* AWS: you will pay to have stuff work properly and you like having customer service
* Azure: you hate yourself, you're running Windows or both
* Google: you're cheap enough that basic functionality is an optional extra
* Oracle: lol
* Hetzner: cheap, good service, the finest pets in the world, no cattle
You can absolutely do cattle with Hetzner. They support imaging and immutable infrastructure. They don't have a native auto scaling equivalent, but if you're using Kubernetes, they have a cluster autoscaler: https://github.com/kubernetes/autoscaler/blob/master/cluster...
Hetzner Cloud's biggest gap for me right now is secure VMs: they don't support encrypted disks, UEFI, secure boot, or TPMs (and certainly nothing like AMD SEV). You can get a fat bare metal Ryzen box through Robot and DIY though.
Or you have big enterprise customers that have a grudge against Amazon and Google and refuse to use anything else.
Not in my experience. Running just under 100 VMs, they'd randomly fail and restart about once a year. One month, something went terribly wrong with our k8s cluster and nodes were becoming unhealthy and being replaced every few hours to the tune of 500 replacements in a month for a 60 node cluster.
Premium SSD v2 is fairly good released generally about a year ago. Premium SSD was pretty painfully slow.
Please don't use AWS especially as a startup, you are going to kill yourself paying for compute, database and egress that is multiples times what you get from a vps. AWs is NOT cheap