With AWS you pay 65 USD (c5.large instance… and by the way why this is called large at all?). You pick Microsoft Azure you pay 36 Euro (B2s). If you would pick DigitealOcean then you pay 24 USD (noname “droplet”). Choosing Scaleway you pay 19 Euro (PLAY2-NANO compute instance in Warsaw DC). However, with Hetzner Cloud you pay as little as 4.51 Euro (CX22 virtual server). How is that even possible? So it goes like this (converted from USD to Euro):

• AWS: 59 Euro
• Azure: 36 Euro
• DigitalOcean: 22 Euro
• Scaleway: 19 Euro
• Hetzner Cloud: less than 5 Euro

With different offers for vCPU and RAM the propotion stays similar, especially in Microsoft Azure. Both Azure and AWS are big-tech companies which make billions of dollars on this offer. Companies like DigitalOcean, Scaleway and Hetzner cannot be called big-tech, because they are much narrower in their businesses and do not offer that high amount of features in their platforms, contrary to Azure and AWS which have hundreds of features available. Keep in mind that this is very synthetic comparison, but if you would like to go with that specific use case scenario you will see the difference.

Every platform has its best. AWS was among the first on the market. Microsoft Azure has its gigantic platform and it is the most recognizable. DigitalOcean, Scaleway and Hetzner are many more (like Rackspace for instance) are the most popular, reliable among other non-big-tech dedicated servers and cloud services providers. I personally especially like services from Hetzner, not only because of their prices but excellent customer service, which is hard to offer within Microsoft or Amazon. If you want somehow more personal approach then go for non-big-tech solutions.

Important notice: any kind of recommendations here are my personal opinion and has not been backup-up by any of those providers.