- [Christian] This episode is brought to you by Porkbun
an oddly satisfying domain name registrar
who's simple services and affordable product
support all levels of entrepreneurship.
Hey guys, my name is Christian Taylor.
Welcome back to Craylor Made
where I like to talk about all things
branding, marketing, and entrepreneurship.
I've taken a look at quite a few
web hosting solutions on my channel,
but many of you have asked about the bigger cloud platforms.
When it comes to platforms like Amazon Web Services,
Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure.
Should you use them for your website?
If so, which one is best?
Well, before we get into the comparison,
let's briefly answer the question of
if you should use a cloud platform to host your website.
I think in 99% of the cases, the answer is no.
If you know you want to use a cloud platform,
then you're likely you're tech-savvy person,
and you're using it for a specific reason,
or just because you enjoy server administration
and like having a private server to yourself.
Now, I want to be clear here and say
that this is not the most technical comparison out there.
These cloud platforms are particularly complex
and there's a lot of depth to them.
If I compared every tiny detail,
we would literally be here all day.
So I'm just going to give you my two cents
on which ones I tend to prefer
and which ones I personally use and why.
I consider the companies in this comparison to fall
into one of two categories.
The first are small independent companies
with fewer offerings,
but they focus on simplicity and reliability
while still giving you this scalable platform.
These companies include Digital Ocean, Vultr and Linode.
The second category is what I call the big three.
The three companies that dominate the tech space
and their platforms are much more complex.
These are Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform,
and Microsoft Azure.
Every single company in this comparison
offers rock solid reliability in my testing.
I didn't experience any downtime
on any of my test instances.
And I have the utmost confidence in each of these companies
when it comes to the reliability of the itself.
In addition, these companies
offer hourly billing as an option,
so there's zero risks or commitment necessary to try it out.
Ultimately you may need or want to tinker around
with a few different options before making a final decision.
So with that said, let's get right into it.
With the three independent companies.
Kicking things off with Digital Ocean,
they're a New York based company
founded in 2011 with VPS services
starting at five dollars a month.
They offer a $100 credit to new customers
that you have 60 days to spend.
So you can really get a feel for the service
with no money involved.
Digital Ocean's core products include
virtual private servers, Kubernetes,
S3-compatible storage buckets, database clusters,
and network management, including load balancers.
The management panel is clean and simple
and it's easy to spin up servers and manage products.
They did have the most complex setup for a VPS
pre-installed with WordPress.
As I had to connect to the server via SSH
to finalize the WordPress installation.
But as I said, and as I'll keep saying,
these platforms are for tech-savvy people,
people who want it all.
You wanna be able to configure all the firewalls,
all the things, all the softwares you want total control
and with total control comes total responsibility.
And that is very much a double edged sword.
You can get automated weekly backups
for 20% of the cost of the droplet.
One thing. And the dimension is that using a service
like Snapshooter, you can set up daily
or even hourly backups with Digital Ocean or Linode
or other cloud platforms.
And they make it pretty easy and intuitive.
So don't let it intimidate you that Digital Ocean
does not natively offer daily backups,
but it's just something I wanted to mention.
If you use a third party service,
you'll have to pay for their service
plus whatever the storage cost is
and you configure that all yourself,
when it comes to customer support,
you'll receive limited free support,
enhanced support if you spend more than $500 a month
or live support with 30 minute response time
for an additional fee.
So who is Digital Ocean for?
Well, I'd say Digital Ocean is a good fit for developers
who want a flexible and scalable hosting platform,
that's separated from the big three platforms.
Digital Ocean offers cost savings over the big three,
and they have the most services
out of the independent options.
So if your goal is to stay away from
AWS or GCP or Azure, for whatever reason,
I feel like Digital Ocean is going to be
the best option for you.
I would not personally recommend Digital Ocean
for WordPress websites because of the complex setup process
and lack of integrated daily backups.
But I do use a Digital Ocean server
from most of my WordPress sites through Cloudways.
So I can speak of the high reliability
and speed of Digital Ocean serves.
In other words, the hosting itself is very high quality
to use as the backbone for your actual hosting.
And that's what cloud waste does.
They provide a management panel
around having your own dedicated servers
to make things easier.
But if you're just looking to get Digital Ocean
pure and raw by itself and put a WordPress website on it,
unless you're tech-savvy,
I think you're just going to be overwhelmed.
Moving on to Vultr.
The experience is similar to Digital Ocean founded in 2014,
Vultr's the newest kid on the block
offering VPS services starting at
two dollars and 50 cents a month.
They offer a $100 credit to new customers
that you have 30 days to spend.
And after that services are billed hourly.
Vultr's core products include virtual private servers,
S3-compatible storage buckets,
and network management, including load balancers.
The management panel is a joy to use,
but similar to Digital Ocean,
I had a complicated experience
setting up WordPress on my server.
And again, it's because it's for tech-savvy.
Vultr offers automatic backups
for 20% of the cost of the instance.
And they do include daily backups
as an option for that cost.
They just offer one single level of customer support
to my understanding.
So I wouldn't choose Vultr
if you need urgent high priority support as an option,
I didn't have any reliability issues with Vultr
and everything works as expected.
When putting it next to Digital Ocean
things feel pretty similar.
So which one is right for you?
Well, if you don't need a database cluster
or the other inclusive services, Digital Ocean offers,
and you're okay with one level of customer support,
I lean towards Vultr because of the better value
for the included backup solution.
It's the same cost as Digital Ocean,
but it's daily instead of weekly.
And it's hard to argue with that.
How I remember that Vultr does not offer
high priority support to my knowledge
and their offers are less extensive.
I think Vultr is great for anyone
just getting into the server administration world.
Who's looking for a simple, scalable platform
to help them get started.
On to the final independent platform.
Let's take a look at Linode.
Linode was founded in 2003 and is based in Philadelphia.
Hosting services start at $5 a month
and you can find, you guessed it
a $100 credit to try it and look around.
Linode offers virtual private servers, Kubernetes
S3-compatible storage buckets and network management,
including load balancers.
The experience at Linode is pretty intuitive.
The management panel isn't as sleek
as Digital Ocean or Vultr,
but it is simple and easy to understand.
The WordPress installation script was much easier to use
than other platforms, but that's about the only benefit
to Linode in my testing.
The automatic backups are expensive
at 25% of the cost of the instance,
and they only keep weekly backups.
They, I take a daily backup
and keep the last day's backup available at all times,
but you're just not getting a great value here
compared to Vultr.
Linen offers one level of standard support to my knowledge,
and they were super helpful and responsive to my questions,
but politely reminded me
that they don't offer extensive technical support.
And I should reach out to the forums if I need more help.
And I wanted to take a minute to point out that
this type of support is standard
in the cloud platform industry.
None of these six platforms offer tech support for free,
and unless there's truly an issue with the server
that they are causing and responsible for,
you're usually on your own
without paying for a premium support plan.
If the issue is operator error or a configuration error
and 99% of the time it is,
then it is on you and only you to fix
unless they offer a higher tier of support
that you're paying for.
Linode has a long reputation since they're 17 years old,
and maybe that's why they seem
to charge a bit more for their services.
Maybe it's just me, but Linode seems generally boring.
I know nothing about Kubernetes
and have no experience with it,
but unless you're using winnowed because of Kubernetes,
there's just nothing exciting there for me personally.
Linode isn't bad by any means they offer quality service
and if you want to try them out,
then you definitely should,
but there's no real competitive edge
that I can see from my perspective,
regardless of where you decide
to host your website or platform,
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Huge, thanks to Porkbun for supporting the channel.
And now let's take a look at the big three cloud platforms.
Jumping back into the video.
It's time to take a look at the giant in this space,
Amazon Web Services.
AWS is its own tier of cloud platform.
They offer literally all the things like seriously
from machine learning to video and coding
to a content delivery network, Amazon does it all.
Amazon Web Services offers a free tier
where you can get a very basic starter server
free for 12 months.
That's there's no catches either.
As long as you're a new customer,
you can sign up and take advantage of the free services.
AWS is definitely a powerful,
reliable quality cloud platform
with a phenomenal reputation.
That's the single reason why it gets so much praise,
the extensive and robust offerings
and full scalability are attractive to anyone,
especially after they see Amazon's name attached to it.
Amazon is a tech giant.
So who wouldn't on their website hosted by Amazon?
Well hosting your website through Amazon
seems like a great idea on paper,
but when you see the complexity of the management panel,
you might think twice.
I personally used Amazon Web Services
for a little under two years to host all of my websites.
I maintained my own virtual private server
that ran cPanel.
And let me tell you, it was a piece of work.
Don't get me wrong, AWS is amazing.
The pricing is a bit expensive,
but Amazon has every right to demand the pricing
for its name and reputation.
The reliability was great,
but the management panel caused me a lot of headaches.
It's not easy to understand at all.
And there are entire companies dedicated to AWS management.
That's right.
You can hire out a third party company
to manage your AWS services for you
because it's that complex.
I feel like AWS management
needs to become a college degree or something,
but I'm not telling you to avoid AWS,
I used it for quite a while and liked it.
Just realize what you're getting into.
Some of you are probably going to ask
about Amazon LightSail.
This is Amazon's answer to simpler services
like Digital Ocean and Vultr.
LightSail is great for deploying servers, but honestly,
when it comes down to actually deploying a server
with WordPress pre-installed,
I find that it's an identical confusing experience
that's the same as AWS, EC2 instances.
And that's because LightSail
is literally just a modern panel that uses the AWS API.
And it also has a simpler
and easier to understand pricing structure.
Amazon offers something for everyone
with many levels of support at different price points,
and you have all the tools you need to build your platform.
AWS is best for those who want the wide variety of services
Amazon offers with Amazon's name to back it up
and you don't mind paying up.
If you're okay with these factors, I can't argue with AWS.
It truly was a pleasure to use.
And I so much respect the infrastructure
that Amazon has spent years building out.
And if you want that behind your software project,
AWS is great.
There's a new kid on the block though.
And that's Microsoft Azure.
Actually Azure has only two years newer
than Amazon Web Services,
but dang, the experience is wildly different.
Azure is a right using star.
They offer a lot of services,
including the exotic ones like machine learning.
But the difference is that
you don't need it college degree
to understand how the panel works.
You can get started right away with
the $200 credit valid for 30 days.
And there's also a free tier
giving you access to some services free for 12 months.
The Microsoft Azure panel is truly something special.
It's laid out in a way that's not overwhelming
and easy to learn.
I'm not going to say it's super easy to use,
but Microsoft has done a killer job
simplifying a complex cloud platform
into an intuitive panel.
Azure is what my software as a service company uses
for our platform.
And I've had a relatively easy time
learning how different features work
and configuring things to our needs.
Where Azure really shines in my opinion,
is what their app service.
Azure App Services is a fully managed platform
for building deploying and scaling web apps.
And it's the core hosting solution for our company.
App service takes away the stress
of managing a VPS and dealing with network configuration
security backups, and more.
It's allowed us to put more time
into the development of our platform
and less time into the nitty gritty server administration.
Now app service isn't an exclusive concept to Azure.
You'll find alternatives like Elastic Beanstalk at AWS
and App Engine at Google Cloud Platform.
But app service, when combined
with the simplicity of the Azure panel
is truly something special.
If for whatever reason
you're set on hosting a WordPress website
on a cloud platform,
I would pick Azure and use an app service.
Setting up backups at Azure is easy
and simple for almost any service.
And they offer three tiers of customer support.
I love that they only have one price
and one price only for their support tiers.
There's no mysterious hard to understand
variable pricing like AWS and the other platforms.
So props to Microsoft for having
transparency on the pricing.
Azure, isn't all unicorns and rainbows though.
I often find myself annoyed
that task execution works on island time.
Seriously, anything from spinning up a server
to deleting a storage bucket takes for ever.
It's not really a huge deal,
but it's something I wanted to mention overall though.
I never expected to be saying this,
but Microsoft Azure is my favorite platform
of the big three.
And I personally prefer it over
AWS for its intuitive panel
and innovative app service platform.
I seriously don't like Microsoft.
I've never really liked their services,
but man Azure is truly something innovative and special.
All right, we're going to close things out
with Google Cloud Platform.
GCP reminds me a lot of Amazon Web Services,
but with the Google name stamped on it.
You'll enjoy $300 credit to try out the platform.
And just like other top platforms,
Google Cloud Platform can do all the things.
The management panel is as cluttered,
if not worse than Amazon Web Services.
And it feels like a typical cluttered Google UI to me.
To me personally, the appeal to Google Cloud Platform
is that well it's Google.
Who doesn't want to host their stuff with Google?
The biggest search engine in the world
and the owner of YouTube hosting your website,
that's pretty cool.
I know it seems like Amazon is the biggest platform
as far as name and reputation here,
but I feel like if we're going for the cool factor,
Google beats it.
Now look, Google Cloud Platform is just plain boring to me.
There's no other way to spin it.
It's rock solid, reliable hosting
that will work great for you.
And if you like it, you like it.
It reminds me exactly of the experience at Google domains.
It's vanilla, but it's fairly reasonable and high quality.
My main beef with Google Cloud Platform
is the insanely complicated process
you have to go through to create automated backups.
It can be done, but it's a drawn out process
unlike AWS and Azure.
Other than that, though, it feels very similar
to Amazon Web Services.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this video,
this is not the most technical or detailed comparison,
but rather a brief overview of which platform
you may want to use.
The great thing is every platform here
offers a credit for new users.
And since everything is billed per hour,
you can try out each platform for yourself
to help you make a decision on what's best for you.
As for me, I use managed hosting solutions
for my WordPress websites,
but I love using Azure for my software as a service company.
It works well for us and the unique app service feature
combined with an easy to use panel
makes it stand out from the rest.
So which cloud platform are you going to use?
I'd love to know your thoughts in the comments down below.
And if you liked this video,
do be sure to hit that subscribe button and click the bell
so you don't miss when I release new videos.
With that said, I will catch you guys next time.