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Comment by jburwell | Hacker News Reader

The following are a few alternatives off the top of my head:

   * Google Compute Engine
   * Microsoft Azure
   * Joyent
   * IBM BlueMix
   * Linode (like DigitalOcean more VPS than cloud provider)

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I think that Joyent does not get the coverage it deserves.

SmartOS looks very very cool.

Joyent's made some bad PR moves. I was a Textdrive customer and the way they treated the lifetime hosting folks put a very sour taste in my mouth.

I was a textdrive "lifetime" customer. I paid thousands and received nothing. Do not use Joyent.

I was also a "lifetime" customer and my memories of the terrible treatment, including one of the founders flaming people on the forums for making reasonable requests, mean I will never do business with Joyent again.

Joyent is fantastic. SmartOS has every feature a Linux user wants in (and usually ends up hacking onto) a cloud server but it's built that way from the ground up.

Their support and engineering staff are friendly and responsive by email and IRC.

The instances have great performance and uptime.

I suppose globally they could use more data centers but Samsung's acquisition should help with that.

I've built multiple companies in Joyent and can't imagine going back to other clouds with less features.

We (Erigones, https://www.erigones.com/en/) are making our own virtualization, orchestration and cloud suite, available for public use, based on SmartOS.

So far for commercial customers only (demo available) but we will release opensource community edition soon on Github.

UpCloud is worth of checking out: https://www.upcloud.com/ - It's a pure VPS vendor with full management API.

    * Aliyun
    * Lucera
    * Oracle

Google is not as general as AWS and therefore has serious vendor lockin. Azure only recently has decided to support docker and is not rooted in opensource.

The big downside of AWS: to difficult to use for many. It seems to me a new entrant which combines easy of use, embraces opensource, would have a good chance in the market.

+ Rackspace. But like many these don't come from the cloud market and still think in terms of servers mostly.

> Google is not as general as AWS and therefore has serious vendor lockin.

Presumably you are talking about Google App Engine, which is just a small part of GCP. Amazon's comparable offering is Elastic Beanstalk. The core building blocks on GCP and AWS are the same: raw virtual machines you can build anything upon yourself, GCE vs EC2. GCE has been around since 2012.

?? starting a AskHN then quickly responding to an answer by incorrectly discrediting it? Are you really asking a question?

Google has a lot of different things as part of it's offerings.

but very quickly:

Google App Engine = google handles as lot for you. not a vm

Google Compute Engine = vm's plus an easy to use interface

You are thinking of Google App Engine. You want Google Computer Engine: https://cloud.google.com/compute/

"Google Compute Engine delivers virtual machines running in Google's innovative data centers and worldwide fiber network."

Azure is the other major option.

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