alt Hacker NewsI've posted this a couple times before when EU tech + Hetzner comes up (and probably will again):
I'm American and IMO, we should also take a look at whether we need to be using the big cloud providers or not. They're so much more expensive compared to smaller hosts like Hetzner, Vultr, and so on. It depends on what you're doing, of course, but I've been on Azure for ages (they had those free $150/month startup credits something like 10 years ago?), but I finally moved off last year.
I shopped around and landed on Hetzner's Ashburn US servers. For what I was deploying (a few dozen websites, containers, some relatively complex .NET SaaS apps, some automated scripts, etc.), the pricing on Azure just wasn't competitive. But worse for me was the complexity: I found that using Azure encouraged me to introduce more and more complex deployment pipelines, when all I really needed was "Build the container -> SCP it into a blue/green deployment scheme on a VPS -> flip a switch after testing it".
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Indeed Azure & AWS use complexity (e.g. their terrible docs) and convoluted non-standard terminology, approaches and non-interop to keep developers in their platform silo and competitors, who provide the same advantages with better DX and less complexity, away from their money cows.
Yeah. Azure is such a weird platform for not actually having a competitive way to just cheaply deploy a simple .NET app, it's a weird design decision.
You get dragged into "Container instances" when then require "Azure Container Registry" or something else that is never really clear what you're getting and how much it'll cost.
I run one thing using the free allowance, but for everything else I just rent a cheap VPS elsewhere.