If you think offering a cloud service is at all the same as offering someone a box in a rack, I invite you to compete in the space.

It's more than a box in a rack. These providers do actively monitor and fix these boxen. They can all be rebooted remotely as if you physically hit the button, you've got interfaces to access the machine as if you were logging in physically with a DB-9/RS232/ethernet/whatever console, etc.

It's not just "space in a rack and you deal with the servers yourself and you come to fix them if they break".

These companies know what they're doing.

You're missing the point. There's a massive difference between getting a box service, and getting a highly available regionally distributed service with a semblance of a SLA of bandwidth to anywhere on the planet. To quote a former manager, its not even apples and oranges, is apples and pumpkins. They simply aren't in any way the same scope.

What do you mean? The big bare metal providers have multiple datacenters with fat pipelines and peering. You can put those geo-separated servers in the same subnet. Europe and US is covered, it looks like Asia a black spot for Hetzner, I will give you that. I doubt that so many business have such size and global reach, that world wide latency is a priority. If it would be, the average site would not connect to 20 domains to load megabytes of javascripts, trackers and what not.

(Also, at Hetzner you can even rent their network hardware if you want to make custom solutions.

Sure, go build your own less reliable cloud. But don't pretend that single box pricing is comparable to single cloud service as a result.

I don’t know why you are suggesting that people will build unreliable things. My company’s first day of AWS was the first time AWS had a major outage. We were sold on more reliable, but I can tell you AWS is just as reliable as home grown BS, if not less reliable. The biggest difference is what you do during downtime: in AWS, you refresh status pages. In your actual hardware, you’re actually problem solving and able to build/deploy workarounds to get back working within 30m.

Having worked for one of the major cloud providers in the past, I second this.

In fact, I have no idea why people go for those. You pay a massive premium for the "privilege" of not owning the infrastructure, and being subject to opaque pricing and outages that are completely beyond your control.

And in terms of actually managing the stuff, now you have to pay staff to manage your cloud things too.

It makes no sense to me.

Hetzner does have a cloud VPS option, which is still very affordable: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud

This is pretty heads-to-heads with EC2, in terms of how it works behind the scenes.

So go with hetzner?

Already do :-)

Hetzner is actually offering their Hetzner Cloud and it's a joy to work with because of its simplicity (think about the early days of AWS). You can do everything in Terraform or via their CLI if you prefer. Setting up a full k8s cluster takes maybe 10 minutes including all configuration.