Select your cookie preferences

We use essential cookies and similar tools that are necessary to provide our site and services. We use performance cookies to collect anonymous statistics, so we can understand how customers use our site and make improvements. Essential cookies cannot be deactivated, but you can choose “Customize” or “Decline” to decline performance cookies.

If you agree, AWS and approved third parties will also use cookies to provide useful site features, remember your preferences, and display relevant content, including relevant advertising. To accept or decline all non-essential cookies, choose “Accept” or “Decline.” To make more detailed choices, choose “Customize.”

Skip to main content

Application Hosting

Traditionally, businesses have had to build and maintain infrastructure to run on-premises applications. With the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, businesses can consume applications that are hosted online, enabling them to lower their costs by paying only for what they use, enjoy seamless and painless upgrades in functionality, and integrate easily with their existing data and systems.

Sign up now
Get Started with AWS for Free

Why Application hosting?

Application providers who are building SaaS-based applications quickly learn that owning and operating the infrastructure on which these solutions are hosted can be expensive and complex, especially when customer demand is uncertain.

Whether you are an enterprise looking for a cloud environment in which to deploy your existing on-premises solutions, or an application vendor evaluating a cloud platform on which to deploy a new application or SaaS offering, you should consider the following questions:

  • Can I use the programming language and application platform of my choice?
  • Can I use the operating system and environment on which my existing applications are already deployed?
  • What commitments or contracts will my cloud provider require? Will I have to make an up-front investment?
  • How quickly can I respond to spikes and lulls in demand from my customers or application computing loads?
  • Does my cloud provider have experience in maintaining a global, redundant, and resilient infrastructure?
  • What security considerations has my cloud provider addressed?

Benefits

AWS is designed to allow application providers, ISVs, and vendors to quickly and securely host your applications – whether an existing application or a new SaaS-based application. You can use the AWS Management Console or well-documented web services APIs to access AWS’s application hosting platform.

AWS enables you to select the operating system, programming language, web application platform, database, and other services you need. With AWS, you receive a virtual environment that lets you load the software and services your application requires. This eases the migration process for existing applications while preserving options for building new solutions.

You pay only for the compute power, storage, and other resources you use, with no long-term contracts or up-front commitments. For more information on comparing the costs of other hosting alternatives with AWS, see the AWS Economics Center.

With AWS, you take advantage of a scalable, reliable, and secure global computing infrastructure, the virtual backbone of Amazon.com’s multi-billion dollar online business that has been honed for over a decade.

Using AWS tools, Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing, your application can scale up or down based on demand. Backed by Amazon’s massive infrastructure, you have access to compute and storage resources when you need them.

Application Hosting Using AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers reliable, scalable, and cost-effective computing resources on which to host your applications. You can use the following AWS components alone or combined to host your application(s):

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Amazon EC2 provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. You define your virtual Amazon EC2 environment with the operating system, services, databases, and application platform stack required for your hosted application. Amazon EC2 provides a full management console and APIs to manage your compute resources. Learn more »

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It is durable, highly available, and secure. Amazon S3 also stores multiple redundant copies of your data. Learn more

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). Amazon RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable database capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks. Learn more

Amazon CloudFront. Amazon CloudFront provides a high performance, globally distributed content delivery system. Your application can use Amazon CloudFront to easily distribute or stream content to your users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, no commitments, and seamless integration with Amazon S3. Learn more

Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS). Amazon SQS provides a high performance, secure queuing system for your application that enables you to reliably distribute work between your application’s processes. Learn more

Amazon DevPay. Amazon DevPay is a simple-to-use online billing and account management service that makes it easy for you to sell applications that are built in, or run on top of, Amazon Web Services. Learn more