Ryan Kearney

If you’ve ever signed up for a SAAS, or another form of online service, changes are you’ve seen a comparison chart of some sort. While comparison charts seem like a good idea, you have to remember they’re constructed by the company that’s trying to sell you their product. I’m not saying all comparison charts are bad, some are actually quite helpful. The trick is to find a comparison chart put together by an unbiased tech blog or website. If you have the time, it’s even better if you just put together your own comparison chart.

If you don’t have the time to make your own chart, or you can’t find a chart that isn’t from the company selling the product, then keep in mind the chart you’re reading is either misleading or just flat out lies. Here are some examples:

GoGrid

At first glance this just looks like a harmless comparison chart. That is, until you actually realize GoGrid leaves out information to make themselves look better.

Ignoring the security and compliance section since Amazon doesn’t really go into detail as far as how their infrastructure is laid out, we can see EC2 doesn’t have an X for Role-Based Access Control, Sub Administrators, and Managed DNS. So, what’s the problem?

Amazon offers all of these.

Role-Based Access Control and Sub Administrators are more or less the same thing: A Sub Administrator would just have all or most of the “Access Controls”. Amazon has a service called AWS Identity and Access Management which allows you to create sub-accounts and fine-tune exactly what access those users or groups have. Amazon’s execution of this service is actually more feature-rich than what GoGrid has to offer which explains why they wouldn’t mention it. Amazon also offers a Managed DNS service called Amazon Route 53.

Skipping down to the IT Standards section of the chart we can see EC2 doesn’t have “Standard Operating Systems” or Persistent Storage. Once again, Amazon offers a wider variety of operating systems, ranging from SUSE Enterprise to Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Windows Server 2008 R2 to Ubuntu. If Amazon, for whatever reason, doesn’t have the OS you want, you can deploy your own operating system to EC2 using Amazon’s tools. I’m not too sure what GoGrid defines as “Standard Operating Systems”. Amazon also offers persistent storage with a service called Elastic Block Store or EBS. EBS is actually more flexible than GoGrid’s persistent storage because you can add and remove storage without having to upgrade your hardware.

Moving right along to Dedicated Servers. Once again Amazon is lacking the X to indicate the availability of dedicated servers, yet Amazon does in fact offer dedicated servers which you can see on the Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances page. I’m really not sure why GoGrid left this one out as well. Amazon also misses the mark on f5 Hardware Load Balancing but Amazon doesn’t publicly disclose what type of load balancing they use so this is GoGrid just making assumptions again.

Finally, I’ll point out Amazon doesn’t have an X on Free Inbound Data Transfer, yet they offer free inbound data transfer on every instance type and size.

So to briefly recap, GoGrid left out:

1. Role-Based Access Control
2. Sub Administrators
3. Managed DNS
4. Standard Operating Systems
5. Persistent Storage
6. Dedicated Servers
7. Free Inbound Data Transfer

And just off the top of my head, here’s a list of things Amazon offers that GoGrid does not:

1. Hardware Security Device
2. Expandable Storage
3. VPN access
4. Customizable Private Network Layout
5. Managed Database
6. Managed Cashing
7. Detailed Instance Monitoring
8. Managed Email Delivery
9. High-Performance Instances Connected By 10Gbps Ethernet

There’s more but I’ll go ahead and stop there. GoGrid claims they have VPN options but the only “option” is to have an instance running so you can run third party software to provide a VPN tunnel. Amazon doesn’t require you to run an instance dedicated to act as a VPN.

The chart could very easily be re-written like this:

And now the chart is tipped in Amazon’s favor. But is AWS better than GoGrid? Well, that’s for you to decide. I personally love Amazon’s lower pricing and more robust control panel, but it’s ultimately up to you to decide. Since both services offer pay-as-you-go pricing options, you can easily use both services without spending more than a few bucks. Amazon also offers a free usage tier, which allows you to fire up a Micro instance running Linux free for 1 year.