LONDON, July 29, 2016
Nobody has ever accused AWS of being too easy to use. Amazon’s cloud computing platform is extremely powerful, launching feature updates on an almost daily basis; the flip side of all that power is a serious level of complexity. Simply setting up a basic WordPress install on a single machine can be a daunting task when faced with the AWS Management Console.
Cloudwith.me reduces this process to just a few clicks. The self-funded five-person team built the service to bridge the gap between old-school virtual machine-based hosting services and the cloud. “There is a gap between the old hosting companies and AWS,” said Cloudwith.me founder and CEO, Gilad Somjen. “Everybody wants to move to the cloud, but it’s too hard.”
To get started, users simply select the region they want to run their server in, what instance type they need and whether they want to install any additional software packages, such as WordPress, Drupal and Magento, or an email, database or FTP server. The next step is to let Cloudwith.me know their chosen domain name (since getting a domain name to point to an AWS machine is no small feat either). From there, it’s simply a question of entering their AWS information and the server will be ready to go. Once it’s up and running, users can then use Cloudwith.me to manage their machines as well.
Cloudwith.me’s dashboard is currently available in 11 languages – more than AWS’s own management console. All server costs will be billed directly by Amazon.
The company monetizes its service by charging an additional, minimal fee for making it easy for users to install its add-ons, like WordPress. Every add-on carries a $3.99/month price tag (promo coupon: aws25) – although it’s worth noting that using add-ons is completely optional. Users are more than welcome to take advantage of Cloudwith.me’s free service to set up and manage basic servers without add-ons, up to a maximum of five individual servers.
Given that AWS derives the majority of its revenue from enterprises and start-ups that spend big on running their services on AWS’s infrastructure, it stands to reason that the kind of user who would benefit from Cloudwith.me’s service doesn’t feature heavily on AWS’s radar, argues Somjen. “AWS doesn’t care about clients who have one WordPress site,” he said.
However, in the four months since its quiet launch, Cloudwith.me has brought 2,800 new accounts to AWS, Somjen says. As a result, Cloudwith.me is now an official Amazon partner.
Somjen and the rest of the team behind Cloudwith.me are continuing to work on making each step even easier but, for the time being, going from the extreme simplicity of the first step to finding their AWS access keys and creating permissions for Cloudwith.me may come as quite a surprise to new users who are unfamiliar with AWS.