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

106 points by tomrod 5y ago

If you were to advise someone starting to build a SaaS product from an idea, what cloud providers would you recommend knowing more about beyond the bigger three?

kavehkhorram 5y ago
The big three do have clear benefits in terms of scale, reliability, and features, so I'd say it's worth it to look at "accessory" applications that run on top of them. Looking at YCombinator's alumni, there are a few interesting ones - for example, CloudThread.io (no affiliation) tracks cost efficiency of teams and applications, providing "technical cloud cost unit metrics as a service." My company, Usage.AI, automatically buys and sells Reserved Instances to cut EC2 costs by up to 57%.
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
Definitely Hetzner; cheap bare metal with ease of use approaching Cloud™, plus actual cloud VMs.
- whitepoplar 5y ago
  If only Hetzner would bring bare metal to the U.S....
  - mardix 5y ago
    That would be it. People would flood them.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    I'm hoping that their cloud VM work in the states is a precursor to that:)
daviddever23box 5y ago
Actually, I'd start with the assumption that the application may not (or should not) know anything about the underlying cloud infrastructure.
nousermane 5y ago
Unless you consider it essential for your product to scale by few orders of magnitude on a dime, it would be sensible to add "non-cloud" hosting into consideration - Hetzner, OVH, Scaleway, ... Those are considerably cheaper, suffer less from unpredictable performance, a.k.a. "loud neighbour" problem, and are less likely to make you lock into some API/feature that would become a huge headache if you ever decide to move.
- jpgvm 5y ago
  You can also make them feel pretty cloud-like by running k8s on them.
- jhugo 5y ago
  We had a lot of noisy neighbour issues on Hetzner's VPSes, to the point that we stopped using them entirely. Their bare metal is a great offer though. And fully agreed about lock-in. If you can, design cloud-agnostic from the start. You get a lot more flexibility and you're in a much better negotiating position as you grow. Not realistic or necessarily sensible for every company/team though.
  - mgbmtl 5y ago
    I'm a happy Hetzner baremetal (and OVH) user, just don't use Hetzner's Finland DC, the network is very unpredictable (a lot of random packet loss).
    - usr1106 5y ago
      You don't say where you notice that packet loss from, so I guess you are talking about the US? The by far biggest cable goes from Finland to Germany. No idea what happens after that. I believe Hetzner uses it and I have never heard that they wouldn't have enough bandwidth. But I have neither inside knowledge nor do I use them. Being in Finland myself I have better latencies from real cheap Scaleway in Paris than from far more expensive AWS in Frankfurt. So it's not always you get what you pay for. Still no drops from either. Maybe Hetzner has more noisy neighbor issues because they are cheaper? The same could hold for Scaleway, but I have never noticed anything.
Pandabob 5y ago
Supabase.
- andrew_ 5y ago
  Came here to say this. Up and comer, adding new services every quarter, while attempting to innovate.
threatofrain 5y ago
https://fly.io https://fly.io https://render.com https://render.com https://digitalocean.com https://digitalocean.com
simonw 5y ago
DigitalOcean and https://fly.io/ https://fly.io/
verdverm 5y ago
None, it is not important at the early stage you are at, if ever, but it depends on the SaaS model you follow. Why do you think it's important to know more than the one you run on?
- tomrod 5y ago
  Fair question. We don't run on one yet -- we are at the stage where we are expanding my understanding of the cloud service offerings and am curious what is available with good reputation. SaaS is at whiteboard phase; where we invest our engineering time will be important as we recognize the issues of lock-in for something like AWS.
  - verdverm 5y ago
    I wouldn't worry about being cloud agnostic, just pick one. My recommendation is GCP because it takes less engineering effort. No matter what, you will have vendor specific code, but you can minimize it. The more important question you might ponder is how to validate the idea is something people both want and will pay for, before investing time & money in a good cloud setup. If you select smaller providers, expect to spend engineering time reproducing existing products in the big ones. Saving money on VM hourly rates often costs you more elsewhere. The only time I recommend worrying about multiple clouds is when you have a "deploy to your cloud" product and strategy.
Otek 5y ago
Alibaba Cloud if company you work for thinks about providing a service for China customers
- crummy 5y ago
  That or Tencent.
foreigner 5y ago
Twilio, Stripe, Notion
- chayesfss 5y ago
  Agree on stripe as well as crm tool. Good thing about aws (and I’m sure others) is you can ride on their soc2 report, security is a huge concern when selling a SaaS tool and when buyers hear aws they assume you’ll pass security no prob, others, ymmv and you’ll have more work to do.
mark_l_watson 5y ago
I have used Hetzner on several occasions - incredibly good value for the money. For ease of use, I like GCP.
Jamie9912 5y ago
Vultr Hetzner
notamy 5y ago
https://railway.app https://railway.app (disclaimer: used to work here, now just a fan ^^)
exikyut 5y ago
This question potentially lacks the situational context necessary to provide the answer/insight it's really looking for. What's the SaaS going to look like technically? Lots of compute processing? Or maybe large volumes of data? Perhaps machine learning? Or is it just a simple website and app deal? Then there's the question of the technical competence on the ground (and the opinions that tag along for the ride). On the one hand, what's the expertise level? On the other hand, what do people prefer using? (And separately, what to people have experience with?) I wonder (I don't have enough context to competently move the slider to "proper accusation") if somewhere along the way a general search for un-turned-over rocks got specialized/narrowed into "the overhead's all in the sheet metal benders" (the hardware). If this *is* the case, the only correct course of action (IMO) is to wind the train of thought backwards (oohc oohc) back to that frame of reference, then apply https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys until you're somewhere alien and interesting. (Reiterating the caveat at the start of the previous paragraph, this is all massive conjecture and just-in-case assumption.) If there was in fact a point at which hardware was specifically called out as a primary focus of optimization, I would loudly note that this type of hyperfocus leaves space for entire forests' worth of trees to fall over without ever being noticed, in this case for all of the software. Not just certain bits of it but like the whole kit and caboodle, unnoticed. A related alternate possibility is that hardware optimization might be being treated like an axis point to orbit around, which can contribute to seeing things like immovable Mt Everests, and the construction of great and confusing Rube Goldberg machines to work around... perceived resistance that isn't really there. To offer a 180-degree counterpoint that sorta flies in the face of the abstraction-away you might be trying to do here, if you want to look at different providers, I would suggest adopting a pat-answer strategy of keeping the architecture cloud-agnostic *where reasonable to do so*, and further suggest trying multiple providers - how does their support help out when it's 3am and you have no attention span and you accidentally something ridiculously straightforward? What's the performance like relative to the workload? What do all the engineers that are going to be headdesking against this stuff every day think about different options? Etc. It's quite possible this reply is entirely misguided, in which case please ignore. I'm still learning the art of reading intent through text, I have a long way to go.
- tomrod 5y ago
mellosouls 5y ago
Polite request for people to give explanations for their suggestions, otherwise the value is questionable.
PaywallBuster 5y ago
Oracle Cloud - good alternative for bandwidth heavy products (used by Zoom) Heroku - For a more "abstracted" cloud that just works Vultr/DigitalOcean - Cheap VMs, additionaly some services like managed DB and K8s Hetzner/OVH - Cheap dedicated hosts Netlify/Cloudflare Pages/etc - for static websites + functions/3rd party services for dynamic stuff
- dijit 5y ago
  > Oracle Cloud - good alternative for bandwidth heavy products (used by Zoom) please don't. I have nothing but the worst experiences with Oracle Cloud. Granted, I was always a little biased against Oracle as a company; but I have a friend working on OCI and assumed that since what I needed was really basic it would be fine. It really wasn't, it was awful, confusing and opaquely and egregiously expensive.
  - deepspace 5y ago
    > It really wasn't, it was awful, confusing and opaquely and egregiously expensive. That is true, but it is also very much an understatement of just how miserable every step of the OC experience is. I was once forced by a customer to endure the torture that is OC, and the only thing that saved me was when Oracle's terrible management software just deleted our entire account and deployment one weekend. Gone without a trace, could not even log in anymore. Luckily, that was enough to persuade the client to move to Azure.
    - Spunkie 5y ago
      I won't even take on clients if they are using OCI now. I've had previous clients whos entire account with production servers just get nuked without even so much as a curtsey email and OCI support WILL NOT HELP.
      - highclass 5y ago
        Do you know if this occurred to a free or paid account? To be fair, I have been testing Oracle Cloud Infrastructure(OCI) on a paid account for about 2 years now and actively monitor server hosting forums. During that time I have had no "abnormal" problems with paid production account. However, it is well known that Oracle accidentally nuked free/trial accounts early on, and again recently accidental nuked free/trial accounts reserved public IPs. However, I know of no such events for paid accounts, and paid accounts on OCI should be production ready quality in my experience. On the other hand support really is somewhat bad, but support is free and the cloud costs are much less than AWS, while having better products than similar priced cloud products such as Lnode, Vultr, Digital ocean.
pxeger1 5y ago
If you want to stick to the same type of platform as AWS, Azure, and GCP: - Oracle Cloud - IBM Cloud - Alibaba Cloud
moondev 5y ago
Kubernetes + Cluster API. This unlocks the ability to use one or multiple providers: https://cluster-api.sigs.k8s.io/reference/providers.html https://cluster-api.sigs.k8s.io/reference/providers.html * Alibaba Cloud * AWS * Azure * Azure Stack HCI * Baidu Cloud * BYOH * Metal3 * DigitalOcean * Exoscale * GCP * Hetzner * IBM Cloud * KubeVirt * MAAS * Nested * Nutanix * OpenStack * Equinix Metal (formerly Packet) * Sidero * Tencent Cloud * vSphere
- jaytaylor 5y ago
  Also Oracle OCI has OKE, which is Oracle Kubernetes Engine. It works nicely and the quality of service has been very good in my experience over the past four years. Disclaimer: I currently work at Oracle.
  - late2part 5y ago
    Can you find anyone who doesn't work at Oracle that can back up this bold assertion?
    - op00to 5y ago
      I’m sure that can be put into some company’s next Oracle licensing true up.
    - moondev 5y ago
      Why is it a bold assertion? Looks like the Oracle folks just need to submit a PR to the CAPI docs to include a link to their provider which is available now. https://github.com/oracle/cluster-api-provider-oci https://github.com/oracle/cluster-api-provider-oci
      - jhugo 5y ago
        It's usually quite hard to find people who don't work at Oracle who speak positively about Oracle Cloud. We tried to use it at work, it was the second-biggest disaster of a cloud provider we've ever encountered (Huawei is the first). Stuff is just broken so often it's hard to ever feel like you can trust it.
kkielhofner 5y ago
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.
- booi 5y ago
  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.
laurent123456 5y ago
Not sure why you wouldn't want to go for one of the bigger three. The advantage of using them is that you can find help online very easily. Also easier to hire an aws or azure specialist.
- bombcar 5y ago
  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.
chocolatkey 5y ago
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.
- bombcar 5y ago
  Linode is great and I’d recommend it especially for those doing more “vps++”.
- jkaplowitz 5y ago
  Linode's future is very hard to predict with them very newly part of Akamai. I wish them the best, of course. and I currently use them for my personal VPS. But it would be a risky time to pick them as the platform on top of which to build a new business.
fuball63 5y ago
No one has mentioned Linode yet, I had a good experience with them around 10 years ago, seems like they have more cloud product offerings now.
lukeqsee 5y ago
Linode. - no nonsense prices - solid hardware, with good, consistent performance & low steal (even on shared nodes, but dedicated is there if you need it) - great support (humans you can call) - adding more and more managed services over the last few years
- jkaplowitz 5y ago
  And now part of Akamai as of March 21: https://www.akamai.com/newsroom/press-release/akamai-completes-acquisition-of-linode https://www.akamai.com/newsroom/press-release/akamai-complet... Whether the future is consistent with the past on the points you listed is hard to predict so soon after they got acquired, but I suspect it will increasingly diverge over time.
- jhugo 5y ago
  We trialled Linode for a bandwidth-heavy product and found that their network has quite heavy contention (decent enough speeds for bulk TCP stuff, but frequent periods of elevated packet loss, latency and jitter that caused problems for our realtime application). It makes sense given how cheap their bandwidth is, and probably isn't an issue for hosting websites / API servers / etc, but something to be aware of.
oneplane 5y ago
tl;dr: Starting out with containers that have no own state, running on x86 on Linux has the highest chance of success I'd say, and when you grow, you have the capability to flow between IaaS, PaaS and SaaS and all-in-one clouds as you wish. That means that your 'first' service provider is irrelevant if you don't have pre-existing knowledge or affinity. If you can produce good container images, you can run anywhere. At some point 'the other clouds' aren't as relevant. Think about the following interactions instead: - CNCF compatibility (interpret as deep and as wide as you like) - Infrastructure vs. Platforms vs. Services - Legal boundaries - Locality (can interact with legal limits, but also latency, transfer costs) - Scope of services vs. scope of what you actually need A lot of providers are good at a thing, and bad at everything they tack on to it. Some providers are reasonably good at many things, but win on integration between those things. Others are simply too dissimilar to orchestrate, so either you'll have to bring your own orchestration or not use it in orchestrated scenarios. Instead of knowing about the clouds, know about requirements engineering. Fitting your needs and the services you pay for is way more important than the details of those needs and services. If you just need some random compute (read: a shell into an OS, a complete VM, a container, things like that) and nothing else, do NOT use some cloud. It will require you to do a lot of other things as a side-effect of using those services at all, and will cost a lot for what you need. On the other hand, if you need to be highly elastic, have completely managed RDBMs on-demand available and orchestrate networking, IAM, object storage, block storage, compute and ingress, do start out with a cloud. Regardless of what you are building, make sure you know ahead of time if: - What your scaling is going to depend on (usage, work hours peaking, seasonal peaking, tenants) - What your scaling is going to be like (horizontally scale and spread the load? vertically scale for a few weeks until you reach the scaling limit and then rebuild the application the right way instead? deploy one instance per customer?) - What availability rules are you going to have? (downtime? data loss? time to recover?) - what legal limits will it have? Example for a MVP SaaS: say you want to manage shopping lists for consumers, you might call it Shoppr and build a PWA and a app-wrapped PWA so you get immense reach. You mostly have front-end engineers, but you do know a bit about metrics and scaling. I'd say that means: - Downtime for a few hours unlikely to tank the business - Legal limits are basically just generic data protection - Scaling is likely linear - Since your data is mostly basic CRUD, any read-replicated system will do This can be built using any stack, and as long as your persistence can keep up you're golden. Don't fuck it up with an ORM that doesn't know how to create the proper indexing rules on tables and you can easily get a couple of million customers on an IaaS-only provider that just has virtual machines or containers, and only has one flavour of persistence store. Plonk Cloudflare in front of it and done. You can make this infinitely more complicated, but as an example add this feature to make this entire setup suck and the entire infrastructure incompatible with the needs of the application: international receipt scanning to recommend/autocomplete shopping lists for customers. Suddenly your requirements are expanded with: - Incoming upload queue - Object storage for image blobs - OCR or ML pipeline to process images - ML or Analysis pipeline to make sense of the contents of the now processed/read images - Instances or expansion for all of the above per region To make your traffic bill not suck you'll need endpoints in most major regions, and you'll probably want to prevent cross-region transfers so you'll want multi-region compute. Since you don't really have to do the processing realtime, you'll be doing some queue work and perhaps have a DLQ that needs human intervention or QA analysis for product improvement. All that stuff also needs a 'control panel' for lack of a better word so you'll be adding backoffice systems too, and those will have a workflow that doesn't compare to consumers at all and should never share any interaction with them, so now your application tenancy requirements change as well, which flows down into infrastructure requirements. At the same time you'll also need training data or validation data, and you'll want to be able to do all of that elastically to not go bankrupt for paying for 100% of capacity that you'll use 50% of the time at best. Suddenly 99% of the vendors are unable to provide what you need and the 'big three' remain (well, not exactly, but for illustrative purposes this will do). Considering a good SaaS might grow, make revenue and be sold or be valuable etc. there will be requirements stacked on top of everything else about redundancy, durability and availability and those will be increasingly hard to guarantee in an IaaS-only provider or PaaS-only provider scenario. When you 'start' with a SaaS, you'll need to know what you need now, and what you might need in the near future, and make sure that whatever you do now doesn't paint you into a corner within weeks. That means that setting up IIS on a Windows desktop by hand on a VPS at some IaaS hosting provider is highly unlikely to be a good place to start. On the other hand, an equally janky setup with a random Ubuntu VM where you manually install Docker and say, Nomad might actually not paint you into a corner too much since a container can easily be run on a container-PaaS and Kubernetes beyond that.
adventured 5y ago
Obviously depends on what you need. If you need many of their services, AWS is very difficult to beat. Nobody else quite matches up with them on breadth offerings. If you don't, do not use AWS due to the cost and the mental overhead of management. If you just need to spin up some servers and want them to be fast and cost effective, Hetzner is the current champ in the US market (their new US datacenter). DigitalOcean, Linode and Vultr are entirely reasonable options after Hetzner. If you have a $50-$100 / month or less budget, know how to set up and secure a linux server, and want to stretch your dollars as far as you can with a top notch cloud provider, Hetzner wins at present. And then throw Cloudflare out in front of it until or unless you can justify paying for a service. Keep your costs low, keep your infrastructure simple, keep your runway long, focus on selling selling selling (customers).
memset 5y ago
We’re building https://www.tasker.sh https://www.tasker.sh (YC S21) to handle ask things async - cron jobs and a must less restrictive version of Lambdas
jpcapdevila 5y ago
https://fly.io https://fly.io It let's you run containers on the edge (close to your users)
ehPReth 5y ago
Any with really high/unlimited outgoing data one would recommend?
thekonqueror 5y ago
If you are considering Vultr or DigitalOcean, try UpCloud as well. They have really robust network and the VMs are faster than AWS C6G instances in almost every test we run.
Shadonototra 5y ago
Scaleway - if you are from EU, they are great and pretty cheap
dijit 5y ago
For simple compute there's many options; everything depends on what you want. Been using Tilaa (if you can tolerate being hosted in Netherlands) for nearly 10 years, I'm quite happy with them. Vultr is not as good, but it's decent enough. But what separates a cloud provider from a VPS/Hosting provider? I might argue some kind of object storage, as that's the differentiating feature AWS had when it came out. In which case, I'm not sure what there is outside of AWS and GCP, sadly.
arccy 5y ago
If multicloud is anywhere on your radar, kubernetes. Most decent cloud providers offer a managed instance and targeting that common platform is so much nicer.
jeffrallen 5y ago
If you need Swiss-only for regulatory reasons, then you might like Exoscale.com. I do.
smackeyacky 5y ago
Alibaba Cloud. Although, my dealings with them have been entirely negative. Their strategy is to make a clone of every service AWS has, except the billing system which hides a lot of majorly expensive pitfalls. Also, if you choose one of their mainland hosted zones, trying to get your data out is even more expensive than the other zones. So in this case, "knowing more about" is really "tread carefully".
- tomrod 5y ago
  Your caution is well received -- thank you!
- jhugo 5y ago
  Having said that, they are the best option if you need to work with mainland China. Huawei is so bad it's almost hard to believe (literally everything is broken in some way), and AWS China only really makes sense if you are already tied to AWS.
spiffytech 5y ago
I'll toss out another vote for Fly.io. They make it super easy to deploy containers. No K8s, no leaky abstraction to an underlying traditional compute service. You get internal networking out of the box with per-app-region internal DNS entries, and with their CLI tool it's one command to SSH into your container or connect your laptop to the internal network. As a nice bonus, their pricing is very competitive. You pay about as much as you would for the same size Linode or droplet (minimum is 256 MB RAM for $1.94/mo), which is a welcome relief vs other providers. Great free plan, too - 3 apps at 256MB RAM running 24/7 in perpetuity.
adamcharnock 5y ago
I think it is really worth being aware of Hetzner's Dedicated server offerings. What you get isn't that dissimilar to what a cloud provider would offer, but you get about an order of magnitude more compute resources for the same price. Plus you get better disk access speed (NVMe) than something like an AWS EBS-backed instance. You can also order new instances within a matter of minutes. You don't have to use them, but being aware of what is available there would be a really good idea. I think some workloads could easily be deployed there at a fraction of the cost of a cloud provider.
- hestefisk 5y ago
  Second this. I moved from GCP compute to a Hetzner dedicated physical server with 3-4x raw compute power at 0.5x the cost. And of course it runs FreeBSD.
user3939382 5y ago
Wasabi It’s compatible with S3’s API buy way way cheaper. Free egress.
slackfan 5y ago
I realize some folks have a fairly negative view, hell I still have it, but Oracle OCI has been surprisingly sane. When you break out of the mindset that "this should work this way because that's how AWS does it", it's actually quite refreshing. Their serverless support story (Oracle Functions) is pretty clunky, but for standing up instances, and the terraform provider is quite verbose, but when it works, it works in a sane and logical manner.
- Spunkie 5y ago
  OCI support is actively the most unhelpful and useless waste of time I've had the displeasure of spending this year. As an added bonus they will randomly nuke accounts and production servers without even a curtsey email. I won't even take on clients if they are using OCI.
  - highclass 5y ago
    Would you know if this occurred to a free or paid account? To be fair, I have been testing Oracle Cloud Infrastructure(OCI) on a paid account for about 2 years now and actively monitor server hosting forums. During that time I have had no "abnormal" problems with paid production account. However, it is well known that Oracle accidentally nuked free/trial accounts early on, and again recently accidental nuked free/trial accounts reserved public IPs. However, I know of no such events for paid accounts, and paid accounts on OCI should be production ready quality in my experience. On the other hand support really is somewhat bad, but support is free and the cloud costs are much less than AWS, while having better products than similar priced cloud products such as Lnode, Vultr, Digital ocean.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
Scaleway in Europe is great and cheap, and they have many of the same services as the big parties. I like them anyway :P
throwaway787544 5y ago
Genesis Hosting. An OpenStack provider in Chicago with really decent prices and full control over your own OpenStack cluster. OpenStack is the open source democratization of the cloud. In Europe there are a dozen such providers, in the US there's only one it seems. Hoping they continue to grow and other hosters break away from basic VPS hosting and also provide OpenStack clusters.
ksec 5y ago
May be more of a market analysis in terms of size than anything. HyperScaler are the three you mentioned. Then you have Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu. ( All Chinese ) Oracle and IBM Cloud OVH, Hetzner, Linode, Digital Ocean, UpCloud, Vultr, Scaleway. Possibly Fly.io ( not sure ) They all own their at least part of the Datacenter, Network and their own hardware. You have other services like Render and Heroku. I am not aware of any potential upcoming players in this space ( Tell me about it ). But I think Cloudflare will likely be the big disruption in the next 5 years. They will own most of what we call "Cloud" services and Network and leave only the capital intensive compute to others. Then you have many players that are the size of Linode or DO but dont operate as "Cloud". I am still sad that Heroku didn't improve or move up / down the ladder. They seems to have happy at where they are.
chrisharven 5y ago
There are many providers who created a platform above the AWS/Azure/GCP infra and are providing services in a multi-cloud fashion ( Eg: Heroku ). Pure IaaS ( Infra as a Service ) players are: Oracle Cloud Digital Ocean
psnehanshu 5y ago
I am currently playing with Fly.io, and it is very simple to use. If you can dockerize your application, you can run it on Fly. Obviously, it is not comparable to AWS etc., but it is totally fine for single apps. You can run multiple apps too, and they can communicate using Fly'a private network and private DNS, but I haven't tried it yet.
pizza 5y ago
paperspace is alright for something simple using gpus
intrepidsoldier 5y ago
Disclaimer: I work for DigitalOcean. We at DigitalOcean tend to see a lot of SaaS builders on our cloud. We obviously are smaller as compared to the big 3, but in our experience most people starting out with an idea don't really need all the bells and whistles. Price-competitive, performant, and easily-automatable IaaS (compute/network/storage), and some managed services on top of it, are sufficient for a vast majority of builders. I think about this thread all the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22310879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22310879 Here is some marketing material with more information: - https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/how-to-scale-your-saas-product-without-breaking-the-bank https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/how-to-scale-your-saas-pro... - https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/forrester-total-economic-impact-study https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/forrester-total-economic-i...

106 points by tomrod 5y ago

If you were to advise someone starting to build a SaaS product from an idea, what cloud providers would you recommend knowing more about beyond the bigger three?

kavehkhorram 5y ago

The big three do have clear benefits in terms of scale, reliability, and features, so I'd say it's worth it to look at "accessory" applications that run on top of them. Looking at YCombinator's alumni, there are a few interesting ones - for example, CloudThread.io (no affiliation) tracks cost efficiency of teams and applications, providing "technical cloud cost unit metrics as a service." My company, Usage.AI, automatically buys and sells Reserved Instances to cut EC2 costs by up to 57%.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago

Definitely Hetzner; cheap bare metal with ease of use approaching Cloud™, plus actual cloud VMs.

whitepoplar 5y ago
If only Hetzner would bring bare metal to the U.S....
- mardix 5y ago
  That would be it. People would flood them.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  I'm hoping that their cloud VM work in the states is a precursor to that:)

daviddever23box 5y ago

Actually, I'd start with the assumption that the application may not (or should not) know anything about the underlying cloud infrastructure.

nousermane 5y ago

Unless you consider it essential for your product to scale by few orders of magnitude on a dime, it would be sensible to add "non-cloud" hosting into consideration - Hetzner, OVH, Scaleway, ... Those are considerably cheaper, suffer less from unpredictable performance, a.k.a. "loud neighbour" problem, and are less likely to make you lock into some API/feature that would become a huge headache if you ever decide to move.

jpgvm 5y ago
You can also make them feel pretty cloud-like by running k8s on them.
jhugo 5y ago
We had a lot of noisy neighbour issues on Hetzner's VPSes, to the point that we stopped using them entirely. Their bare metal is a great offer though. And fully agreed about lock-in. If you can, design cloud-agnostic from the start. You get a lot more flexibility and you're in a much better negotiating position as you grow. Not realistic or necessarily sensible for every company/team though.
- mgbmtl 5y ago
  I'm a happy Hetzner baremetal (and OVH) user, just don't use Hetzner's Finland DC, the network is very unpredictable (a lot of random packet loss).
  - usr1106 5y ago
    You don't say where you notice that packet loss from, so I guess you are talking about the US? The by far biggest cable goes from Finland to Germany. No idea what happens after that. I believe Hetzner uses it and I have never heard that they wouldn't have enough bandwidth. But I have neither inside knowledge nor do I use them. Being in Finland myself I have better latencies from real cheap Scaleway in Paris than from far more expensive AWS in Frankfurt. So it's not always you get what you pay for. Still no drops from either. Maybe Hetzner has more noisy neighbor issues because they are cheaper? The same could hold for Scaleway, but I have never noticed anything.

Pandabob 5y ago

Supabase.

andrew_ 5y ago
Came here to say this. Up and comer, adding new services every quarter, while attempting to innovate.

threatofrain 5y ago

https://fly.io https://fly.io https://render.com https://render.com https://digitalocean.com https://digitalocean.com

simonw 5y ago

DigitalOcean and https://fly.io/ https://fly.io/

verdverm 5y ago

None, it is not important at the early stage you are at, if ever, but it depends on the SaaS model you follow. Why do you think it's important to know more than the one you run on?

tomrod 5y ago
Fair question. We don't run on one yet -- we are at the stage where we are expanding my understanding of the cloud service offerings and am curious what is available with good reputation. SaaS is at whiteboard phase; where we invest our engineering time will be important as we recognize the issues of lock-in for something like AWS.
- verdverm 5y ago
  I wouldn't worry about being cloud agnostic, just pick one. My recommendation is GCP because it takes less engineering effort. No matter what, you will have vendor specific code, but you can minimize it. The more important question you might ponder is how to validate the idea is something people both want and will pay for, before investing time & money in a good cloud setup. If you select smaller providers, expect to spend engineering time reproducing existing products in the big ones. Saving money on VM hourly rates often costs you more elsewhere. The only time I recommend worrying about multiple clouds is when you have a "deploy to your cloud" product and strategy.

Otek 5y ago

Alibaba Cloud if company you work for thinks about providing a service for China customers

crummy 5y ago
That or Tencent.

foreigner 5y ago

Twilio, Stripe, Notion

chayesfss 5y ago
Agree on stripe as well as crm tool. Good thing about aws (and I’m sure others) is you can ride on their soc2 report, security is a huge concern when selling a SaaS tool and when buyers hear aws they assume you’ll pass security no prob, others, ymmv and you’ll have more work to do.

mark_l_watson 5y ago

I have used Hetzner on several occasions - incredibly good value for the money. For ease of use, I like GCP.

Jamie9912 5y ago

Vultr Hetzner

notamy 5y ago

https://railway.app https://railway.app (disclaimer: used to work here, now just a fan ^^)

exikyut 5y ago

This question potentially lacks the situational context necessary to provide the answer/insight it's really looking for. What's the SaaS going to look like technically? Lots of compute processing? Or maybe large volumes of data? Perhaps machine learning? Or is it just a simple website and app deal? Then there's the question of the technical competence on the ground (and the opinions that tag along for the ride). On the one hand, what's the expertise level? On the other hand, what do people prefer using? (And separately, what to people have experience with?) I wonder (I don't have enough context to competently move the slider to "proper accusation") if somewhere along the way a general search for un-turned-over rocks got specialized/narrowed into "the overhead's all in the sheet metal benders" (the hardware). If this *is* the case, the only correct course of action (IMO) is to wind the train of thought backwards (oohc oohc) back to that frame of reference, then apply https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys until you're somewhere alien and interesting. (Reiterating the caveat at the start of the previous paragraph, this is all massive conjecture and just-in-case assumption.) If there was in fact a point at which hardware was specifically called out as a primary focus of optimization, I would loudly note that this type of hyperfocus leaves space for entire forests' worth of trees to fall over without ever being noticed, in this case for all of the software. Not just certain bits of it but like the whole kit and caboodle, unnoticed. A related alternate possibility is that hardware optimization might be being treated like an axis point to orbit around, which can contribute to seeing things like immovable Mt Everests, and the construction of great and confusing Rube Goldberg machines to work around... perceived resistance that isn't really there. To offer a 180-degree counterpoint that sorta flies in the face of the abstraction-away you might be trying to do here, if you want to look at different providers, I would suggest adopting a pat-answer strategy of keeping the architecture cloud-agnostic *where reasonable to do so*, and further suggest trying multiple providers - how does their support help out when it's 3am and you have no attention span and you accidentally something ridiculously straightforward? What's the performance like relative to the workload? What do all the engineers that are going to be headdesking against this stuff every day think about different options? Etc. It's quite possible this reply is entirely misguided, in which case please ignore. I'm still learning the art of reading intent through text, I have a long way to go.

tomrod 5y ago

mellosouls 5y ago

Polite request for people to give explanations for their suggestions, otherwise the value is questionable.

PaywallBuster 5y ago

Oracle Cloud - good alternative for bandwidth heavy products (used by Zoom) Heroku - For a more "abstracted" cloud that just works Vultr/DigitalOcean - Cheap VMs, additionaly some services like managed DB and K8s Hetzner/OVH - Cheap dedicated hosts Netlify/Cloudflare Pages/etc - for static websites + functions/3rd party services for dynamic stuff

dijit 5y ago
> Oracle Cloud - good alternative for bandwidth heavy products (used by Zoom) please don't. I have nothing but the worst experiences with Oracle Cloud. Granted, I was always a little biased against Oracle as a company; but I have a friend working on OCI and assumed that since what I needed was really basic it would be fine. It really wasn't, it was awful, confusing and opaquely and egregiously expensive.
- deepspace 5y ago
  > It really wasn't, it was awful, confusing and opaquely and egregiously expensive. That is true, but it is also very much an understatement of just how miserable every step of the OC experience is. I was once forced by a customer to endure the torture that is OC, and the only thing that saved me was when Oracle's terrible management software just deleted our entire account and deployment one weekend. Gone without a trace, could not even log in anymore. Luckily, that was enough to persuade the client to move to Azure.
  - Spunkie 5y ago
    I won't even take on clients if they are using OCI now. I've had previous clients whos entire account with production servers just get nuked without even so much as a curtsey email and OCI support WILL NOT HELP.
    - highclass 5y ago
      Do you know if this occurred to a free or paid account? To be fair, I have been testing Oracle Cloud Infrastructure(OCI) on a paid account for about 2 years now and actively monitor server hosting forums. During that time I have had no "abnormal" problems with paid production account. However, it is well known that Oracle accidentally nuked free/trial accounts early on, and again recently accidental nuked free/trial accounts reserved public IPs. However, I know of no such events for paid accounts, and paid accounts on OCI should be production ready quality in my experience. On the other hand support really is somewhat bad, but support is free and the cloud costs are much less than AWS, while having better products than similar priced cloud products such as Lnode, Vultr, Digital ocean.

pxeger1 5y ago

If you want to stick to the same type of platform as AWS, Azure, and GCP: - Oracle Cloud - IBM Cloud - Alibaba Cloud

moondev 5y ago

Kubernetes + Cluster API. This unlocks the ability to use one or multiple providers: https://cluster-api.sigs.k8s.io/reference/providers.html https://cluster-api.sigs.k8s.io/reference/providers.html * Alibaba Cloud * AWS * Azure * Azure Stack HCI * Baidu Cloud * BYOH * Metal3 * DigitalOcean * Exoscale * GCP * Hetzner * IBM Cloud * KubeVirt * MAAS * Nested * Nutanix * OpenStack * Equinix Metal (formerly Packet) * Sidero * Tencent Cloud * vSphere

jaytaylor 5y ago
Also Oracle OCI has OKE, which is Oracle Kubernetes Engine. It works nicely and the quality of service has been very good in my experience over the past four years. Disclaimer: I currently work at Oracle.
- late2part 5y ago
  Can you find anyone who doesn't work at Oracle that can back up this bold assertion?
  - op00to 5y ago
    I’m sure that can be put into some company’s next Oracle licensing true up.
  - moondev 5y ago
    Why is it a bold assertion? Looks like the Oracle folks just need to submit a PR to the CAPI docs to include a link to their provider which is available now. https://github.com/oracle/cluster-api-provider-oci https://github.com/oracle/cluster-api-provider-oci
    - jhugo 5y ago
      It's usually quite hard to find people who don't work at Oracle who speak positively about Oracle Cloud. We tried to use it at work, it was the second-biggest disaster of a cloud provider we've ever encountered (Huawei is the first). Stuff is just broken so often it's hard to ever feel like you can trust it.

kkielhofner 5y ago

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.

booi 5y ago
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.

laurent123456 5y ago

Not sure why you wouldn't want to go for one of the bigger three. The advantage of using them is that you can find help online very easily. Also easier to hire an aws or azure specialist.

bombcar 5y ago
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.

chocolatkey 5y ago

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.

bombcar 5y ago
Linode is great and I’d recommend it especially for those doing more “vps++”.
jkaplowitz 5y ago
Linode's future is very hard to predict with them very newly part of Akamai. I wish them the best, of course. and I currently use them for my personal VPS. But it would be a risky time to pick them as the platform on top of which to build a new business.

fuball63 5y ago

No one has mentioned Linode yet, I had a good experience with them around 10 years ago, seems like they have more cloud product offerings now.

lukeqsee 5y ago

Linode. - no nonsense prices - solid hardware, with good, consistent performance & low steal (even on shared nodes, but dedicated is there if you need it) - great support (humans you can call) - adding more and more managed services over the last few years

jkaplowitz 5y ago
And now part of Akamai as of March 21: https://www.akamai.com/newsroom/press-release/akamai-completes-acquisition-of-linode https://www.akamai.com/newsroom/press-release/akamai-complet... Whether the future is consistent with the past on the points you listed is hard to predict so soon after they got acquired, but I suspect it will increasingly diverge over time.
jhugo 5y ago
We trialled Linode for a bandwidth-heavy product and found that their network has quite heavy contention (decent enough speeds for bulk TCP stuff, but frequent periods of elevated packet loss, latency and jitter that caused problems for our realtime application). It makes sense given how cheap their bandwidth is, and probably isn't an issue for hosting websites / API servers / etc, but something to be aware of.

oneplane 5y ago

tl;dr: Starting out with containers that have no own state, running on x86 on Linux has the highest chance of success I'd say, and when you grow, you have the capability to flow between IaaS, PaaS and SaaS and all-in-one clouds as you wish. That means that your 'first' service provider is irrelevant if you don't have pre-existing knowledge or affinity. If you can produce good container images, you can run anywhere. At some point 'the other clouds' aren't as relevant. Think about the following interactions instead: - CNCF compatibility (interpret as deep and as wide as you like) - Infrastructure vs. Platforms vs. Services - Legal boundaries - Locality (can interact with legal limits, but also latency, transfer costs) - Scope of services vs. scope of what you actually need A lot of providers are good at a thing, and bad at everything they tack on to it. Some providers are reasonably good at many things, but win on integration between those things. Others are simply too dissimilar to orchestrate, so either you'll have to bring your own orchestration or not use it in orchestrated scenarios. Instead of knowing about the clouds, know about requirements engineering. Fitting your needs and the services you pay for is way more important than the details of those needs and services. If you just need some random compute (read: a shell into an OS, a complete VM, a container, things like that) and nothing else, do NOT use some cloud. It will require you to do a lot of other things as a side-effect of using those services at all, and will cost a lot for what you need. On the other hand, if you need to be highly elastic, have completely managed RDBMs on-demand available and orchestrate networking, IAM, object storage, block storage, compute and ingress, do start out with a cloud. Regardless of what you are building, make sure you know ahead of time if: - What your scaling is going to depend on (usage, work hours peaking, seasonal peaking, tenants) - What your scaling is going to be like (horizontally scale and spread the load? vertically scale for a few weeks until you reach the scaling limit and then rebuild the application the right way instead? deploy one instance per customer?) - What availability rules are you going to have? (downtime? data loss? time to recover?) - what legal limits will it have? Example for a MVP SaaS: say you want to manage shopping lists for consumers, you might call it Shoppr and build a PWA and a app-wrapped PWA so you get immense reach. You mostly have front-end engineers, but you do know a bit about metrics and scaling. I'd say that means: - Downtime for a few hours unlikely to tank the business - Legal limits are basically just generic data protection - Scaling is likely linear - Since your data is mostly basic CRUD, any read-replicated system will do This can be built using any stack, and as long as your persistence can keep up you're golden. Don't fuck it up with an ORM that doesn't know how to create the proper indexing rules on tables and you can easily get a couple of million customers on an IaaS-only provider that just has virtual machines or containers, and only has one flavour of persistence store. Plonk Cloudflare in front of it and done. You can make this infinitely more complicated, but as an example add this feature to make this entire setup suck and the entire infrastructure incompatible with the needs of the application: international receipt scanning to recommend/autocomplete shopping lists for customers. Suddenly your requirements are expanded with: - Incoming upload queue - Object storage for image blobs - OCR or ML pipeline to process images - ML or Analysis pipeline to make sense of the contents of the now processed/read images - Instances or expansion for all of the above per region To make your traffic bill not suck you'll need endpoints in most major regions, and you'll probably want to prevent cross-region transfers so you'll want multi-region compute. Since you don't really have to do the processing realtime, you'll be doing some queue work and perhaps have a DLQ that needs human intervention or QA analysis for product improvement. All that stuff also needs a 'control panel' for lack of a better word so you'll be adding backoffice systems too, and those will have a workflow that doesn't compare to consumers at all and should never share any interaction with them, so now your application tenancy requirements change as well, which flows down into infrastructure requirements. At the same time you'll also need training data or validation data, and you'll want to be able to do all of that elastically to not go bankrupt for paying for 100% of capacity that you'll use 50% of the time at best. Suddenly 99% of the vendors are unable to provide what you need and the 'big three' remain (well, not exactly, but for illustrative purposes this will do). Considering a good SaaS might grow, make revenue and be sold or be valuable etc. there will be requirements stacked on top of everything else about redundancy, durability and availability and those will be increasingly hard to guarantee in an IaaS-only provider or PaaS-only provider scenario. When you 'start' with a SaaS, you'll need to know what you need now, and what you might need in the near future, and make sure that whatever you do now doesn't paint you into a corner within weeks. That means that setting up IIS on a Windows desktop by hand on a VPS at some IaaS hosting provider is highly unlikely to be a good place to start. On the other hand, an equally janky setup with a random Ubuntu VM where you manually install Docker and say, Nomad might actually not paint you into a corner too much since a container can easily be run on a container-PaaS and Kubernetes beyond that.

adventured 5y ago

Obviously depends on what you need. If you need many of their services, AWS is very difficult to beat. Nobody else quite matches up with them on breadth offerings. If you don't, do not use AWS due to the cost and the mental overhead of management. If you just need to spin up some servers and want them to be fast and cost effective, Hetzner is the current champ in the US market (their new US datacenter). DigitalOcean, Linode and Vultr are entirely reasonable options after Hetzner. If you have a $50-$100 / month or less budget, know how to set up and secure a linux server, and want to stretch your dollars as far as you can with a top notch cloud provider, Hetzner wins at present. And then throw Cloudflare out in front of it until or unless you can justify paying for a service. Keep your costs low, keep your infrastructure simple, keep your runway long, focus on selling selling selling (customers).

memset 5y ago

We’re building https://www.tasker.sh https://www.tasker.sh (YC S21) to handle ask things async - cron jobs and a must less restrictive version of Lambdas

jpcapdevila 5y ago

https://fly.io https://fly.io It let's you run containers on the edge (close to your users)

ehPReth 5y ago

Any with really high/unlimited outgoing data one would recommend?

thekonqueror 5y ago

If you are considering Vultr or DigitalOcean, try UpCloud as well. They have really robust network and the VMs are faster than AWS C6G instances in almost every test we run.

Shadonototra 5y ago

Scaleway - if you are from EU, they are great and pretty cheap

dijit 5y ago

For simple compute there's many options; everything depends on what you want. Been using Tilaa (if you can tolerate being hosted in Netherlands) for nearly 10 years, I'm quite happy with them. Vultr is not as good, but it's decent enough. But what separates a cloud provider from a VPS/Hosting provider? I might argue some kind of object storage, as that's the differentiating feature AWS had when it came out. In which case, I'm not sure what there is outside of AWS and GCP, sadly.

arccy 5y ago

If multicloud is anywhere on your radar, kubernetes. Most decent cloud providers offer a managed instance and targeting that common platform is so much nicer.

jeffrallen 5y ago

If you need Swiss-only for regulatory reasons, then you might like Exoscale.com. I do.

smackeyacky 5y ago

Alibaba Cloud. Although, my dealings with them have been entirely negative. Their strategy is to make a clone of every service AWS has, except the billing system which hides a lot of majorly expensive pitfalls. Also, if you choose one of their mainland hosted zones, trying to get your data out is even more expensive than the other zones. So in this case, "knowing more about" is really "tread carefully".

tomrod 5y ago
Your caution is well received -- thank you!
jhugo 5y ago
Having said that, they are the best option if you need to work with mainland China. Huawei is so bad it's almost hard to believe (literally everything is broken in some way), and AWS China only really makes sense if you are already tied to AWS.

spiffytech 5y ago

I'll toss out another vote for Fly.io. They make it super easy to deploy containers. No K8s, no leaky abstraction to an underlying traditional compute service. You get internal networking out of the box with per-app-region internal DNS entries, and with their CLI tool it's one command to SSH into your container or connect your laptop to the internal network. As a nice bonus, their pricing is very competitive. You pay about as much as you would for the same size Linode or droplet (minimum is 256 MB RAM for $1.94/mo), which is a welcome relief vs other providers. Great free plan, too - 3 apps at 256MB RAM running 24/7 in perpetuity.

adamcharnock 5y ago

I think it is really worth being aware of Hetzner's Dedicated server offerings. What you get isn't that dissimilar to what a cloud provider would offer, but you get about an order of magnitude more compute resources for the same price. Plus you get better disk access speed (NVMe) than something like an AWS EBS-backed instance. You can also order new instances within a matter of minutes. You don't have to use them, but being aware of what is available there would be a really good idea. I think some workloads could easily be deployed there at a fraction of the cost of a cloud provider.

hestefisk 5y ago
Second this. I moved from GCP compute to a Hetzner dedicated physical server with 3-4x raw compute power at 0.5x the cost. And of course it runs FreeBSD.

user3939382 5y ago

Wasabi It’s compatible with S3’s API buy way way cheaper. Free egress.

slackfan 5y ago

I realize some folks have a fairly negative view, hell I still have it, but Oracle OCI has been surprisingly sane. When you break out of the mindset that "this should work this way because that's how AWS does it", it's actually quite refreshing. Their serverless support story (Oracle Functions) is pretty clunky, but for standing up instances, and the terraform provider is quite verbose, but when it works, it works in a sane and logical manner.

Spunkie 5y ago
OCI support is actively the most unhelpful and useless waste of time I've had the displeasure of spending this year. As an added bonus they will randomly nuke accounts and production servers without even a curtsey email. I won't even take on clients if they are using OCI.
- highclass 5y ago
  Would you know if this occurred to a free or paid account? To be fair, I have been testing Oracle Cloud Infrastructure(OCI) on a paid account for about 2 years now and actively monitor server hosting forums. During that time I have had no "abnormal" problems with paid production account. However, it is well known that Oracle accidentally nuked free/trial accounts early on, and again recently accidental nuked free/trial accounts reserved public IPs. However, I know of no such events for paid accounts, and paid accounts on OCI should be production ready quality in my experience. On the other hand support really is somewhat bad, but support is free and the cloud costs are much less than AWS, while having better products than similar priced cloud products such as Lnode, Vultr, Digital ocean.

GekkePrutser 5y ago

Scaleway in Europe is great and cheap, and they have many of the same services as the big parties. I like them anyway :P

throwaway787544 5y ago

Genesis Hosting. An OpenStack provider in Chicago with really decent prices and full control over your own OpenStack cluster. OpenStack is the open source democratization of the cloud. In Europe there are a dozen such providers, in the US there's only one it seems. Hoping they continue to grow and other hosters break away from basic VPS hosting and also provide OpenStack clusters.

ksec 5y ago

May be more of a market analysis in terms of size than anything. HyperScaler are the three you mentioned. Then you have Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu. ( All Chinese ) Oracle and IBM Cloud OVH, Hetzner, Linode, Digital Ocean, UpCloud, Vultr, Scaleway. Possibly Fly.io ( not sure ) They all own their at least part of the Datacenter, Network and their own hardware. You have other services like Render and Heroku. I am not aware of any potential upcoming players in this space ( Tell me about it ). But I think Cloudflare will likely be the big disruption in the next 5 years. They will own most of what we call "Cloud" services and Network and leave only the capital intensive compute to others. Then you have many players that are the size of Linode or DO but dont operate as "Cloud". I am still sad that Heroku didn't improve or move up / down the ladder. They seems to have happy at where they are.

chrisharven 5y ago

There are many providers who created a platform above the AWS/Azure/GCP infra and are providing services in a multi-cloud fashion ( Eg: Heroku ). Pure IaaS ( Infra as a Service ) players are: Oracle Cloud Digital Ocean

psnehanshu 5y ago

I am currently playing with Fly.io, and it is very simple to use. If you can dockerize your application, you can run it on Fly. Obviously, it is not comparable to AWS etc., but it is totally fine for single apps. You can run multiple apps too, and they can communicate using Fly'a private network and private DNS, but I haven't tried it yet.

pizza 5y ago

paperspace is alright for something simple using gpus

intrepidsoldier 5y ago

Disclaimer: I work for DigitalOcean. We at DigitalOcean tend to see a lot of SaaS builders on our cloud. We obviously are smaller as compared to the big 3, but in our experience most people starting out with an idea don't really need all the bells and whistles. Price-competitive, performant, and easily-automatable IaaS (compute/network/storage), and some managed services on top of it, are sufficient for a vast majority of builders. I think about this thread all the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22310879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22310879 Here is some marketing material with more information: - https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/how-to-scale-your-saas-product-without-breaking-the-bank https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/how-to-scale-your-saas-pro... - https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/forrester-total-economic-impact-study https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/forrester-total-economic-i...