[api]

We use OVH and Hetzner dedicated (2X providers, 5X data centers for redundancy). Our application is CPU bound and it's approximately 10X cheaper than AWS/MS/Google and 3-5X cheaper than Vultr and Digital Ocean. If you need a lot of CPU bare metal is vastly more cost effective. It's also a bit faster.

Bare metal is only a little more work to set up if you're using orchestration and provisioning tools. We use Chef and Consul/Nomad.

IMHO Amazon and the other big cloud providers are not a good deal if you only need compute, storage, and bandwidth and if you have any in-house IT expertise. They only make sense if you're taking full advantage of all their managed services e.g. S3, Redshift, managed SQL, lambda, etc. If you only need raw compute and bandwidth the smaller providers (DO, Vultr) and bare metal (OVH, Hetzner) are far better deals.

[anothergoogler]

Are you managing the OVH and Hetzner hosts (provisioning) by hand, using general-purpose tools (Terraform etc.), or tools you've built custom against the providers' APIs?