The other problem for _our_ particular use case is that Minecraft is single-threaded, so it performs better on a quad-core 4GHz than an octa-core 2GHz, for example. Because of this, we use almost exclusively E3-12xx lineup CPUs at 3.6GHz+. I don't believe DO publishes their underlying hardware specs, but last time that I ran benchmarks it performed in the 2.0-2.4GHz range, like most cloud providers. Even if their CPUs were identical, it would cost us $112,000/mo at stock pricing, which is significantly more than we're paying for our current deploy.

Your point does stand, though, that not all cloud providers have the bandwidth price gouging. I was mainly referring to GCP/AWS/Azure, who set the trend for the rest of the major providers.

Bandwidth Alliance is only for routing http traffic, but a game server will have udp traffic.

Bandwidth Alliance has nothing to do with this, afaik. Minecraft is a TCP game.

> DigitalOcean gives 3TB bandwidth on a $15 2CPU/2GBMEM/60GBSSD instance.

DigitalOcean is a VPS provider, not a cloud provider, and that's pretty similar to pricing on the nearest comparable AWS service (Amazon LightSail), not something showing DO as notably better (1Core/2GBRAM/60GBSSD/3TB transfer @ $10/mo or 2Core/4GBRAM/80GBSSD/4TB transfer @ $20/mo.)

Though if you are optimizing price per TB of transfer quota, LightSail does best with the 1Core/1GB/40GBSSD/2TB transfer @ $5 instance size.

> DigitalOcean is a VPS provider, not a cloud provider

From the first paragraph in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigitalOcean

> DigitalOcean, Inc. is an American cloud infrastructure provider[2] headquartered in New York City with data centers worldwide.[3] DigitalOcean provides developers cloud services that help to deploy and scale applications that run simultaneously on multiple computers.

You might have your own cute definition of “cloud”, but it doesn’t match the industry so get over it and stop correcting people.