57
- approval share
- 56%
Recommended in 12 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Owned for 5 years
Median of the 3 owners who said how long they have had it.
Each square is one year.
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 73 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.2 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 12 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Good for personal and small servers
“EC2 is similarly great for normal people as long as you only need a part-time server for a short amount of time.”
Comment from 8 Sep 2026 in “Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare” “All my personal services are running on one EC2 instance and I use subdomains to separate them.”
Comment from 1 Aug 2026 in “Software for One” “I can toss pennies per hour at Amazon for a relatively small VM with like 4GB of RAM”
Comment from 9 Jun 2026 in “We Think the SpaceX IPO Is Overvalued” - Comment from 24 Jun 2026 in “A Practical Guide to SSH Tunnels: Local and Remote Port Forwarding”
Saves money over dedicated machines
“The last one has probably already saved me hundreds of dollars that I would otherwise pay for a dedicated machine”
Comment from 9 Oct 2026 in “Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?” “now suddenly EC2/EBS/etc costing is so cheap it's a no brain choice”
Comment from 3 Mar 2026 in “Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon” Easy patching and backups
“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.”
Comment from 5 Nov 2025 in “I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars” “Not to mention how easy it is to backup mediawiki + mysql in AWS vs having to spin up ANOTHER vps.”
Comment from 8 Oct 2026 in “Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?” Trusted core AWS infrastructure
“I wouldn't trust anything more than the ec2, RDS, S3 layer which are more "completed" products”
Comment from 13 Jan 2026 in “Amazon Layoffs – In My Own Words” “the basic infrastructure we know and love like S3, EC2, etc.”
Comment from 28 Aug 2026 in “I used AWS cognito for a startup. I wouldn't do it again”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Often costs more than a VPS
“I have come across a lot of people who use EC2 (usually just a single instance) when a VPS would work fine for them.”
Comment from 30 Jan 2026 in “Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?” “Don't you know EC2 is so much more expensive than self hosting?”
Comment from 20 Aug 2026 in “Tell HN: GitHub Is Experiencing Degraded Performance” “If all you are using on AWS is EC2, I agree that it has no value. You should switch to a much cheaper option.”
Comment from 15 Jun 2026 in “Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6BN” - Comment from 4 Nov 2025 in “I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars”
Full VM adds management overhead
“You might even get away with EC2s but they bring extra overhead of management such as patches and os upgrades”
Comment from 11 Jul 2026 in “Understanding ECS from Kubernetes Perspective” “EC2 gives you a full VM which means slow boots, manual cleanup, big blast radius if your agent breaks out.”
Comment from 21 Mar 2026 in “ClawRun – Deploy and manage AI agents in seconds” Outages can break autoscaling
“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.”
Comment from 4 Feb 2026 in “GitHub experience various partial-outages/degradations” “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.”
Comment from 14 Dec 2025 in “Why Twilio Segment moved from microservices back to a monolith” “I've seen US East 1 outages cause autoscaling issues in other regions including failing to start new EC2s.”
Comment from 21 Oct 2026 in “Google Cloud outage affects almost all banking and other operations in Europe” Deprecations and API changes
“Networking is probably the most frustrating thing you'll ever encounter and beware when they change their APIs and parameters”
Comment from 11 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: Klaus – OpenClaw on a VM, batteries included” “it just vanished one day because Amazon sunsetted EC2 clasic and I didn't have time to deal with that”
Comment from 15 Apr 2026 in “Claude Code Routines”
Other VPS hosts people recommend
The four most recommended other VPS hosts, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hetzner | 415 | 212 | 66% | 13 | 5 yrs40 owners | — |
| DigitalOcean | 133 | 117 | 53% | 12 | 10 yrs15 owners | — |
| exe.dev | 115 | 56 | 67% | 11 | — | Approved |
| Hetzner Cloud | 99 | 28 | 78% | 12 | 3 yrs8 owners | Approved |
| Amazon EC2This page | 73 | 57 | 56% | 12 | 5 yrs3 owners | — |
What people said
40 of the 140 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“EC2 for now as I need it running reliably and don't have time to mess around with more optimization”
“I've seen US East 1 outages cause autoscaling issues in other regions including failing to start new EC2s.”
“modern EC2 instances support memory encryption (Graviton + AMD SEV-SNP)”
“why would you even use them when you can do it cheaper by shipping straight to ec2?”
“The last one has probably already saved me hundreds of dollars that I would otherwise pay for a dedicated machine”
“Not to mention how easy it is to backup mediawiki + mysql in AWS vs having to spin up ANOTHER vps.”
“I would say none of these are good options. A simple VM or ec2 node hosting a coding sandbox is likely the better option.”
“Every new EC2 generation is typically slightly more expensive, but the gains in the compute performance are 15-25% or even higher depending on your workload.”
“EC2 is similarly great for normal people as long as you only need a part-time server for a short amount of time.”
“the basic infrastructure we know and love like S3, EC2, etc.”
“Don't you know EC2 is so much more expensive than self hosting?”
“All my personal services are running on one EC2 instance and I use subdomains to separate them.”
“You might even get away with EC2s but they bring extra overhead of management such as patches and os upgrades”
“I have managed to connect hundreds of devices using a single EC2 nano instance.”
“If I can get a same-spec EC2 instance at AWS for just 2x the price of a Hetzner box, I would never consider Hetzner.”
“If all you are using on AWS is EC2, I agree that it has no value. You should switch to a much cheaper option.”
“I can toss pennies per hour at Amazon for a relatively small VM with like 4GB of RAM”
“An EC2 instance with lots of cores like a c6i.32xlarge should do the trick, no?”
“It gets far more complicated when you have reserved instances, and combine reserved instances with RAM sharing when working in a larger org.”
“it just vanished one day because Amazon sunsetted EC2 clasic and I didn't have time to deal with that”
“EC2 gives you a full VM which means slow boots, manual cleanup, big blast radius if your agent breaks out.”
“Networking is probably the most frustrating thing you'll ever encounter and beware when they change their APIs and parameters”
“by defaulting to an EC2 instance, you're in control of what data is at risk”
“now suddenly EC2/EBS/etc costing is so cheap it's a no brain choice”
“the cost of continuous integration higher than the cost of the rest of the ec2 instances”
“renting those from AWS isn't going to be significantly more expensive for a decent-sized company”
“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.”
“Moving between environments is a lot easier when you stick with the VM as the unit of deployment.”
“I have come across a lot of people who use EC2 (usually just a single instance) when a VPS would work fine for them.”
“I wouldn't trust anything more than the ec2, RDS, S3 layer which are more "completed" products”
“Claude is so good at AWS and terraform, and it even found a $3k monthly accidental spend I had running”
“There are plenty of workloads where I'd love to double the memory and halve the cores”
“If you have an ec2 instance with EBS and auto-restart you have almost identical fault tolerance”
“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.”
“IAM policies can allow IP Addresses or more safely just named EC2 instances.”
“it'll be likely faster and more flexible than lambda with much more predictable performance”
“Either BTRFS or the CI/CD database (PostgreSQL I think) would eventually get corrupted and I'd run a rebuild script a few times a year.”
“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.”
“I can certainly see a use for that small amount of compute & RAM, but it's not clear that your level of needs is common.”
“For many (most?) applications, you're going to overpay (sometimes by orders of magnitude) for AWS.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.