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?

New York and Seattle areas