> Having deployed servers well before AWS was a thing, AWS alwyas felt incredibly overpriced.
Yeah, I remember when AWS first appeared, and the value proposition was basically "It's expensive but you can press a button and a minute later you have a new instance, so we can scale really quickly". For the companies that know more or less the workload they have during a week don't really get any benefits, just more expensive monthly bills.
But somewhere along the line, people started thinking it was easier to use AWS than the alternatives, and I even heard people saying it's cheaper...
You'll even see people in a lot of the HN threads on the subject refusing to believe AWS is expensive, even in the face of a lot of us with expensive (EDIT: meant "extensive". but will leave it there as the tpo is also apt...) experience running systems on both AWS and alternatives.
The biggest innovation AWS delivered was to convince engineers they are cheap, while wresting control of provisioning away from the people with actual visibility into the costs.
The only benefit you get is reliability, temporary network issues on AWS are not a thing.
On DigitalOcean they are fairly bad (I lose thousands of requests almost every month and I get pennies in credit back when I complain - while my users churning cost way more), on Hetzner I've heard mixed reviews.
Some people complains, some say it's extremely reliable.
I'm looking forward to try Hetzner out!