Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?

We recently decided to move from AWS to OVH, primarily for saving money. We realized that the bulk of our AWS bill was made of EC2 and Data transfer costs. So, leaving S3, Cloudfront and SES, we moved everything away from AWS. The costs have become less than half.

My question is: Why is OVH not as popular as AWS, Google Cloud or Azure among startups when it is so much more cheaper?. I am aware of the following drawbacks of OVH:

  * No disk replication i.e unlike EBS or Google disk, if my disk fails, I am at the mercy of my backups (given no RAID) 
  * No private network for all the servers by default. Unlike AWS security groups or Google Cloud private networks (which are setup by default), I will have to pay for vRack to setup a private network and is more complicated.
  * Decreased flexibility i.e I may not be able to spin up instances instantaneously or shut down instances to save costs in off peak times.

These maybe big factors for large corporations but I think that a startup which starts with a small monolith (or a handful of services) and is focused on eventual profitability may benefit from using services like OVH.

Am I missing something here?

Also, please let me know of any better and cheaper services out there than OVH.

Edit: I would add that we have moved to OVH dedicated servers not VPS.

I think it is because many people's bill is not primarily in EC2.

AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure's biggest value add come from managed services, like auto scaling databases and VMs. It makes it a lot easier for a small startup to build out their services without thinking about scaling challenges.

Snapchat, for example, was built on google app engine and to this day has billions of dollars in contracts with Google Cloud. They scaled their app to millions of users remarkably well with what I hear was just 2 guys.

No one does a startup because they expect it to stay small, so eating the upfront cost of using a managed service is a reasonable price to pay for peace of mind if things take off and the team can't keep up.

Hiring people to manage infrastructure and do it well is likely more expensive in many scenarios.

I don't have answer to you question, just a few notes about another low cost proder - Hetzner: * They have RAID by default * They have private network included now (vSwitch)

Drawbacks from my expirience: * You have to monitor hardware by yourself (SMART, CPU and HDD temperature) and requests checks if you suspect hardware failure * Decreased flexibility (curretly Hetzner have limited cloud support, but it's very limited). Probably doesn't matter for most startups. * More manual work for administration (provided services are more low level)

I'd be interested to see an analysis for a typical startup of when managing your own infrastructure becomes less expensive than managed services from cloud providers. I'd imagine it has to be pretty high considering most startups don't rush to leave AWS even after becoming massive.

There are all kinds of good and valid business reasons why, and all kinds of good and perhaps valid counterarguments to those reasons. None of which are the real answer. The real answer is that the CEO/CTO/CxO doesn't want to have to think about these things, or getting expertise in-house for these things. They want it to be like electricity or water; something they have to pay for, but don't have to think about. Whether or not that's what really happens is irrelevant; it's what they think will happen, and to be honest it is what often happens. Even if they're paying more $$, they paying less in mental bandwidth, and never have to worry about whether they have (retained or retrained) sufficient in-house talent to maintain it. That's the real reason.