This is why a company i worked at about 3 years ago switched to AWS. I suggested using Digital Ocean and argued that we didn't need the complexity of AWS. But the CEO (who is so tech-illiterate that he struggles to send basic email, I am not even joking) has heard that everyone else uses AWS, so he wanted to use it too. Nobody was going to stop this guy from switching over to AWS. He wanted his company to rank among the cool kids that was built on AWS. He had heard of AWS and he trusts Amazon. He has never heard of Digital Ocean. His un-warranted opinion on switching to AWS was not worth fighting, so I let him switch as he desired. If any problem had ever come up with Digital Ocean, he would have pointed fingers at me and said "this wouldn't have happened with AWS, because they are AMAZON!".

And thus is why one small company dumps $1,000 a month into AWS when it could dump about $250 a month into Digital Ocean for comparable results. I know these are small numbers for many people on here, but it is a good illustration.

For what its worth. I was able to justify getting an AWS Certification because of this, which has been surprisingly helpful to have on my resume, even with companies that don't use AWS. It seems to be a fairly respected certification that demonstrates knowledge of cloud computing in general.

Risk mitigation. Your CEO is probably juggling several issues from budget, hiring, sales, real estate etc. Some of these are probably high risk decisions that could sink the company. So the decision to go with AWS and not care about marginal cost savings are about eliminating a potential source of risk.

Dude, even for a small company the difference between $1000/mo and $250/mo is peanuts.

Maybe. But the decision heuristic here, which is "we pay 4x more for things because the CEO doesn't trust his people and like to micromanage things" can easily be fatal.

The company paid $1 instead of a quarter. Why the original poster even put up a fight about saving 750 dollars.... can't tell you. They probably spent more on keeping the kitchen stocked with coffee and soda each month.

The company is paying an extra $9000/year. With a boss like this, it's perfectly possible that they don't stock the kitchen with coffee and soda, because the CEO is already having somebody bring him his caramel macchiatos, so he doesn't care, and money's tight, because his people just do what the boss says instead of him trusting them to do the right thing.

Definitely the case at my company. A while ago we did an evaluation of different cloud providers and hosting solutions but it was pretty clear that “AWS” was the only acceptable answer. Which is probably ok. If you don’t have much experience in that space AWS is probably the reasonable and safe way to go.