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Comment by slake | Hacker News Reader

My opinion on this is that you still learn and deploy on AWS or GCE. The learning curve might be steep at first but it'll save a lot of heartache when your organization scales or you want to set up a complex deployment that one of the smaller players don't necessarily support.

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Classic premature optimisation. Those hours spent mastering the 10s of products you need to use to do it the 'right' way would be better spent on marketing, business logic, and 5 minutes installing apache + php on a Digital Ocean droplet which also is the dev environment.

If your company suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune & needs to migrate, you can paid someone who is an expert to help you migrate, because that's their business, and yours is presumably something else.

That is a false dichotomy. The reality should fall in between, learn enough to understand some of the design choices you make, but don't overcook it.

Learn enough to go live. Hire people who know the rest.

Learn enough to do the rest if you want to work for someone else doing the rest.

I don't think it's a false dichotomy: I can only do one thing at a time, and my time is limited.

You don't need to be a cloud expert to start with GCE or EC2 instead of a VPS provider. If you end up just going straight to GCE instead of a droplet that's not a big mental hurdle. Then as the parent said, if you suddenly need to scale up, bolt on other services (like say GCS or Cloud SQL) you're not starting with a migration.

You will spend more than $5/month on either AWS or GCP, but the example here seems focused on a business not a throwaway. So IMO, it is more like premature optimization to have a $5/month droplet instead of a $30/month set of GCE instances.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Okay this is like your 6 or 7th post in this discussion advertising for Google. Can we stop wth the spam now?

Sigh. I didn't want to respond, but someone pointed out to me that you work at Amazon (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12181599). I think it's fair to say that in a thread asking about alternatives to AWS, I was both factual and disclosed my non-trivial source of potential bias (so my statements didn't constitute spam).

Again, I don't mean this to be an ad hominem response, but I take the disclosure "expectation" seriously, and it's frustrating to see folks (competitor or not) try to squelch discussion.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

> when your organization scales

Case in point: AWS/GCE are intended for organizations. If you're not operating an organization, they're overkill.

Do the Quick test: Is your budget less than $100/month? If yes, use Digital Ocean.

I'm not sure I agree! Yours isn't a bad test, but honestly for many people I route them to App Engine depending on their need ("you just want a simple Python web app with no traffic and no hassle? Yeah, you should use GAE").

Having to deal with any infrastructure at all, even for a few hours per year is certainly going to make a VPS a worse choice for some folks.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

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