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Comment by system2 | Hacker News Reader

IMHO it is their approach. I use Hetzner and OVH (and their other variants for lower budget clients) for our EU clients. They do not use buzz words like "deploy app server", "cloud clusters", "turbo charge this app". They are simply providing VPS and similarly configured droplets. They are also established and don't want to mess around with very modern experimental infrastructures.

Same goes for Digital Ocean. No buzz words. Just hosting with droplets. They simply say "here pick a linux distro, configure whatever and don't ask us much about app support". I use their Linux distros for my own apps and if want anything extra I just install it and suffer my own actions' consequences. Not theirs.

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DO, OVH, and Hetzner are more stable because they don't use buzzwords?

I guess what OP is getting at is that these providers stick to the battle tested proven bedrock and nothing like "run your app where your users are" which I find interesting because that too can be done with any cloud that has a Datacenter in the region where you happen to have users.

So this "closer to your users" voodoo is a little beyond me.

The 'where each user is' is implicit, the expectation is that you're some kind of global SaaS, and you want low latency whereever your users are.

Sure you can do that with any cloud (or multiple) that has datacenters in a suitable spread of regions, but I suppose the point (or claimed point, selling point, if you like) is that that's more difficult or more expensive to coordinate. Fly says 'give us one container spec and tell us in which regions to run it', not 'we give you machines/VMs in which regions you want, figure it out'. It's an abstraction on top of 'battle tested proven bedrock' providers in a sense, except that I believe they run their own metal (to keep costs down, presumably).

Some workloads are surely latency sensitive but some of those transactional CRUD systems don't need that much closer to the edge is my possibly flawed opinion.

I mean chat or e-commerce yes, the edge and all.

But for a ticketing system, invoicing solution or such, a few hundred millisecons are not that much of a big deal but compliance, regulations matter more.

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