Each has their trade offs. AWS absolutely has a high premium but Hetzner has some quirks.
Recently we had several of our VMs offline because they apparently have these large volume storage pools they were upgrading and suddenly disks died in two large pools. It took them 3 days to resolve.
Hetzner has no integrated option to backup volumes and its roll your own :/ You also can't control volume distribution on their storage nodes for redundancy.
I don't think it's fair to call AWS a scam. It's complicated and powerful and it charges a lot for many services compared to a DIY approach. But you can see the prices transparently on its site, it provides a free tier to try most services out, it is fairly good about long term support for services and how it handles forced upgrades when they become necessary, and generally it has an OK reputation for customer support even if something unexpected and very bad happens. You're certainly paying a price for the convenience and the brand but I don't think that's a scam if you're making an informed choice. If you want to save money then you can replace RDS with Postgres running on VMs but the trade off is then you have to manage your database infrastructure yourself.
On top of lambda and CF (if I remember correctly) I got the WAF and something else slapped on silently. Sorry, don't remember the details. It was basically a tiny tiny "project", entirely within the free tier -- until it wasn't because non-free components have been added to it.
That’s like saying Mercedes is a scam because you’re fine with a Honda Civic. It’s a totally legitimate preference but not being in the target market doesn’t make something a scam.
AWS ain't no Mercedes. Mercedes feels premium and isn't full of bugs.
AWS and Azure a charging an arm and a leg, but the offered quality is mostly perceived. Most of the bits and bobs they charge for are not providing much value for a vast majority of businesses. I won't even go over the complete lack of ergonomics with their portals.
I see you have strong emotions about this but really my point was simply that AWS customers are paying for things they value which you do not. It’s fine for you not to share their priorities but any time people are paying billions of dollars for something in a competitive market, it’s a mistake to say they’re all fools or being fooled.
I see you've never actually owned or worked on a German car, especially in relation to even modest Japanese models. Maybe they were a little nicer inside in the 80s and maybe 90s, but "German car" and frankly "European make" is basically synonymous with "big expensive pile of shit that's an expensive pain in the ass when things start falling apart (which they seem to with increasing rapidity)." It's like the disease that plagued British cars for the longest time got contaminated with the German propensity to build overly complex monstrosities.
I've worked on many German cars and the amount of bullshit repairs (ie. stuff breaking because of obviously poor engineering) I had to do on them was just way lower than on Ford/Chevrolet cars that are supposedly less over-engineered. French cars, on the other hand, are somehow even worse.
No, they just don't know what value AWS provides. And honestly you'll never know until you roll out your own Dedicated servers and later you'll wonder why you never did it sooner.
Cloud used to be marketed for scalability. "Netflix can scale up when people are watching, and scale down at night".
Then the blogosphere and astroturfing got everyone else on board. How can $5 on amazon get you less than what you got from almost any VPS (VDS) provider 10 years ago?
