Amazon Web Services (AWS) vs Liquid Web Comparison

Why choose Amazon Web Services (AWS)

• Has a free plan (Liquid Web does not)
• Lower estimated cost for 10 users: Free vs $11/mo
• Higher Integration score (10/10 vs 5/10)
• Higher Analytics score (8/10 vs 4/10)
• Better fit for developers (9/10 vs 6/10)

Why choose Liquid Web

• Higher Support score (8/10 vs 6/10)
• Higher Ease of Use score (5/10 vs 4/10)
• Better fit for small business (7/10 vs 5/10)

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Pros

• The service catalogue is unusually broad, with over 200 services across 38 regions, so most infrastructure needs can be met on one platform.
• EC2 has a 99.99% region-level SLA with credits of up to 100%, and instances unavailable for more than six minutes in an hour are not billed for that hour.
• The free plan gives up to $200 in credits, and more than 30 always-free services let new teams experiment at low cost.
• Support scales from a $29 minimum up to dedicated Enterprise and Unified Operations tiers for mission-critical workloads.
• G2 rates it 4.4 across more than 17,000 reviews, and reviewers praise its scalability and global reach.

Cons

• Reviewers widely cite a steep learning curve across the console and services.
• Usage pricing is complex and can produce unexpected bills unless spend is monitored closely.
• Paid support is billed as a percentage of total AWS spend, so support costs rise with usage.
• A July 2025 billing console bug showed customers estimated charges in the billions, which hurt trust in its cost tooling.

Liquid Web

Pros

• Fully managed VPS and dedicated plans cover monitoring, updates and ServerSecure hardening.
• The SLA promises 99.99 percent uptime, and the dedicated page adds a 30-minute hardware replacement guarantee.
• Cloud VPS comes in compute, memory and CPU-optimized sizes, with hourly billing.
• Managed dedicated plans include 500 GB of Acronis backups and DDoS protection.
• Data centers are in the US, Europe and Australia and are assessed for HIPAA and PCI-DSS.

Cons

• Reviewers repeatedly call it more expensive than budget hosts such as Hostinger and InterServer.
• There is no built-in CDN, and it offers no managed Kubernetes or serverless products.
• The InterWorx and SiteWorx control panels can confuse beginners.
• Some recent user reviews say support has slowed since the ownership change.
• Windows servers and cPanel or Plesk licences cost extra.