I work at a company that markets itself as a "premium IT service provider", and I think our cheapest VM is maybe 3x to 5x what the equivalent OVH or Digital Oce

I work at a company that markets itself as a "premium IT service provider", and I think our cheapest VM is maybe 3x to 5x what the equivalent OVH or Digital Ocean VM costs. What you get, is: * actual humans to talk to, when things go wrong * hosting in central Europe, without dubious ownership structures * you actually get the VM specs you payed for, no overbooking of hypervisors * colocation in the same datacenters as the VMs. * custom deals. If you pay enough money, you can install cages with your own access control in our datacenters. * architecture support and consulting * you can visit our datacenters if you really want * lots of certifications that will make your compliance department happy * if the auditors come to you, and request access protocols to your servers, we can provide those ... and so on. Why do I list all that? Because cost is just one aspect to consider, and some business have good reasons to optimize for other aspects. Some value flexibility in their service provider, some value physical proximity, some value constant contact persons over multiple years.