> One detail is that bare metal bandwidth (especially egress) is radically, ridiculously, nonsensically cheaper than any of the big cloud providers. I work in

> One detail is that bare metal bandwidth (especially egress) is radically, ridiculously, nonsensically cheaper than any of the big cloud providers. I work in the ISP space specifically with folks who help place businesses in datacenters. This is 100% accurate - sometimes it can literally be pennies on the dollar for egress. > Storage on the other hand is far cheaper Agree - S3 will always be a backbone component of my toolbox when building out infrastructure. It's been solid from day-1 when I was in my early 20's using it on remix competition sites (wavs are big... 10-20 wavs per-song oh god). The awe still hasn't worn off for me as to how quick I can scale large-scale web-friendly/secure storage with tools like that. --- On the VPS hosts... I'm weirdly loyal to them and have kept infra on Linode for years. I also have had extraordinary positive experiences with DO as well. I find they have the customer service that solutions like AWS lack for the little guys... if we're talking about a big spend then yea I will totally go to a more formal provider, but for my stuff I prefer knowing that there's solid engineers on the hosting side that I can actually talk to. I'm REALLY excited to see folks like Linode/DO support things like S3-compatible APIs, K8s, etc. I think that's important for those solutions to stay relevant. --- Thanks for such a great response - conversations like these are invaluable, and I've definitely learned from this! I am VERY interested in Vultr - totally could have used them 5-6 months ago for GIS crunching (fiber maps, lit building lists, geocoding, census blocks, etc). Once I open that up as a service to my users I'll likely be on the hunt for SSD-backed high-compute on-demand instances.