Why is Amazon AWS not recommended?

Because its extremely complex, even for advanced teams. As with many services and tech that gets “trendy” with corporate and enterprise teams, it eventually gets mentioned on blogs and at conferences and the “smaller” guys start to repeat these recommendations, even though they don’t have much idea about them.

AWS is the perfect example. The majority of teams using AWS should not be using it. It is simply too complex to use (both technically, and the UI itself) to make sense for small agencies or independent developers. Plus, their customer support is horrible (or doesn’t even exist) for smaller accounts.

There have also been reports that AWS will randomly change the public IP address of your servers, meaning your website could suddenly go down, if you didn’t configure AWS the way they “say” with static IPs etc (although they never warn you about this, and the documentation is very poor).

There is also the problem where AWS does not support root SSH logins, meaning you have to setup your SSH keys before being able to login, and new users must do this too. Their default Linux user is named the OS name, e.g. “ubuntu” which makes configuration even more unstable and more of a headache when setting up new servers.

Simply put, AWS is focused on protecting their own network, and not really on small teams looking for performance or user friendliness. It makes more sense for corporate teams who need certain types of regulatory contracts, containerization, and internal networking… but 90% of teams really don’t need it and shouldn’t use it with all the other options out there.