Out of curiosity, what advantages do the small VPS hosts offer compared to the big 3 (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)? Customer Service? Pricing? Local Data Center?
Having not used AWS for years, I logged in to check it out, navigated through the Kafkaesque maze of their services until I found what I was looking for:
A lone S3 storage bucket, with one file, "Squirrel.jpg". A 200kB picture of a squirrel that I uploaded 8 years ago and can't remember why.
I wonder what the cost to AWS was for keeping track of that and running your CC. There's no way they made money off you / that 12 cents/year cost them *at least* 12 cents to collect every year
I have $6 in charges and so now my account is locked. Lol. Fuck off AWS.
One of the hard rules we learned pre-pandemic was that services attached to usage based billing should really exit on error. It's a lesson I'm keeping in mind working with agents and routing (and the main reason I'm local-first).
https://lukecyca.com/2025/canadian-vps-review.html
Last year, I moved from DigitalOcean to FullHost (their Vancouver datacentre) for hosting a small SaaS and a bunch of personal projects. It's cheaper and FAR better performance.
If I need to host something small, I don’t want to mess around with the many permissions and quirks that are required to deal with AWS. It is often much easier to just setup the server on a standalone service.
When I worked at Microsoft, I seldom used Azure for personal use due to it being expensive and complicated.
Whereas I have plenty of Fourplex.net servers because even on half the salary, it's affordable enough for 16 Tor exit relays and two personal web/email/Mastodon servers.
There's also the human touch in terms of who you talk to: a lot of the smallest VPS hosts are 1-2 people, both technical, so customer support = sysadmin = contact for everything.
The set of companies that sell VPS and the set of companies that sell dedicated servers aren't the same set.
Does it have a billion 9's of reliability? No, but I don't care, it has literally never not worked when I've used it
Customer Service so far has been human, but that will vary greatly for the provider
I also use a different provider for work related hosting, and the reduced latency of being within 20 ms of the DC has been probably the single biggest (perceived) perf improvement my users have ever seen, specially on the legacy webforms platform we recently decomissioned (We're a bit too geographically far for most Datacenters of most large providers)
Outbound data pricing is a potentially huge saving.
AWS is as much as $90/TB outbound with 1GB free. Hetzner is $1.20/TB (in EU and US) with 1TB/20TB (US/EU) free.
(Good) Smaller places are more likely to have actual technical staff you can talk to.
That is a nice way to have a static IP on the internet and enough resources to do small things like host a nameserver and/or OpenVPN/Wireguard.
I may have had 4 hours of downtime in one year, always announced days in advance.
Meanwhile, small service providers might not actually need those premium features, and just want something that is cheap and makes economical sense. They don't need the state-of-the-art hardware and just want something that works.
That's why while the AAGO (AWS, Azure, GCP and Oracle) attracted a lot of big corpo, that is, almost all of Forbes 500s used them, DigitalOcean and Vultr, with their $5 plan, is those who won the small businesses.
VPS services are usually really, really simple and fairly cheap.
I'd say that actually VPS prices is where we actually see computing prices going down rather than on the big 3.
AWS used to optimize further and pass down the savings to the customers back in the day, now they don't do it anymore.
Never had problems with downtime and I payed, like, 40 bucks a year over 3 years. I think I had to restart the thing once because of something dumb I did on my end.
AWS does offer Lightsail which is similar pricing.
You cannot use Lightsail to work around EC2 costs, but you can use Lightsail instead of using EC2.
If you’re a government agency or a company you don’t care about saving $14/month, you want a secure provider. And these hosts are not secure, you’re basically just on your own.
I replaced with a home server and it costs way more just in power hahaha.
It’s weird because in most of this industry scale results in lower prices. Not in cloud.
Not all of the people who want to avoid KYC are doing something illegal ... but all of the people who are doing something illegal are looking for a no-KYC provider.
Not including the faster SSD & included traffic
If you're using AWS/GCP/Azure to just host a couple of VMs for a small group you're massively overpaying.
But if all you really do with cloud stuff is "ssh into a server I have" (which covers a ton!) then you'll find much cheaper/more performant elsewhere.
A lot of people do it.
People feel the battleship is safe and familiar. For most businesses the extra cost is not even noticed. Even a small business spending $500/month on hosting instead of $50 is not going to notice.
Also, if something goes wrong (e.g. your AWS region goes down) its far easier to explain to a manager or client that "its Amazon's fault and lots of stuff is down", rather than "its Digital Ocean's fault".
My point is small businesses tend to be owner managed and therefore more cost sensitive and the costs are still not a significant factor. AS businesses get bigger its even less significant and its other people's money.
And at least here in Germany, they are nickel an dimming on the hosting cost.
Personally, the only thing I know of that is a true deal vs. competition is cold storage of data. Using the s3 glacier tiers for long term data that is saved solely for emergencies is really cheap, something like $1/100GB a month or less.
AWS is usually not the cheapest EVER when it comes to offerings like EC2. If you aren't doing cloud-native or serverless at AWS, you're probably spending too much.
I view a large percentage of "cloud" usage like Teslas stock price: it's completely detached from reality by people who have drunk the kool aid and can't get out.
I use them to run wireguard to evade geoblocks when I'm travelling, a few redundant monitoring scripts alerting me of reachability issues of more critical stuff I care about, they serve as contingency access channels to my home (and home assistant) if my primary channels are down.
I get no support, no updates, it's all on me - which is fine, it allows me to stay current and not lose hands-on practice on skills which I anyway need for my job (and which are anyway my passion). I don't even get an entire IPv4 - I get.... 1/3000th of it? (21 ports, the rest are forwarded to other customers). Suits me fine.