| That's simple. When DO came on the scene it was the only one of its kind. Now there are 4 almost identical services: DO, Linode, Vultr, and Lightsail. On the surface those seem the same because of the near linear pricing and similar allocation of resources. The ones you listed aren't even close. Each of those may have some but they don't have all of what makes the DO model so useful to some of us: 1. Mission-critical/Production ready reliability and communication (all maintenance and issues) 2. No unexpected termination of instances / Reasonable warning & mediation 3. Not overprovisioned / little concern of noisy neighbors 4. Tier 3/4 redundancies 5. Strong American coverage (each DC with Tier 3/4 level services) 6. No setup fee on new instances 7. 1-minute provisioning (simple creation of instances / no ticket needed for deleting resource) 8. Programmatic IaaS management including provisioning, DNS, and images 9. Quality resources - mostly Xeons not ARMs, local SSD not Ceph 10. Huge backing - they're not closing tomorrow & I wanted a #10 While OVH, Hetzner, Leaseweb seem like nice services, particularly for needs in Europe, I can't build an American-centric service on those, set it and forget it nearly as easily or worry-free as with DO/Linode/Vultr/Lightsail. |