Why you choose big hosting provider like AWS?
Hi guys, this is my first post on this forum and I hope I’m not breaking any rules here.
I’ve been thinking about something that just doesn't sit right with me and is why are people still throwing 3x or 4x the money at AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure?
I get it, they have a massive ecosystem, but let’s be real. If your use case is just a VM sitting there running a service, whether it’s a simple script or a complex stack,why pay that insane premium? What exactly does AWS give you that justifies that bill? Is it just the brand name, or is there something I’m missing?
On the other hand, I’m tired of the "cheapest is best" mindset.
We all know the deal: if a VPS costs $1/year, it’s worth exactly what you paid for ancient hardware, heavy overselling, and zero stability. Quality and actual support have a cost, period.
So, if we take the "bottom-dollar" price out of the equation, what actually makes you choose one host over another?
Hardware Transparency? Network Quality?Real Support?
Also, I’m curious: what are you guys actually running on your VMs these days? Is it all Docker, personal VPNs, monitoring nodes, or something else?
Comments
I think you’re mostly paying for reliability, ecosystem, and convenience with AWS / OCI / GCP / Azure, not just raw compute. Things like managed databases, autoscaling, global networking, IAM, backups, and integrations save a lot of time (and headaches) at scale. For businesses, that often justifies the cost more thæn the hardware itself.
For a simple always-on VM though, yeah, it’s usually overkill. Plenty of smaller providers give you better value if you don’t need all the extra features.
When choosing a host, I’d say the big ones are:
As for workloads, it’s mostly Docker these days, apps, small services, monitoring, sometimes game servers or personal tools. Pretty boring, but it works
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I run stuff on Azure, Oracle and AWS because of the reliability. Literally years of VPS uptime on Azure.
It seems that what makes a difference is (a) live migration - I'm sure my VPS is not running on the same node/hardware for years without a reboot, they're doing proactive live migrations when there's a hardware issue; and (b) the network - even the "best" LES provider is at the mercy of their upstream and I'm getting some type of brief (at least) network outage from ALL of them more often than I'm happy with.
As for whether the incremental benefit is worth it, the issues with outages are that they tend to occur at the most inopportune times, and the uncertainty about when they'll be resolved. Is it a 1 minute "blip", or is it going to last hours? Is it worth migrating stuff somewhere else, or just ride it out? I'm getting better at this and have scripts that can do a migration between providers in a few minutes, and am working on automating that. And for sure not everything needs 100% reliability.
Last decade, I think they guaranteed 6 to 9, perhaps 11 nines on data reliability. Moreover, managed database with global availability is great. But, it's just expensive
As for computing, high-frequency cores aren't the default.
Aside from ecosystem there is also compliance. Bigger companies have a whole laundry list of requirements so they're never going to go for a LES style provider.
But who does that? I know people use Oracle free tier to run simple scripts, but other than that it must be extremely rare that people are paying premium providers to run simple scripts.
I have several customers that run with the big dragons for a bunch of reasons. It could be geographical spread, SLA's, some certain service or product, automation, or even legal. When you run 1000 production critical vm's you don't just click "I accept" on some random providers EULA and hope for the best, you tell your legal department to call their legal department and write down a shitload of contracts and get them signed. Small providers do not have that kind of resources. Also, those kind of contracts sometimes contains fines and stuff in the millions in case of contract breach, and small providers could never afford to sign such a clause.
Yes.
There's a few factors for me. One is cost. I explicitly preference smaller companies. I also run OpenBSD whenever possible, and ease of running OpenBSD is a factor.
I have three external name servers that also provide monitoring services.
ARPNetworks: This one is the most expensive at $10/month. It's twice the cost of comparable offerings, but it's another point of presence, I've had no issues with it, and they have a great reputation in the BSD community. I could spend elsewhere, but it's not breaking the bank, so why?
IRCNow: $5/month, which is what I've normally considered market rate for a basic VPS. They run OpenBSD as a hypervisor.
OpenBSD.Amsterdam: Definitely the gold standard for OpenBSD on OpenBSD. A little more money, maybe $6/month or so. A lot of these funds go back to the OpenBSD project.
In total, I spend about $21/month for off-site servers that I'm quite content with. I still have a couple stragglers on Vultr that I want to move over to more core setup in Spokane, but almost all of my stuff is in-colo now, on my own gear.
Slow Servers IPv6-native VPSs hosted on OpenBSD's VMM in Spokane, WA, USA. (I racked these.)
SporeStack Resold Vultr VPS/baremetal, DigitalOcean, and a whitelabeled brand in Europe. KYC-free, simple to launch. (I didn't rack these.)
Neither are dirt cheap!