[monoideism]

The "bullet" in this analogy is AWS's notoriously high cost.

[mr_toad]

Notorious in what way?

The price charts are all publicly available. Anyone can check for themselves what the costs are.

[kadoban]

And yet nobody can predict what anything will actually cost. If you make your prices complicated enough, transparency doesn't mean much.

[pizza234]

True, but due to the large extent of the services provided/required, it's very hard to know the unexpected costs, even if one has experience.

For example, one will hardly think of the cost of the disk speed (IOPS, in AWS), before moving to AWS. Then, they will suddenly have to deal with it (note that IOPS will be mostly opportunity costs, in case one doesn't choose provisioned IOPS of larger capacity).

[monoideism]

Notorious doesn't mean "secret" or "hidden", as you seem to imply here. It means "well-known, usually for negative reasons".

AWS prices are well-known, and not for being low.

Now, the benefit of AWS may well be worth the high cost - that's a separate question.

[dcanelhas]

But which runs on most renewable energy?

[sascha_sl]

The cheapest provider in existence runs on renewables (Hetzner Online). There isn't too much of a difference, especially for EU datacenters as they have a high excess of renewables and the energy market works in a way where you pay for renewables but just as everyone else you'll be using the base capacity generating dirty sources.