> Assuming all vendors provide similar capabilities in terms of costs, features, support, API response times, load testing results and the like This is a terr

> Assuming all vendors provide similar capabilities in terms of costs, features, support, API response times, load testing results and the like This is a terrible assumption. This is one of the things that differentiates vendors. No two vendors are the same, especially things like staging environments, capacity limits, etc. But other things are: 1) Do they have a real-time status page? 2) How many outages have they had in the last year, and how severe were they? 3) Where is their support based? And is it 24x7? What if you have an issue at 2am on Saturday morning, do they have support? 4) How attentive are they to fixing bugs?