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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

You're not buying the same thing. Comparing AWS to DO is like comparing your home printer-scanner with the Hubble telescope.

Yes, one of them is more expensive.

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Really?

I'm not saying AWS doesn't offer anything over bare servers, but do people think it's a Hubble to their home printers?

Yes. AWS is that awesome with the number of different and sophisticated services that they offer. Azure is probably the only other cloud that comes close. DigitalOcean is cheap, unreliable, and the amount of services being offered can be counted on the fingers of my one hand. I can talk about the issues there are with DO on a daily basis. Once you are past MVP, your business needs a better home.

I would love to hear more about the issues you’ve experienced with DO. We have been using them more and more lately and have had a much better experience there than on AWS, GCP, or Linode.

That's a bad analogy but yes, AWS is a vast portfolio of services to solve your problems. If all you need are some bare-metal servers and nothing else then you really don't need AWS in the first place and are paying a premium for stuff you're not using.

They have a vast portfolio of services to solve resume driven architectures problem. The scale at which you outgrow 2 modern high end load balanced boxes is something 99% of the projects will never achieve. There are legitimate use cases for cloud services but what majority of projects are using them for is not it. Reminds me of service at FB that issues and processes data from roughly several hundred million requests per day runs on a single box and is a regular python app. 99% of startups would implement same thing as some data processing pipeline with kafka, spark , hadoop or whatever else is "absolutely critical" to have to process 1/1000 the size of data.

It's a bit of a stretch, but yeah there's a pretty vast difference between AWS or Azure and DigitalOcean.

And comparing AWS to GCP is like comparing Hubble telescope to James Webb telescope :)

Recently I have moved my infra to a more hybrid architecture where all complex services run on major cloud providers while stateless compute services run on a cheap vultr vms. Result is quite nice!

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