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My question is: what happens to all the small cloud infrastructure startups? Surely Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr etc don't have the resources to invest in thes

My question is: what happens to all the small cloud infrastructure startups? Surely Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr etc don't have the resources to invest in these massive facilities. Yet, they have customers, and provide options. How are the big three (AWS, GCP, MS) able to sell on such a scale?

troymc 8y ago
> How are the big three (AWS, GCP, MS) able to sell on such a scale? I don't know the whole answer, but part of it is that they give free credits to new users, to get them using their cloud. It's smart. Once the free credits are used up, the business just starts paying, because switching to a different cloud provider is usually non-trivial.
- projectramo 8y ago
  Perhaps, but wouldn't digital ocean/VULTR etc start offering a free tier and catch up? I think they also focus on a few large customers. SNAP, Netflix, and others can't really use Digital Ocean (can they? Does anyone know enough to do some back of envelope math?)
foobarbazetc 8y ago
There are always going to be people who want to pay a fixed $x/month without all the pricing hoops of AWS etc. I assume this is why Lightsail sort of exists (still waiting for a non-ancient distro over there). E.g. I tried finding the Azure equivalent of a $5/m nano/micro instance the other day and it doesn’t seem to exist. I think their minimum is $25/m just for the compute portion. That gets you 1 vcpu/1 gig. I honestly have no idea why anyone uses Azure.
- projectramo 8y ago
  isn't this it? https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/#virtual-machines1 https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/#virtua... hopefully you can see what I see, but $0.008 x 730 hours is about $5.5
closeparen 8y ago
The cloud providers provide a lot more than the VPS providers: - Arbitrary private network topologies - Managed databases - Other managed services for the "undifferentiated heavy lifting" of infrastructure like source control, CI/CD, monitoring, log aggregation, alerting, load balancing, encryption, directory services, etc. As such, they're in a different business - providing single servers for hobbyist and small-business websites - rather than seriously competing with on-prem for big-co infrastructure needs. They're making some attempts to catch up but are far behind.
- angry_octet 8y ago
  It's just a slight exaggeration to say Digital Ocean, Hetzner etc are for 'hobbyists'.
- projectramo 8y ago
  Would love to learn more about the difference. Since this discussion is "old", I might have to craft an Ask HN

troymc 8y ago

> How are the big three (AWS, GCP, MS) able to sell on such a scale? I don't know the whole answer, but part of it is that they give free credits to new users, to get them using their cloud. It's smart. Once the free credits are used up, the business just starts paying, because switching to a different cloud provider is usually non-trivial.

projectramo 8y ago
Perhaps, but wouldn't digital ocean/VULTR etc start offering a free tier and catch up? I think they also focus on a few large customers. SNAP, Netflix, and others can't really use Digital Ocean (can they? Does anyone know enough to do some back of envelope math?)

foobarbazetc 8y ago

There are always going to be people who want to pay a fixed $x/month without all the pricing hoops of AWS etc. I assume this is why Lightsail sort of exists (still waiting for a non-ancient distro over there). E.g. I tried finding the Azure equivalent of a $5/m nano/micro instance the other day and it doesn’t seem to exist. I think their minimum is $25/m just for the compute portion. That gets you 1 vcpu/1 gig. I honestly have no idea why anyone uses Azure.

projectramo 8y ago
isn't this it? https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/#virtual-machines1 https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/#virtua... hopefully you can see what I see, but $0.008 x 730 hours is about $5.5

closeparen 8y ago

The cloud providers provide a lot more than the VPS providers: - Arbitrary private network topologies - Managed databases - Other managed services for the "undifferentiated heavy lifting" of infrastructure like source control, CI/CD, monitoring, log aggregation, alerting, load balancing, encryption, directory services, etc. As such, they're in a different business - providing single servers for hobbyist and small-business websites - rather than seriously competing with on-prem for big-co infrastructure needs. They're making some attempts to catch up but are far behind.

angry_octet 8y ago
It's just a slight exaggeration to say Digital Ocean, Hetzner etc are for 'hobbyists'.
projectramo 8y ago
Would love to learn more about the difference. Since this discussion is "old", I might have to craft an Ask HN