Liquidweb Vs. AWS - Who's the clear winner?
LiquidWeb vs. AWS (Amazon Web Services) - both are leading players in the web hosting business; but how do they compare and who wins?Â
My Experience with Liquidweb and AWS
I thought I'd write a detailed comparison and my experience with all these hosts because I've used all of them for extended periods of time. However, even before we compare them, it's essential to understand how these two big web hosting providers differ from each other.
We'll need a common set of parameters to compare these three hosts if we've to pick up a winner. My aim is to give you as clear picture possible as I could - because the winner differs by the use case.
We're going to look at all the important aspects that matter. Let's start with Liquidweb.
LiquidWebÂ
We have a long history with #-Link-Snipped-#. CrazyEngineers was hosted with them for about a decade before we decided to move over to Amazon Web Services (AWS). I'll discuss the reasons when we talk about AWS.Â
Make no mistake, we didn't move to AWS because we had any issue with LiquidWeb. In fact, they continue to be our favourite hosting service provider of all time! Much love, LiquidWeb folks!Â
After their recent acquisition by Madison Dearborn Partners, the focus seems to have shifted to offering high-end hosting services.Â
Liquidweb does not offer shared hosting anymore!
Liquidweb no longer offers shared hosting plans. Instead, they are now focusing on offering #-Link-Snipped-#, cloud hosting and dedicated hosting packages.Â
Unfortunately, that means their lowest plan starts at around $39 per month; which is their WooCommerce hosting plan; which they launched a couple of weeks ago.Â
We began with their shared hosting services, gradually upgrading to higher hosting plan, then moved over to the VPS hosting, then we ran a dedicated server for almost ~2 years. We had the opportunity to test their cloud hosting services called 'Storm on Demand'.Â
I can confirm that their hardware was excellent at all the times - and we never had issues. At least anything that'd make us want to drop them in favour of another web host.Â
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Â
Amazon's AWS takes a totally different approach towards hosting, in general. Their focus is entirely on providing the raw infrastructure that can be customised or scaled according to your needs.Â
Perhaps, that's a good thing to do - because AWS can really accommodate any type of web-site with a lot of functionality taken care of.Â
Our current server setup with AWS includes -
- An EC2 instance [acts as a web server]
- An RDS instance [ provides database ]
- An Elasticsearch Instance [ takes care of search functionality ]
- An Elasticache Server [We make use of Redis]
- Cloudfront Distribution - offers the CDN (content delivery network)
- S3 Object Storage - all the static stuff (js,css,images) are stored in S3 bucket and served via Cloudfront.
Mind well, there are advantages and disadvantages of having such configuration. First - we can bring the costs really down while having a robust infrastructure. Second - save the initial configuration woes, it feels better to have distributed server structure.Â
Understand your web hosting needs
Your choice of web hosting service provider, either Liquidweb or AWS should totally be decided by your own needs and capabilities. If your hosting needs are really simple like:
- Running WordPress Blog
- Running Simple Business Website
- Running a CMS - WP, Drupal, Joomla etc.
- Running a Forum Software [ phpBB, XenForo, Invision, vBulletin]
- Running a simple web app
Then take my word, and go with LiquidWeb! You will be really happy and your website will run smooth and as fast as it should be. Plus, Liquidweb will take all the burden of maintaining the server off your head.Â
If you are adventurous and aren't bothered to stay up all night just to figure out why isn't your EC2 server letting you log-in;Â then go with AWS.Â
Let me make it simpler to understand -
It's 10x difficult to get started with AWS, but very easy with Liquidweb!
Trust me, if you don't understand servers, uBuntu, networking concepts et.al; you'll want to give up. Configuring AWS infrastructure isn't easy and straightforward. I say this because it took me about a month to really understand how things work in AWS!
They do have documentation, but for someone who has had very limited experience with server administration, it could be really overwhelming. I had to refer to hundreds of pages on the Internet, videos and official documentation to make sense of the things.Â
With Liquidweb, on the other hand, getting your server up and running is a matter of seconds! You can pump up a server in just a few minutes and if something doesn't work - simply trigger a chat session with their Heroic support. They're available to help 24x7. You'll love it.Â
Server Location:
Is the server location critical to your online venture? If yes, you might want to go with AWS. They've their data centers all over the world and you can be sure that your physical server is always nearer to the majority of traffic to your website.
With Liquidweb, their data centers are located in the United States - which means really fast response times for your audience in US or Europe. If your traffic is primarily from Asia, Africa or Middle-East; you might have to sacrifice a few milliseconds of response time.Â
By the way, I assumed that you'll be serving your traffic right from just 'one' server. But that's the web of 2001. We're nearing 2020; and that means you ought to make use of the Content Delivery Network. The CDN ensures that your static files are all quickly served from the server nearest to your visitor's physical location.
It ensures faster loading time for asset-heavy web pages.Â
Liquidweb has partnered with CloudFlare - one of the leading CDN and Amazon has its own CDN 'CloudFront'.Â
Billing:
This is an important area which you have to consider before making the decision. Do you have a fixed monthly budget for your hosting? If yes, Liquidweb wins the deal. You can easily predict how much you will have to pay at the end of every month for your hosting.
There won't be any surprises.Â
AWS has a flexible billing structure that is 'pay-per-minute' and 'pay-per-region'. This pricing structure ensures that you are billed only for the resources that you've used in the given number of minutes.Â
Here's a practical example of what may go wrong - Emailing your users.Â
Whenever there is an important update to the site that everyone on our site should be aware of, we send a mailer. Our user base is well over 350,000 engineers (as of writing this) and is growing daily at an astonishing rate.
We've configured Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) which is an awesome way of sending notification and announcement emails. However, when you send email to tens of thousands of users - your bill can quickly shoot up - without you noticing. Of course, you can set alarms; but that's something we realised after the first 'shock'.Â
Be aware of the billing differences between Liquidweb and AWS.
Scaling:
If your blog or website or web app gets frequent spikes, you might need to adjust your server specs.Â
We've had traffic surges whenever we wrote a breaking news on our News Blog, but Liquidweb servers handled it all gracefully. At its speak our 8GB Storm server (VPS) was handling 700-800 simultaneous users - reported in Google Analytics. That was cool.
With AWS, we haven't had traffic spikes yet, but I'm confident that the current infrastructure can handle much more. That's because there's one separate server doing one single task and nothing else.