Amazon AWS

At first, I thought this was going to be the easiest review on this site, because AWS is the biggest hosting solution in the world right now. Then, I went through all of their offers and now I’m scared shitless that I’m going to miss something – there are way too many offers here. Amazon is literally offering every hosting solution known to man with levels of quality that no-one can afford to compete with. They’re the biggest network solution in the entire world, and every successful corporation uses these servers.

What’s really interesting about AWS is that it’s an international network of server farms of the highest standards known to man, but they’re made available to everyone. This network was designed in such a way that everyone and everything can use AWS for their hosting needs. It doesn’t matter whether you need storage, bandwidth, security or international availability – they’ve got everything. Their business model revolves around scalability, or in other words, paying for what you use, instead of paying in advance. It’s not a pipe dream; they’ve really brought forth the future of hosting solutions to the present day. I guess having the richest man in the world as your owner and CEO helps, huh?

Too Many Offers

You don’t want to go over to AWS’s site to see what they’ve got and figure out what you need. They’re basically a digital super-store of services. You should go at this kind of subscription from another angle. First, you figure out your problem and what you’d need to solve it, then you go over to AWS and request the kind of solution that’s optimal for you. This is roughly what makes reviewing AWS so hard. They have no niche or dedicated business model, unless being billionaires counts as a business model.

When you’re the top dog, it’s easy to stay on top. AWS leverage the Amazon money to add services to their ever-expanding list, whenever they become at all necessary. You don’t bend to their requirements; they bend to yours. Don’t believe me? Check out the products list on their site. It’s literally impossible to show them all on one screen. They had to segment the damn offers three times across more than two dozen categories. If you can think of a web hosting solution, they’ve got it.

For Porn Webmasters

Let’s get down to brass tacks. What can AWS do for you? Large scale hosting is probably what you’re looking for. I would venture to guess that most of my readers are shoveling some smut to the masses, whether it are videos or still images. It doesn’t matter. Peddling smut is the most popular format for growing a porn web empire. The second most popular approach is the affiliate network shtick, which I’m obviously involved in. So, you either talk about porn or you show porn.

Regardless, you can make use of AWS. I mentioned that their hosting solutions are built to be dynamically scalable. For you, this means that you only ever pay for what you’ve used up. So, once you get your initial offer, you can calculate a margin, to see the cost versus the profit of a certain amount of bandwidth, for example. If the numbers look good, then you can pull the trigger and get yourself some AWS hosting.

Calculating The Profitability

This part can be complicated if you’re a fresh webmaster. If you don’t have several sites that are already paying for themselves and leaving you with excess income, then chances are you can’t afford AWS and you shouldn’t even consider them in the first place. Let’s say you’re running a standard porn tube with some affiliate marketing ads thrown in to monetize your traffic. Let’s also assume that you’re running all the content off of a powerful VPS that you got from some random ass off-shore company that’s trying to undercut the competition. It’s not the best server, but it does the job.

Now, you’re considering moving over to AWS for stability, security and worldwide availability. Ok, I’m with you so far. But, you’re only getting a few thousand views every day and the profits from your referrals are just barely enough to cover your hosting fees. Moving onto AWS isn’t going to increase your earnings in any way. You’ll just have better quality. But, it’s not like the videos are going to become more appealing. This also won’t do anything for your Google rating. You’re just going to have a better working website. Except, the hosting you already had was handling video streaming just fine. You just dug yourself into an expensive hole, for no reason.

Overpriced for a Reason

Most of these tools are available for free so that you can demo them in advance, but there’s no free tier that’ll let you host a porn empire. You just get minimal access to the tools so that you can run your initial setup and confirm that everything’s working right. Considering that AWS supports all kinds of new technologies like VR and machine learning, it’s no surprise that they feel the need to prove themselves in advance. However, you’ll notice that they don’t flat out list the pricing for any of their products.

Instead, they have an extensive calculator program that lets you input every single estimated value regarding your traffic, storage and number of requests per given time frame. Once you’ve added all these items to the virtual cart, you get a total estimate. Once you dive into all of these complicated metrics, you get a detailed breakdown of every choice you can make within the calculator.

For example, I tried setting up an AWS storage gateway and found out that they charge 9 cents for every outbound gigabyte of data. Except, this isn’t a site-wide pricing rule. It’s specific to the storage gateway offer. You also get dynamic pricing on the data transfer depending on where you’re sending that data to, relative in distance to the actual home server, which in this case was listed as being in Ohio. It’s all really fucking confusing.

Way Too Complicated

Using this price calculator actually gave me a headache. I’m a tech-savvy guy and I’m also an accomplished webmaster and even I couldn’t make heads or tails of what the fuck I was looking at. I wanted to see how much a standard porn tube website would cost me and I just couldn’t figure out which one of these dozens of offers I needed. Sure, there are prepackaged offers that you can check out, but if you want to do it all yourself, you have to opt for a specific solution and you have to configure it yourself.

If you don’t want to go through the super-complicated rigmarole, then you’d have to hire an expert. Except, AWS experts are expensive. Also, your average third-party web host is already using AWS for all of their hosting, so you’d be on AWS even if you don’t sign up with them directly. It seems like there’s no point in using AWS directly. It’s just a fucking hassle. These services are clearly trying to cater to large scale corporations with extremely convoluted business models.

AWS is for Professionals

Think of an average popular competitive video game that has millions of active daily users and chances are that it’s actually hosted on AWS. Amazon has established itself as the undeniable kings of reliable, high bandwidth, low latency networking. I won’t lie. They’re the best of the best. But for you, the consumer, they’re always going to seem like an unnecessarily large bite and a tough pill to swallow. You’re pretty much always going to be better off just using a simple third-party hosting solution that is partnered with AWS, rather than going to AWS directly.

That being said, you can still keep AWS on your radar, if you get to a point where you’re running multiple websites with different types of services and an established affiliate marketing network that is more than raking in the profits. At that point, you should also be able to afford a professional to handle the migration for you. When you get to that point, by all means, migrate your entire empire to AWS.

With enough traffic and different kinds of provided content on one scalable hosting solution, you’ll start to see the worthwhile cost to benefit ratio. Your websites aren’t going to perform exactly the same at all times. There will be dips and spikes. The amount of money you pay is going to scale accordingly. That’s what AWS is really for. Bookmark it as your end goal destination for all of your projects, once you’re actually making a killing in the industry.