But they're also simple and cheap if you're a "one man band" trying out some personal idea that might or might not take off. Those people have no budgets for specialists.
Pricing schemes like these just make them move back to virtual machines with "unlimited" shared cpu usage and setting up services (db,...) manually.
I'm 100% on team "just rent VMs and run the software on there". It's not that hard, it has predictable price and performance, and you don't lock yourself into one provider. If you build your whole service on top of some weird Amazons -specific thing, and Amazon jacks up their prices, you don't have any recourse. With VMs, you can just spin up new VMs with another provider.
You could also have potential customers who would be interested in your solution, but don't want it hosted by an American company. Spinning up a few Hetzner VMs is easy. Finding European alternatives to all the different "serverless" services Amazon offers is hard.
> You could also have potential customers who would be interested in your solution, but don't want it hosted by an American company.
Not happened yet. The nearest I have come to it was a requirement that certain medical information stays in the UK, and that is satisfied by using AWS (or other American suppliers) as long as its hosted in the UK.
I've worked in places where customers (especially municipalities in Germany) have questioned the use of American hosting providers. I don't know whether it has actually prevented a deal from going through (I wasn't close enough to sales to know), but it was consistently an obstacle in some markets. This is despite everything being hosted in EU datacenters.
Isn't the reason that even if it is hosted physically in the EU, if it is an american company the data is still not safe from american spy agencies?
Yeah, something like that.
Yes, definitely.
Most small business I have dealt with use AWS do just need a VPS. If they are willing to move to a scary unknown supplier I suggest (unknown to them, very often one that would be well known to people on HN) then I suggest AWS Lightsail which is pretty much a normal VPS with VPS pricing - it significantly cheaper than an instance plus storage, just from buying them bundled (which, to be fair to Amazon, is common practice).
My own stuff goes on VPSs.
> AWS Lightsail which is pretty much a normal VPS with VPS pricing
Except it is still Amazon and subject to the same weird billing practices. I once terminated a Lightsail instance and they kept charging me, claiming that I didn't terminate the static IP address associated with it. The IP address itself cost the same as the instance + IP address did.
Now, that would make sense in "real" AWS, but you'd expect it to be more straightforward with a simplified service like Lightsail.