We sell accounts for every provider below, which means we have no reason to flatter any of them. Here is the comparison we would give a friend.
AWS — the broadest, rarely the cheapest
The widest service catalogue and the deepest community. If a tool exists, it integrates. If you break something at 2am, somebody has already written about it. That is worth real money.
What it is not is cheap or predictable. AWS bills are famously hard to forecast, and the platform will happily let you spend money you did not intend to. If your bill is the problem rather than your access, credit is the lever — not a different provider.
Azure — buy it for a reason, not by default
Two genuinely good reasons: you already live inside the Microsoft stack, or you need Azure OpenAI. Outside those, it is a competent and expensive way to do what cheaper platforms do more simply.
Google Cloud — the data one
BigQuery is excellent, Kubernetes is native territory, and Vertex AI is coherent rather than a bag of services. If your work is data or ML, GCP is a strong choice — and its credit works the same way AWS credit does.
Watch BigQuery costs. One badly-scoped query can scan a frightening volume of data. Set a budget alert before your first query, not after your first invoice.
Hetzner — the value outlier
Not really in the same conversation on price-to-performance. Hetzner is substantially cheaper per core, especially in Europe. If your workload is CPU-bound and region-flexible, it is very hard to argue against — and the savings are not marginal.
DigitalOcean — the pleasant one
The friendliest developer experience of the group and flat, predictable pricing. Nobody has ever been ambushed by a DigitalOcean invoice. Plenty of people have been ambushed by an AWS one.
Linode — the boring one, and that is a compliment
Linode is straightforward, globally distributed and reliable. It rarely tops a benchmark and rarely ruins a week. For a great many projects the second matters far more.
Oracle — the free tier nobody expects
Set aside the jokes: OCI has the most generous always-free ARM allocation in the industry, and Ampere instances are outstanding value per core. An excellent place to prototype before committing money anywhere.
The decision, compressed
- Widest ecosystem, hiring for it → AWS
- Microsoft shop, or Azure OpenAI → Azure
- Data/ML heavy, Kubernetes-first → Google Cloud
- Standard web app, cost matters → Hetzner, DigitalOcean or Linode
- Prototyping on nothing → Oracle
- Bill is the bottleneck, not access → stay where you are and buy credit
“It is what serious companies use” is not a reason. It is the single most expensive sentence in cloud procurement. Describe what you are building and we will name the platform we would choose — including when it is the cheap one.
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