AWS alternative for PHP hosting

# About AWS

Amazon Web Services started in 2006 with S3 and EC2 and is the largest cloud provider by market share. It rents more than 200 services, from compute and databases to networking, billed by usage, in more than 30 regions. For a team with its own DevOps people, that range is hard to match.

# Why not AWS?

AWS works by the shared responsibility model↗: AWS secures the cloud, the customer everything inside it. For a PHP app, that means the network, the instances or the Kubernetes cluster, the database setup, OS and PHP patches, backups, certificates, monitoring and the on-call rotation.

That works for a company with a DevOps team. A marketing site or a client project rarely has one, so the responsibility lands on the developer who built the site.

# Why fortrabbit

fortrabbit runs on AWS EKS, EC2, RDS, EBS and CloudFront. The PHP runtime, MySQL, backups, TLS certs and security patches are ours. When a service stops responding, a health check restarts it, and a team is on call behind that.

The code stays yours: the app, CMS and plugin updates, Composer dependencies. We don't review or touch client code, as our support policy states.

Pricing is per component and billed after use, without a line item for NAT gateways.

# When AWS is the better choice

An environment on fortrabbit runs on one instance and scales vertically. The largest PHP plan has 4 GiB memory and 12 PHP processes. There is no horizontal autoscaling and no object storage. An app that outgrows this belongs on AWS directly, with someone hired to run it.

# AWS and fortrabbit