AWS is great if you have lots of money and little time. Which was very true in the last ~decade, where we had lots of venture funded startups that had very much money, but little time.

Also, while you definitely pay a markup, the standard EC2 pricing also contains instant availability. If you skip on buying a car and instead pay a taxi to wait 24/7, your costs will also be insanely high. Additionally, AWS provides a great ecosystem where your app can easily be managed in - things like getting a https certificate, setting up a redundant load balancer and even a CDN, database or a Kubernetes cluster can be made simply with a few clicks in an UI. If you don't have someone who knows how to configure those services, it can detract a lot from what you're actually trying to do as a business. Lastly, it has all these enterprise features you suddenly need - solid billing, encryption, certificates etc..

Don't get me wrong, it's expensive, but there's a reason so many businesses use AWS.

if all you are running are a few ec2 servers then you have quite a lot of competitors to choose from and price out/balance with reliability.

we use aws at work, but been running side projects on digital ocean for years for way less than hundreds a month

Why haven't there been a upstart taking market share? Why do only the big players get into the game and hold similar costs?

It's easy to enter the market and offer a cheap product. It's hard to enter the market and offer a very solid product. It's nearly impossible to enter the market and provide the hundreds of services the big players can provide, and operate at the scale they can provide, servicing the number of markets and customers they do, with the level of support they do.

The big players know that what separates the majors from the minors is trust. If you buy from AWS, you know what you get works, and you will pay a premium for that assurance. And also it is really fricking expensive to be AWS.

Very much this - I don't have much experience with providers in this space but Digital Ocean has taken maybe a decade to build and offer a small number of services.

That said, there is a lot of AWS that I probably wouldn't know existed - I know in my day job I make big use of maybe five services, plus maybe another 10 glue services between them (CloudWatch, IAM, VPC etc).

DigitalOcean, Linode, Hetzner, Vultr...

DO's spaces didn't even work for the most basic test of putting a few images on a page when I tried it. I couldn't say it's comparable to S3.

I use DO spaces heavily - for images no less. It works great. What issues did you have?

Uploaded about 100 images. Put those images on a page. 50% of them timed out when downloading. Maybe I was just unlucky, but it was a good way to make me instantly lose all confidence DO Spaces. S3 and Backblaze B2 worked fine for the same thing at the same time as when this happened.

That's definitely incorrect behavior. Did you reach out to support?

Something tells me you are doing something wrong.

Which raises my question: Is there some open source github project that lets you create an S3 API compatible with underlying heterogeneous VPS hosts clustered? I'm guessing even with this storage would still be expensive, so how does Backblaze pull this off?

Yes, several. Minio is the big one but I believe Ceph can do this too. Others exist.

Disk is cheap. Real cheap.

ah yes minio! the one issue i have with using VPS for production is, are they hardened? or is it enough just with proper unix user management and UFW? I have this fear that the VPS box has attack surfaces or zero day vulnerabilities but when I am on the cloud I do not have this worry.

Perhaps irrational but can't argue with the peace of mind that expensive clouds offer. Although we've seen misconfigured S3 buckets leaking data so.

What makes you believe the threat model for AWS is different than DO? They are just VMs at the end of the day.

Large fixed costs, economies of scale, whole product (need compute AND storage). It's possible that a company like Cloudflare can disrupt certain verticals in storage that are mispriced by AWS yet have a larger than expected TAM.

Because infrastructure is not that high of cost for most companies and every dev and devops out there knows AWS and has no clue how competitore dashboards even look like.

Human biology is not programmed to abide conflict of interest. On paper things can be written just so, but what’s on paper does not stop feelings, friendship, and connection between two people from forming given biology. Pointing at some philosophy to equivocate away physical laws is the simple con leveraged against the people.

The big players leverage their understanding of science and well paid lawyers to play a cognitive game where investment in storage is set aside, as storage is “a solved problem”, they collude to focus government spend on new things they can charge consumers for after charging us via taxes and agency, to build it.

Good luck finding a VC willing to compete against Bezos. They’re not going to target the guy managing the infra risk, providing a cheap platform key to their cheap startup gambling. They’re going to target naive college kids to try and build a rocket for them. Because VCs are smarter than Bezos; do none of the work, own the reward.