@Chernabog Oh yes, with over 170 services to choose from it does everything and then some. It scales from the smallest website, to big corporations. It does eveything you can think of and more and all with rock solid reliability. All for a fee, of course, depending on what you use.
There's a function called Simple Email Service (SES) which will allow you to send forum email alerts from your domain. Don't let the name fool you though, as setting it up isn't particularly simple, but it's solid and worth it. There's another one for user accounts too, eg
ftl@example.com, called Amazon WorkMail.
In the end, avoiding data loss is up to your working practices and I can understand your concern after being hit with data loss twice. However, AWS gives you the means to set up a rock solid database implementation with failover that is very hard to corrupt. The function for the database that you want is called Relational Database Service (RDS). This will host the very latest versions of MySQL or MariaDB as a "black box" function that you can use and allow you to create a backup regime and access from your EC2 virtual machine, all in a totally integrated way.
Another way to think of AWS is to compare it to a standard hosting package where for a set fee per month, you get so much CPU power, so much memory, so much storage, so much bandwidth, so much network bandwidth, running on a certain OS, Windows or Linux and
certain apps (PHP, MySQL etc) and versions of those apps, all decided by the hosting company, not you. This includes versions of Windows or Linux decided by the hosting company, not you and in every single case that I've seen, they're old versions! What a joke. For example, most of them limit you to PHP 7.4 and MySQL 5.5 which are several years out of date, when the latest versions are now PHP 809 and MySQL 8023. Their excuse is compatibility, but that's garbage, because they can easily offer them alongside the latest versions too. I wanted to set up a brand new site on a brand new domain and I had to accept out of date, insecure versions of the software? You gotta be joking, no wonder websites are hacked all over the place. With Amazon, you don't have to put up with this crap and can have the latest everything.
With AWS, you pick what you want and can change it on the fly whenever you want. This flexibility is unrivalled and just what I was looking for. Oh and watch out for hosting companies that are simply reselling a packaged set of AWS services at a profit.
I wouldn't touch those and yes, they don't usually advertise it, either.
One thing I'll say about the OS on Amazon though, is that what's offered in their selection of AMIs, infuriatingly, also isn't the latest version either. However, you can get around this by creating your own virtual machine image and importing it into AWS. In my case, I'm still using the old version offered by AWS, but it works well enough and I'll be creating my own image with the latest OS version and importing it soon enough. I'll then move the site over to that.
Of course, there's a downside to all this and that's the learning curve and lack of handholding by AWS, but after researching the market, I decided that it was worth the investment in time and effort, implemented my site on AWS and haven't looked back.
Finally, you might be thinking about AWS's prime competitor, Microsoft's Azure, the number two in the market. I tried it, but didn't like it at all. Didn't like the interface and often clicking links was very slow, unlike with AWS where the wait times are very short, or near instant. It wasn't as integrated or user friendly, either. AWS however, is a very polished service, that gets most things right, with great documentation and no, it's not perfect, lol, so it was a no-brainer over Azure.
To familiarise yourself with AWS, start off with its homepage, here:
Amazon Web Services offers reliable, scalable, and inexpensive cloud computing services. Free to join, pay only for what you use.
aws.com
