The dynamic nature of eCommerce and web applications demands hosting solutions that can seamlessly adapt to evolving requirements while ensuring top-notch performance, reliability, and scalability. As nopCommerce continues to be a popular choice for online businesses seeking an open-source, feature-rich eCommerce platform, the importance of selecting the right hosting environment cannot be overstated.
Everleap, a nopCommerce Technology partner, often gets questions about the differences between their Managed Hosting service and other Public Cloud platforms. To address this topic, they previously published an article about the differences between Everleap Managed Hosting and Azure and compiled a new comparison.
Throughout this article, we will explore various aspects such as performance benchmarks, ease of use, cost-effectiveness, support, and scalability, offering a comprehensive comparison that can guide you towards making the optimal choice for your nopCommerce-powered online store.
By the end of this comparison, you'll be better equipped to determine whether AWS or Everleap aligns more closely with your hosting requirements, ensuring a solid foundation for your eCommerce success.
Brief history of AWS
Due to the rapid growth of their eCommerce platform, Amazon sought to build a scalable cloud infrastructure in the early 2000s. Recognizing that other businesses may need to solve the same problem, Amazon made the decision to leverage their technology and “rent” the infrastructure to customers. Therefore, Amazon was able to turn an internal need into a new revenue stream.
Early in this new direction, Amazon introduced Merchant.com as an eCommerce platform-as-a-service, targeted to retailers, who could easily build an online shopping experience. While the idea of Merchant.com was interesting, its actual execution turned out to be challenging.
To streamline their offering, Amazon built all their systems in a decoupled API accessible fashion. So, they focused on selling basic compute, storage, and database as metered services.
In 2006, AWS (Amazon Web Services) launched Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), which provided services for storing and retrieving data. This was followed by Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), which allowed users to rent virtual servers to run their own applications.
Over time, AWS expanded its services to include a wide range of offerings, such as database management, machine learning, networking, security, and more. Today, Amazon offers more than 200 products and services.
Powerful yet complex
Amazon AWS is a versatile and powerful public cloud platform built for developers. However, with over 200 services, it is so complex that many developers have trouble navigating all the options and many developers offload the infrastructure management to Managed AWS service providers or use Amazon’s AWS Professional Services. To help users master AWS, Amazon even offers training courses and certifications.
How does Everleap compete?
So how does Everleap compete with a behemoth like AWS that has virtually all the latest technology innovations? We know that AWS will always have a larger global footprint and a deeper technology stack than we will ever have. Everleap’s focus is not about competing with AWS on technology, which is a losing proposition.
Instead, Everleap’s focus is to fill a different need. We focus on delivering high touch services to small- and medium-sized businesses, to simplify their hosting journey so they can have a successful presence online.
We know that many businesses do not require deep niched technologies, do not require hosting in global data centers, and do not experience exponential growth. Most businesses desire standard hosting services that work reliably with good technical support when needed.
For example, an eCommerce site powered by nopCommerce will require a Windows Web Server and a SQL Database, which are standard Windows web services. Therefore, we would encourage all nopCommerce users to explore their hosting options to make the best decision for their business.
Everleap and AWS comparison
Table 1 shows the differences between Everleap Managed Hosting and AWS hosting.
In the table, we will not be listing out different technologies since it is already established that AWS would have many technologies that Everleap would not support.
| Everleap | AWS | |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-Sales Consulting | Yes (free) | Not with regular service. Yes, with paid AWS Professional Services |
| Fully Managed | Yes | Not with regular service. Yes, with paid AWS Managed Services (based on AWS fees) |
| Responsible for initial server setup | Everleap | Customer, or use paid AWS Professional Services |
| Site Migration | Yes | Not with regular service. Yes, with paid AWS Professional Services |
| APIs for Server Management | No | Yes |
| Scalable Environment | Yes | Yes |
| Automatic Scaling | No | Yes |
| 24/7 Technical Support | Yes (free) | No, but offers free self-support. Yes, with paid Support Plan *(Generally, 3-10% of monthly AWS fees) |
| System Administrator / DBA Support | Yes, 2 hours per month included | No. Yes, with paid AWS Professional Services |
| Monthly Uptime Percentage | 99.9% | 99.5% - 99.99% **Depending on compute platform |
| Billing | Billed monthly in advance | Billed monthly in arrears – or – Upfront/Partial Upfront with 1yr or 3yr commitment |
| Fees | Flat Monthly Fees | By the hour. Partial hours billed per second for standard instances (for compute) |
| Data Transfer Fees | No, ingress/egress bandwidth included with monthly price | Yes, egress bandwidth billed separately, other data transfer subject to charges include data transfer between your workload and other AWS services, between AWS regions, between AWS and on-premises systems, over AWS site-to-site VPN |
| Predictable Monthly Pricing | Yes | No |
Table 1. Everleap vs. AWS
* https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/pricing/
** https://aws.amazon.com/legal/service-level-agreements/ (Check under Compute)
Let’s look deeper at some categories that encompass many of the items in Table 1.
Developer Platform vs. Business-Friendly Hosting
AWS is built for developers with access to deep niched technology stacks. Developers can create and control their hosting environment through the AWS portal or through APIs. Amazon’s goal is to provide a developer-friendly hosting infrastructure with the deepest and newest technologies.
However, having over 200 services, the hosting environment management increases in complexity and can be overwhelming even for seasoned developers.
At Everleap, we deliver high-touch services to small- and medium-sized businesses. Our goal is to help businesses get solid hosting for their applications, while addressing common pain points.
So, we include consultation, hosting environment setup, site migration, technical support, and server management as part of our Managed Hosting services. We help design an optimized hosting infrastructure for the business’ requirements. Our philosophy is to offer right-sized hosting environments that are not under- or over-resourced.
Everleap services are fully managed, meaning we take care of all server updates and security patches. AWS deployments are managed by the customer. The customer can outsource the server management to AWS Managed Services or a Managed AWS Service Provider, which is an added expense.
Support
With AWS, you can access free self-help resources – documentation, knowledge center, whitepapers, videos, blog posts and articles. For a higher level of support, AWS offers four Support Plan tiers, where the monthly pricing is based on a percentage of your monthly AWS fees. The percentage ranges between 3% - 10%.
Everleap provides 24/7 technical support at no cost, included with our Managed Hosting. We also include 2 hours of higher-level system administrator or DBA support per month. You can use this time for consulting, server or database tuning, database migrations/upgrades …etc.
In addition, Everleap has hosted tens of thousands of sites and databases over the years, and our staff can often observe trending issues early on. If we do see a trend, we will proactively contact our Managed Hosting customers to help them avoid being impacted by these emerging threats.
Pricing
For pricing, like other Public Cloud providers, Amazon fees are metered by an hourly rate. Any partial hours are charged by the second. Although they do not charge for incoming data transfer, AWS does charge for outgoing data transfer. So, in essence, you only pay for what you use, but that also means that you never know how much the charges will be at the end of the month.
At Everleap, we strive to simplify the hosting costs and we only charge a fixed monthly fee, which tends to be less than the cost of AWS. With predictable monthly fees, you will never be hit with any surprise bills.
Conclusion
AWS is a global, powerful, and scalable hosting platform with a deep and growing technology stack. While AWS is global, developer-friendly, and technology-rich, Everleap focuses on the needs of small businesses.
Everleap provides small businesses with consulting, setup, site migration, fully managed hosting, high-touch services, and technical support, all at a predictable flat monthly pricing model.
Ultimately you must decide what the best hosting platform will be for your application. We firmly believe that Everleap is a great option to host nopCommerce storefronts and other business websites and applications. We hope that you do your due diligence in all your hosting options to make the best decision for your business.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to Everleap. We are always open to talk to you about your hosting situation.
| Takeshi Eto is a VP Marketing and Business Development at Everleap. Everleap provides a cost-effective scalable cloud solution allowing customers to focus on their business rather than managing services. |
