[WilliamEdward]

You nailed it. The infrastructure in developed countries is taken for granted by its consumers. Websites are often not tuned for low speed internet, or for people across the ocean, because everything works so smooth in developed countries. Also, having a server that serves to the US and Europe if you live in a remote area obviously cannot be on-premise, it has to be in the cloud served in those countries for latency reasons.

And you cannot have a website that doesn't cater to US and EU users, unless the website only solves local problems.

[mD5pPxMcS6fVWKE]

If web site caters to EU customers, just rent it from the EU datacenter, no need for a cloud. A Hetzner server costs $100/month, an equivalent amount of cloud resources will run you into thousands.

[tekknik]

And how much does Hetzners nosql/relational db, emr solution, faas, etc cost? Solutions aren’t built the traditional way anymore. You don’t go get some cots server and write everything yourself. So while you’re futzing around getting a database installed, tuned and setup the engineer using a more complete cloud platform has already moved onto business logic.

[mD5pPxMcS6fVWKE]

The person above wrote that she can't use local server to cater to US and EU customers. I pointed out that you don't need cloud to resolve that problem.

[tekknik]

Hetzner is a cloud, as per their own literature but my point being if you buy Hetzner you’re not getting a complete platform. You are buying into a platform just less of one. Hetzner also advertises themselves as thrifty, not exactly instilling confidence for critical infrastructures. My point remains though, buying a VPS is equivalent to an EC2 and this is not how things are built these days. Also note the posters name is WilliamEdwards, I know if you called me a she (I’m a he) it would be very offensive to me. It’s best to use gender neutral or pay attention to sex/identity if possible (not really here) and use the correct pronoun.

[mD5pPxMcS6fVWKE]

VPS is in no way equivalent to an EC2

[tekknik]

Sure it is, for almost every use case. For edge cases, it’s not exactly equivalent sure. If you just need a place to run code then it most definitely is.

[iajrz]

Even so, having say a bare metal server (à la Vultr) can be way cheaper than having a cloud setup in one of the most flexible kinds of providers.

The detail to look at is that flexibility is a feature of the cloud offering, and an expensive one at that. If you don't need it, you need to find a way to not pay for it.