It's less reliable than a guy running a website on a raspberry pi with a solar panel from harbor freight http://pi.qcontinuum.com/

This is not true at all. We run a large setup in OVH Gravelines and another in us-east-1 and we’ve not had a single outage in 3+ years with OVH. I can’t say the same for AWS.

You have been lucky with Gravelines, OVH had major outages lasting several hours in 2017 (Roubaix, total loss of routing for all of the 6 DCs) and in one case close to 24 hours (Strasbourg, cascade of events resulting in total power failure http://status.ovh.net/?do=details&id=15162 ).

In that period (2015-2018) I used to run a fairly well known French website on OVH, and their network was very unstable, from equipment failures to way too many fat-fingering of routes. If you're able to easily switch traffic between OVH and AWS you're in a far better position than most people.

We stayed away from Roubaix given the experimental design. Not sure why anyone would put production stuff there. I can’t speak to Strasbourg that sounds horrendous. But Gravelines has been rock solid and 4ms latency to London.

But at the end of the day outages happen everywhere, including AWS. We also have some kit at Hetzner and I think that a redundant setup across OVH and Hetzner will be a fraction of a cost of single AZ setup in AWS and yield far greater uptime.

We’ve commoditized the servers and services (cattle vs pets)...why would we treat the providers any differently? Use cheap components and lots of redundancy.

> 1st AWS and big 3 is much more reliable.

I think that's a myth. People assume it's true because it should be true. I don't think it is true.

> 2nd AWS is not only a VPS provider.

It's a glorified VPS provider. Most of the stuff doesn't matter to most of the people using AWS, but they go for it so they can put it on their resume and because they don't want to get fired for choosing something that's not a big name.

EC2 might be a glorified VPS provider, but you seem to be ignoring the vast array of managed services in modern cloud providers (or unaware of their utility beyond padding resumes).

Load balancing, fault tolerance, high availability, arbitrary scale, messaging, orchestration, autoscaling, warehousing, big data processing, identity management, desktop management, secrets management, container registries, source code management, build tools, hardware test suites, gpu hardware, observability tools...

Those of use that use cloud providers know full well why we use them (and certainly know when not to).

If you really need any of that stuff you probably shouldn't use Amazon's managed version of it.

Why? I run both on prem and cloud workloads (on more than one provider) so I'm wondering what's wrong with Amazon's managed services?

> People assume it's true because it should be true. I don't think it is true.

It makes sense that bargain-bin providers would offer inferior reliability, but there are providers out there other than the big 3 cloud providers and the bargain-bin VPS providers.

GitHub for instance is apparently [0] hosted by Carpathia [1].

[0] https://github.com/holman/ama/issues/553

[1] http://www.carpathia.com/ (they should really fix https://www.carpathia.com )

There should be data available for #1 -- it's not something we should need much subjective discussion around.

Re #2: I love all the other stuff. I never use EC2. Lambda, Cognito, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFront, Route 53, and API Gateway are my default stack, managed by Cloudformation. Granted, I'm doing smaller projects, but the costs are minimal, the setup time is trivial, the documentation is excellent, everything is nicely compartmentalized and 'just works' together. And I only pay for the actual traffic to the site.

This is the way. We've given multiple clients very similar stacks for "api layers" and it's by far the most cost effective way to do AWS from both productivity and opex point of view.