AWS

While PaaS providers like Heroku offer simplicity, major cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure offer unparalleled power, flexibility, and scalability. These are known as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers, although they also offer PaaS and other services. AWS is the market leader and provides a vast and comprehensive suite of cloud services. For web developers, there are several key services. Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) provides virtual servers (called 'instances') in the cloud. This gives you complete control over your server environment, allowing you to install any operating system and software you need. Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is an object storage service that is commonly used to host static assets like images, CSS, and JavaScript files for a website. AWS Lambda is a 'serverless' compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service, and you only pay for the compute time you consume. Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database like PostgreSQL or MySQL in the cloud. While using these services directly requires more configuration and management than a PaaS, it offers greater control over your architecture and can be more cost-effective at scale.