[oliwarner]

> better customer experience with AWS than Azure or GCE

Yeah, they're all awful. A comparison might show one is better than another, but it's all a wash when you look at actually good customer service.

A good host has a phone number, you ring it, somebody answers and then they fix your problem, without pinging you around a call centre. You're in and out within 20 minutes.

For AWS (and their class) you submit a ticket and in 4-48 hours, you twiddle your thumbs while the cheapest labour available to Amazon wakes up on the other side of the planet to investigate your problem (also known as walking you through a script).

AWS-sized hosts have advantages but I put a lot of weight in scaling things back to the RackSpace, Linode and Hetzner size operations. They put so much more effort into their human interaction.

[mattmanser]

I have to say that these days the people on the other side of the planet are getting really good.

As mentioned in another comment, I had an Indian woman answer a non-trivial support ticket and she really was excellent.

She had a breath of knowledge about SQL & SQL Server that I'd hire on the spot.