[elwray]

I think its impossible for the Herokus and the digital oceans of the world to survive in the cloud world. They might be able to create better experience for customers but noone can match the networking that AWS, GCP and Azure can provide. Low latency will always win over better developer experience.

[kaoD]

DigitalOcean is the Arduino of cloud.

True, it can't compete with AWS/GCP/Azure if you're large scale. But most of us are not large scale, we just need a no frills experience instead of dealing with 27 nested panels just to spin up a VM.

[arnvald]

Heroku runs on AWS though, doesn’t it? They just package it.

I don’t think it’s impossible for them to survive. Salesforce bought them more than 10 years ago and did little to support growth of Heroku. And yet they’re still around and people still ask „is there something new with comparable customer experience?” because they don’t mind paying more

[fragmede]

Vercel is the chosen replacement, I believe.

[petcat]

Vercel is basically just an AWS reseller too though

[anonyfox]

on the other hand modern tech stacks can process insane amounts of req/s for typical websites/services in a single shared vserver core. not your 2010 ruby snoozefest anymore. plus I can't even remember when a few decade old droplets needed anything from me and still host some things just fine with zero issues or friction or nagging at all. DO is the number one pick for me in 2026 still when the problem fits a droplet style deployment, full stop.

[interstice]

I've never found cloud anything to beat the speed (and price) of a well placed server.

DO has always been a bit rich for my blood though, and even a low cost hetzner VPS has less cores than I remember seeing at the same price a decade ago. I could be wrong there though I usually use Vultr for their SYD region.

[petcat]

> has less cores than I remember seeing at the same price a decade ago

Less cores but probably 5x more performance per core now.

[interstice]

This is more helpful when software doesn't just pin the first 4 available cores at 100% to get things done.

[SpaceNugget]

How? If each core is 5x faster then it's done 5x sooner. I can't think of a use case for a cheap vps where 5x faster per core cpus are not helpful.

[interstice]

A slower background transcode usually doesn't matter, but a faster transcode that stops important processes running in the meantime might. This is usually fixable with effort, but sometimes it's nice to not have to configure everything to the nth degree.

[SpaceNugget]

I don't really buy it. The idea that somehow getting one less core but faster per core speeds per pricing bracket makes any difference in this imagined problem.

There are many different configurations of vps available with different numbers of cores, if you are picking the vps configuration specifically to have more cores than some transcoding software uses by default to avoid configuring a thread limit for that software then you are still configuring things to the nth degree just at the objectively wrong level of abstraction.