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Amazon EC2 vs Amazon Virtual Private Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on May 21, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.4
Investing in Amazon EC2 offers cost savings, operational efficiency, flexibility, and scalability, reducing traditional server management and expenses.
Sentiment score
5.7
Effective use of Amazon VPC, especially with appropriate EC2 instances, yields significant financial returns, particularly beneficial for startups.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.8
Amazon EC2 support varies; premium users often praise responsiveness, while free support users experience slower responses and mixed satisfaction.
Sentiment score
6.8
Amazon VPC support receives mixed reviews, praised for expertise but facing issues with communication delays and need for self-navigation.
The technical support from Amazon has been excellent.
When we use business support, the availability of the engineers is very good.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Amazon EC2 is praised for its robust, flexible, and cost-efficient scalability features, despite some challenges with instance updates.
Sentiment score
7.8
Amazon VPC offers excellent scalability with tools like Auto Scaling, efficiently managing demand for companies of all sizes.
The scalability and ability to expand within Amazon Virtual Private Cloud performs very well.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.0
Amazon EC2 is highly reliable, offering features like auto-scaling and load balancing to ensure stability and dependability.
Sentiment score
8.4
Amazon VPC is praised for security and uptime, with minimal downtime and quick resolution of configuration issues ensuring reliability.
 

Room For Improvement

EC2 users seek affordable pricing, better AWS integration, enhanced support, easier customization, scalability, and improved interoperability with other systems.
Amazon VPC users face challenges with compatibility, usability, pricing, and integration, desiring improved documentation, security, and customization.
It would be great if we could use the AWS Direct Connect in Mongolia.
Based on my experience, there are aspects of Amazon Virtual Private Cloud that could be improved to enhance the solution.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon EC2 pricing is complex, with variable costs and options requiring careful planning to manage budgets and ensure cost-effectiveness.
Enterprise users find Amazon VPC pricing complex and costly, but competitive when extensively using AWS products with minimal configuration setup.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon EC2 is favored for its scalability, reliability, cost-effectiveness, robust security, and seamless AWS integration with minimal setup.
Amazon VPC offers security, scalability, and easy integration with AWS, featuring flexible pricing and customizable policies for efficient management.
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud allows the nodes to talk to each other, enhances our security with its security group feature, and the network access list can isolate attackers, while the subnet service organizes our nodes' network topology and provides access to customers.
The ability to define and work with subnets is particularly helpful in managing the networking environment.
For security and ACLs, Routing Tables, route tables, subnet, and subnetting, these are very useful functions.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EC2
Ranking in Compute Service
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
69
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud
Ranking in Compute Service
7th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Compute Service category, the mindshare of Amazon EC2 is 9.0%, up from 7.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon Virtual Private Cloud is 0.9%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Compute Service Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon EC29.0%
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud0.9%
Other90.1%
Compute Service
 

Featured Reviews

KatlegoMabila - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers customization and flexibility with great support
Scalability depends on whether the client wants to scale up or scale down. It decreases resources based on demand. The great aspect of scalability is the flexibility to allow business success to optimize resource solutions and cost efficiency. Another crucial aspect of scalability is auto-scaling. When you have the opportunity to auto-scale, it can't always be available for everything. If you have chosen to integrate with auto-scaling, it's marvellous and doesn't require additional effort. Auto-scaling gives you the edge by using the capacity you have efficiently, scaling up or down as needed. These flexibilities within the EC2 feature instances of AWS play a crucial role in helping me utilize AWS EC2 Intelligent efficiently.
Carl Seguya - PeerSpot reviewer
Reliable traffic management with good cost reduction and a straightforward setup
In terms of the system, I love the functionality of a NAT Gateway. For instance, when I was using it, it was easy to refuse certain traffic from penetrating into my other availability zone. I had to use a NAT Gateway to transition traffic only to the desired portal. Due to using Amazon VPC, it was reliable, efficient in operations, and cost-effective. For scalability, it was beneficial when one instance was down in an availability zone, as we had a standby instance. This ensured that when an availability zone in South Africa went down, another one in the US was available. We used methods like backup, restore, and pilot standby to recover data, and AWS Trusted Advisor guided us on cost optimization. We achieved an average of 70% cost reduction through savings plans for reserved instances and Spot Instances for short-term development servers.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Transportation Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise17
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon EC2?
The scalability and elasticity are helpful.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EC2?
Advice on Setup Cost, Pricing, and Licensing for EC2: 1. Start Small & Use Free Tier if Possible For new users or small applications, the AWS Free Tier offers limited EC2 usage free for 12 mont...
What needs improvement with Amazon EC2?
There are some specific features, such as ML features and AI features, that I would to see included in the next releases of Amazon EC2. Additionally, there is functionality available in Databricks ...
What needs improvement with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud?
It would be great if we could use the AWS Direct Connect in Mongolia. That is our only issue with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud; other than that, it works well.
 

Comparisons

No data available
 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2
Amazon VPC
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Netflix, Expedia, TimeInc., Novaris, airbnb, Lamborghini
Hess, Expedia, Kelloggs, Philips, HyperTrack
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EC2 vs. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,566 professionals have used our research since 2012.