Amazon Web Services is the perfect solution for hosting a server outside your organization. This allows you to create a cloud hosted database server that takes the strain off your local server infrastructure using Microsoft SQL server 2012 or a Linux based solution in a cloud hosted server instance. There is a free trial that lasts for a year if you are using the free tier and you do not go over your limits. If you go over the limits you are billed automatically, but this is time to upgrade to a higher tier. A Linux based instance uses SSH for connections from home or your business. an SSH keys is used instead of a password, this provides more security. But you must keep your SSH key safe from theft. Once a user is connected to a Linux instance, Ubuntu for example, use the regular sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get install asterisk if an Asterisk server is desired. This is better if a business does not want to add a new physical server in their building and the cost of the Amazon server instance is justifiable due to the cheap cost.
I have a small Ubuntu 14.04 server instance with OpenVPN installed, I wish to configure a small OpenVPN instance and try out a VPN connection. Windows Server 2008 R2 as well as 2012 R2 are available if you want to setup a Windows Server system. There is nothing wrong with Windows Server 2012. I spent today planning and helping setup a Windows Deployment Server system on Windows 2012 R2 and this was very successful. The deployment server allows deployment of operating systems to networked computers. But this is not something you would have on AWS. A database server would perform very well on AWS, there is limited disk space and processing power required until you actually start filling the database with data. Then it starts to chew up disk space, especially with a very large database.
To get access to a Linux operating system on AWS, use this command.
ssh -i FooBar.pem [email protected]
Where FooBar.pem is your SSH key and XX.XX.XX.XX is your server instances IP address.
Use the BitVise SSH client if you are on Windows: http://www.bitvise.com/ssh-client. This works perfectly when importing the SSH key to connect to your instance.