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Comment by kingofheroes | Hacker News Reader

Are they all just AWS resellers?

None of them are. There’s no way you could make money doing that in the VPS market especially with the ludicrous bandwidth costs at AWS.

Most VPS providers rent rack space at large colocation facilities in multiple cities. In some cases they locate right next to major peering points for very good peering and very cheap bandwidth.

Vultr in particular is massively underrated and is certainly good enough to use in production.

One caveat though: most of these providers don’t handle sanitization of storage or encryption at rest as thoroughly as the big clouds do. I’d recommend handling your own encryption at rest with these if you have sensitive data. See: Vault, LUKS, etc.

Digital Ocean does offer managed Postgres with encryption in transit and at rest. I had a nice experience with their Postgres offering. They also have an S3 equivalent (spaces) and managed Redis.

nit pick: Spaces is not an AWS S3 equivalent -- compatibility matrix vs. S3: https://docs.digitalocean.com/reference/api/spaces-api/#aws-...

It doesn’t have full feature parity, but as the post you shared says, they “aim for full interoperability with S3”. If you have an S3 client doing basic object storage stuff, it will work fine with Spaces.

Eh, not Apache Spark <--> Spaces. Doesn't work out the box unlike Spark <--> AWS S3.

See other child comment above. Faster to use AWS S3 instead of trying to fix it (IIRC can't set the endpoint url or something, which is required for Spaces). :shrug:

I appreciate I'm making a "No True Scotsman" point, but Spark isn't really "a typical S3 client doing basic object storage stuff". I'm thinking of your standard web app persisting uploads and static files.

I think it’s fair to not call it equivalent because of that, but it’s also fair to acknowledge what is unsupported is pretty power user level stuff for the most part. I used spaces in s3 compatibility for a few use cases and never ran into the problem that what I was trying to do was unsupported. Granted I was not trying to do fancy things, but still.

Some examples of things that I used the S3 compat for that worked just fine:

- terraform backend

- velero backups

- log store for prometheus/promtail

- docker pull through cache

Yep, for basic object storage via boto3 etc. it mostly works fine. hence why I called it a nit pick.

There are additional interop things like Apache Spark <--> Spaces that don't work like Spark <--> AWS S3 (endpoint URL config issue which I lost the will to sort out as it was quicker to just use AWS S3 :shrug:).

i dont think any of these companies resell aws infrastructure

It’s actually the opposite. AWS will run on top of other hosting providers for some services and regions.

That’s why you’re paying so much for AWS.

wait, what?

this is not correct in the slightest

No. You're paying so much because (a) they make a lot of money ($20bn yearly profit) and (b) they have an extremely large headcount which are building the large number of services they provide.

Never heard of them running on other providers though.

Surely that would a problem for all of the compliance e.g. HIPAA, FIPS ?

Both A and B are true. But that doesn't preclude them from still charging a heavy premium over other providers in the market. Which is exactly what is happening, the raw COGS of operating a provider are dramatically lower than the prices they charge.

This could not be more incorrect. Stop spread BS and read up some before commenting thinks you obviously have no idea about.

Could you elaborate further on what you're saying about running on top of other providers?

Doesn't AWS have its own infrastructure? Why would they run on top of other hosting providers?

Yes, of course they have their own infra. But there are also reasons to partner. Not having a presence in a region. Not wanting to do the initial capital outlay. Offloading risk. etc.

I've seen many other services do this type of partnering and sometimes expect them to depending on the size, but this is definitely new information to me about Amazon doing this. Thanks.

I pay far less for AWS than I ever did for the providers in this article. Clearly YMMV depending on your workload and also how well you optimise for a cloud providers strengths. Hence making broad statements is unhelpful. There's a place for AWS/GC/Azure, and also for the likes of Vultr/Do and also for rolling your own. It all depends on what you need to achieve. There's no one size fits all.

There is also a large number of providers well below the prices of DO and Vultr as well. That are just as big, more profitable, and provide you with a better product and service.

Its crazy to me how many smart people don't realize they are only looking at the most expensive options out there.

It's like thinking the Ferraris and Porsches are your only two options for getting from point a to b

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