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Comment by option_greek | Hacker News Reader

I checked them out after using GCP, AWS and its unbelievable how much slower their servers are. I some times wonder how anyone other than AWS/GCP/Azure even survive in this competitive market.

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If you only want a server, OVH/Hetzner are much cheaper for the same performance. To me, AWS/GCP/Azure only really make sense if you start using the whole ecosystem. Otherwise you can get the same for half the price..

I've spent the last 3 years doing AWS stuff at work and agree 100%. If all you're using is EC2 then it's not a great value. Where it's worthwhile are the other services you can tie in to really easily. At work we're using:

  SQS
  SNS
  RDS
  S3
  Athena/Glue
  EMR
  CloudWatch
  Lambda
  CloudWatch Events
  EC2 Autoscaling, ELB, ALB
  Elasticsearch Service
  Glacier
  ElastiCache
  Route 53
  CloudFront
  Data Pipeline

It's spendy, no question. None of this is stuff you can't do yourself on cheap instances. We'd just need an additional 2-3 FTEs to maintain the homegrown jungle of crap that would replace the managed services. Oops, there went my savings.

Many people think the same for GCP,AWS when you compare their VPS with dedicated hardware. Though the managed services are nice.

Price - traffic is included (while GCP/AWS charge a lot for it, and a sudden surge in traffic could lead to an unexpected bill), and the server costs a fraction of what a small server would cost on GCP/AWS (except for the shared-CPU instances which I found to be slower than Scaleway once the throttling hit).

If you want to run a business, Scaleway's lack of reliability (servers often sell out etc.) may be a problem. If you're a hobbyist, the potential bandwidth bill from GCP/AWS is a show-stopper, and the Scaleway servers are more than good enough for many applications.

Regarding the slowness, are you talking about CPU speed, I/O, or network?

I’m using it for personal hosting and it’s way cheaper than others. The speed isn’t a big deal for a Nextcloud or Gogs server since I am the only user.

I wouldn’t use it for any large web service though.

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