The Amazon Premium
calpaterson.com
calpaterson.com
I find that premium to be worthwhile once I factor in the cost of my time. My personal web site costs something like $20-$30 per year on Amazon.
In business settings, developer time is maybe $300k per year, and the cost of the sizes of servers mentioned just doesn't matter. If I'm paying for a 2-core 8GB machine, it's pocket change -- anything which keeps people productive at that price point is an obvious spend. If a developer is 0.2% more productive, the AWS premium makes sense.
You'll be that much more productive even on boto. Or better documentation. Or integration. Or having a lot of people you hire already know the stack. Or the reliability of a stack that has worked without problems for a decade now. Or ....
I've been in business settings where hosting costs became (very) significant as we scaled. We got competitive quotes. Amazon gave a discount. It was fine.
Also: While Google's support is junk as the article mentioned (I'd never run a business on the Google cloud), Amazon's is fine.
I'd stay away from many of the newer, proprietary AWS services, which are complex, proprietary, have lock-in, and otherwise aren't generally very good, but I find a basic stack of EC2+RDS+S3+... works really well.
As a footnote, when I tried a "modern" AWS stack (Lambda, CodeStar, DocumentDB, etc.) it seemed to be like stepping on landmines every five minutes. I really like the concept of a serverless stack, but at least Amazon hasn't gotten it right.
The only extra thing I would add to that is that you can usually use boto with all of the other cloud providers. I believe one of the main aims of openstack (which I understand at least OVH runs) is to make code written against the AWS APIs portable.
Totally agree that many of the proprietary parts of AWS function largely as billing footguns. However I have subsequently been told of AWS lightsail which is another, cheaper, way to buy what is effectively EC2. Strangely people around me rarely mention Lightsail - I suspect that many corporate users don't use it.