Top Reasons to Get Tranquil Instead of AWS

There’s no denying the success of Amazon Web Services - $5 Billion in revenue and over one million customers is nothing to sneeze at.But even Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos admits that AWS is hard, saying in his most recent letter to shareholders:

“[AWS is] still a necessarily complex set of tools with rich functionality and a non-trivial learning curve.”

And some analysts predict that once you’ve invested all the time and energy to learn AWS, you will be locked-in.

We take a different approach

More than just bits and bytes, Tranquil Hosting is your source for on-demand cloud expertise.  We invest the time up-front to understand your goals and then architect and maintain the ideal environment to support your unique and changing business needs.One customer that reluctantly switched to AWS due to a management change, recently came back to Tranquil after struggling to get maximum business value from AWS.  Specifically, AWS presented this customer with the following three hurdles:

1. Complex pricing - the customer’s AWS bill was higher than expected, and figuring out why and how to get it back in budget was a mystery
2. Systems administration - the customer didn’t have the necessary performance and alert monitoring systems in house, and really didn’t have the time to proactively monitor the systems
3. Performance - tuning the cloud infrastructure to maximize their webapp’s performance was very time-consuming

OK - so here you have them - the top reasons customers choose to Get Tranquil over AWS

API key security

Amazon has been a leader in advancing the web-as-platform through its APIs.  But all that power, if not vigilantly guarded, can leave your critical systems vulnerable to breach and malicious hacks.As explained in a recent Programmable Web article: “API security involves more than just securing the API itself: it involves protecting API Keys, cloud credentials, and other sensitive data from public exposure — security measures that are sometimes overlooked by developers.”Tranquil Hosting’s cloud infrastructure experts free developers from having to manage things like API key security, letting them focus all their energy on building and delivering ridiculously slick and addictive sites and apps. As Scott Hussey of MogoBox LLC put it “through Tranquil Hosting’s extraordinary customer service, we can be confident in our servers running as expected in the background, allowing MogoBox to focus on what matters to us most: continuously making new, and improving existing, relationships with customers.”

Do you want to build your business, your sites and your apps or learn the intricacies of virtualized infrastructure?

Take the AWS Virtual Private Cloud, or VPC, as a prime example of the power, and complexity, of AWS. With VPC, you carve out your own slice of AWS with the entire stack of resources at your disposal, from compute to storage to networking.Be prepared, though, to buy lots of beers for your buddies at Juniper or to go *deep* on fun networking topics like subnets, NAT, static routes, EIP, ACL, and many more. Follow this developer’s journey on Stack Overflow for a taste of what you could be in for.As the number of different types of people connecting to your VPC increases - internal, external, full access, partial access - the fun really gets started.And the complexity of AWS goes beyond VPS. Take IP addresses. On AWS, they are not automatically bound to an instance.  So, when you do simple things like stop and start, you need to re-associate the IP address. How’s that for low-value activity?Is VPC, and the rest of AWS, powerful?  No doubt. Will it eat time?  Magic 8 ball says ‘signs point to yes.’Customers come to Tranquil, stay with Tranquil, and come back to Tranquil because they know they can trust our experts to sweat these details for them, optimizing their cloud environment to meet their needs.  To quote Ray at Core Sound Imaging, “Tranquil Hosting has an extremely knowledgeable staff that goes above and beyond to support us.”

Noisy neighbors?

When things go wrong, you need to know everything about your infrastructure in order to troubleshoot.  With AWS, several performance-impacting factors are about as easy to pin down as, well, a cloud. Your workload shares CPU, disk, RAM and network with some of the other one million customers using AWS. If another customer sends a blitz of write requests to storage, for instance, you can take a performance hit. Frequently, the only way to figure out what’s going on with your instance is to move it and see if the problem goes away. That’s valuable time you’re not perfecting your app or site, it can impact your service delivery and, if you’re an e-commerce site, your revenue.Tranquil lets customers choose between virtualized servers, dedicated bare-metal servers, which completely avoid the noisy neighbor problem, or some combination. If things aren’t right, we’ll detect it through our proactive monitoring and solve it fast with our hands-on approach to troubleshooting issues. In the words of Anthony Mattia at Appraisal Nation, “Tranquil is more than a great service provider, they are a partner that I can rely on at all times.”In short, when what you *really* want on-demand is cloud expertise, not just cloud compute capacity, maybe it’s time for you to Get Tranquil.