Any thoughts for or against Amazon?
Please don't top post on this list, it breaks up the flow of the thread for people who read the thread after it's finished. The primary purpose of the list is to get your questions answered, but the secondary purpose is to help those who come after, and top posting impedes that.
Anyway, I'm a fairly heavy Amazon web services user, using multiple Workspaces instances (remote desktops), EC2 instances (servers), RDS instances (database, in my case MySQL), and Elastic Beanstalk (self-scaling web site). I find it performant and highly reliable. I can't vouch for the tech support as I haven't really had to use them. They have a user forum which is not terrible but not great. The documentation can be a bit frustrating but if you are willing to devote the time to wading through the adverto-babble the information is there.
All that sets me back about $250 a month. No doubt not the cheapest but you have to decide if what you want is cheap or good -- you don't typically get both, except sometimes temporarily by luck.
Mark