Ask HN: Beyond AWS/Azure/GCP, what cloud providers should I know more about?

Cloudflare. Between Pages, Speed, Access, Workers, durable objects, KV store, R2, Images, etc they’re maybe a small handful of product releases away from being able to replace the providers you mentioned for many users and applications. Plus I’d wager that many applications can be built 100% on Cloudflare today (and are). Benefits? - Pricing. Compare pricing on Workers to functions across those platforms as one example. For many use cases you can use the Bundled pricing model. It’s insanely cheap. Crazy cheap. Then start looking at pricing on bandwidth (ESPECIALLY BANDWIDTH), KV, R2, DO, etc. You’ll be pleased. - Pace and market disruption. AWS is 20 years old. That makes them essentially the IBM of cloud. No one ever got fired for buying AWS but seriously compare uptime, pricing, etc. - Speed, uptime, performance. Cloudflare’s edge network and architecture is truly impressive. KV store? Workers? R2? Durable objects? Forget worrying about regions, etc. All of this and more runs at their edge in more than 270 cities worldwide. - Less vendor lock-in, more standards. R2 is S3 compatible. Workers are actually WebWorkers. Pages is Jamstack. I’m not exaggerating when I say that Workers (as one example) have 2x the performance at 1/4 the cost compared to Lambda. Then start looking at bandwidth… In my mind where AWS truly shines is exactly why they’re the IBM of cloud. Support for enterprise, government, etc. Really complicated access and management, regulatory requirements, extensive customer requirements, an entire cottage industry and ecosystem of consultants for everything you can imagine, various supplemental SaaS offerings, the list goes on. Everyone likes to think you can’t go wrong even just starting out with AWS. I don’t like to crush dreams but the reality is most efforts fail in a year or less and only what, maybe 1/10,00,000 projects/companies will ever need the full scale of what I just listed. Not shilling Cloudflare - just a happy customer who’s truly baffled why Cloudflare’s full product suite isn’t leveraged more often and more fully.

Also forgot to mention - for compute providers, other storage, bandwidth, etc look at their bandwidth alliance. Free bandwidth to/from any of the members.

I'm surprised there's been many mentions of DigitalOcean, but none of Linode, which I think of as occupying almost the exact same space in terms of offerings.

If only Hetzner would bring bare metal to the U.S....

That’s all great and amazing for the edge but not for general compute which the majority of applications still need. Yes you probably could design it with just workers but most popular frameworks just don’t lend themselves well to that and using things like accessing private databases from workers is still hairy at best and almost certainly not certifiable.

Depending on your architecture and use cases you can save much more than a few salaries by moving to another provider.l, especially if outgoing bandwidth is involved and not compensated for.