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or you pay annually... then if one of your VMs dies good luck getting their CS to do anything about it (or even ever finding out why)
We've never had an issue like this after moving to GCP.
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…
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.
External tools such as Terraform and Kubernetes already supports AWS. For smaller hosting providers this is usually not the case.
Did you use autoscaling to keep your instance count as small as possible?
These could be reasons why your costs were so high.
Another reason why companies use AWS is that it allows them to move faster. If you're afraid of lock-in and want to build everything yourself then yes, AWS will be damn expensive. But if you use the services they provide, you can build things pretty quickly without much workforce.
- How reliable are their datacenters?
- Do their servers use good hardware? e.g. Hetzner is known to replace HDs on their budget servers with used HDs that have been "retested." Whatever it is, they fail more often than HDs at other hosts.
- Do they have organized procedures I can bet my business on? (DDoS response, hardware failure, power failure, network failure)
- Do they have a dedicated security team?
- Do they have professional, knowledgeable support? Low cost providers are typically lacking, IMO. When shit hits the fan and I need top-notch, professional support at 2am, can I get it?
To me, the only budget host that seems on par with the bigger companies is DigitalOcean.
OVH in particular is really just phenomenal for dedicated hardware at a very reasonable price. They deploy very quickly (anywhere from 3 minutes to 48 hours, depending), and I've always found them INCREDIBLE to deal with - the last 4 years. Prior to that, when they were the go-to host for lowendwebhosting/cheapwebhost/lowendbox/etc they were a 'best of luck' provider. And that caused grief for many a friend / startup / client.
There's really a risk/reward difference. With AWS and friends, I'm getting incredible scale. With OVH and friends I'm getting tremendous disk space, processing power, but the scaling can be at best a PITA.
Ultimately I'm a big fan of physical to cloud bursting - if that's your need. Monitor your environment from a third party and use that to orchestrate your cloud-bursting strategy if necessary. It's fairly easy to do, if not a tiny bit time consuming.
This is hit-and-miss marketing strategy that works for some, but not for others.
I use them but tbh I miss quality, responsive customer support when things gets bad.
The big cloud providers all give a massive amount of credits for startups to use. Massive meaning multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars. So it’s easy for startups to hop on for the free credits and a couple years later be too busy on product cycles to make time for a move. The “lock-in” is strong.
I did not mention in the question for brevity, but we moved to Google Cloud (GCP) after exhausting AWS credits to utilise GCP credits. We came to know of OVH a couple of months back and having burnt through our GCP credits, we are again making a switch.