Not to mention the superior network connectivity (10 gigabit/s). In fact, there are no 10gbps options from the common last mile carriers available at any price (AT&T, Crapcast). And if they did offer it, it'd probably be $500USD/mo+ just for Internet.
AT&T has a 5gbps fiber plan available for $250USD+/mo, but there are very few (>10 fractional portions of cities nationally) areas where it is offered today.
If you have a strong enough desire for cost-effective, really fucking fast Internet for a fair price, move to Korea. In .kr you can get 10gig for something like $30-50USD/mo.
Edit: Oops, my bad. I meant to reply to this comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37934982.
> Step 1. Create an Oracle Cloud account Step 2. Create an Ampere 6 core, 32gb memory instance for like $5/mo Step 3. Use Jetbrains Gateway to run your IDE as a thin client, executing on that host.
> You get a pretty darn beefy ARM64 VM instance from OCI for extremely cheap. You can get these in a region near you, with low latency. And Jetbrains Gateway works pretty great.
We use OCI, aka Oracle Cloud. As a customer, OCI is more financially appealing compared to the competition (AWS, Azure) for bare compute infra. Not as cheap as OVH, if that fits your requirements. For me though, OCI is preferred because it provides all the standard cloud building blocks of multi-region + (cheap) object storage + block storage.
I mean, fuck Oracle and Larry Ellison, right? That said, building and operating a cloud at scale is a lot of work and I'll leverage their work as long as it makes fiscal sense.
> $60/yr vs thousands of $ upfront for a comparable desktop or notebook machine.
I don't think we're talking about the same things here.
I could upgrade to dual 2.5 GigE but I have nothing that needs that much bandwidth. I can download 30gb from hugging face in a few minutes which doesn't bother me.
The DC is about to onboard another client of mine, a startup that ran on AWS credits for 9 months. They are upgrading to a 64 core 2TB ram box that was an extra the DC had, for $3500, which will probably go into the rack next to mine.