Richie Lee has a long blog post on log shipping:
Despite the development of AlwaysOn in recent releases of SQL Server, log shipping is still a great way to set up a copy of databases to be used for reporting. One of the main reasons it is great is because, unlike AlwaysOn, it is available in less expensive editions like Standard and Web from SQL Server 2008 onwards. Sure, in 2016 AlwaysOn will be available in Standard, but in a greatly deprecated form, and you cannot read from the secondary. So it will be good for DR, but not for reporting (as an aside it still might be easier to set up log shipping for DR than AlwaysOn Basic because you need to setup a failover cluster. Read through the “how to set up Standard Edition Availability Groups” here.) However you do need to be careful though when setting up log shipping across different editions of SQL Server: whilst you can log ship between Enterprise to Standard/Web, if the database uses any Enterprise features then you’ll need to log ship to an Enterprise edition of SQL Server. And because you’ll be using the database for reporting, you’ll need to get it licensed.
Log shipping is a venerable disaster recovery technique and it behooves database administrators to know of its existence.
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