10x in cost isn't necessarily the most important factor to a business.
From an individual's perspective, that's hard to understand. To a business, it really isn't that difficult to justify the cost.
One of my criticisms of HN commenters is the inability to empathize from a company's POV. Just because it doesn't make sense to you doesn't mean it doesn't make sense!
Companies (especially big ones) have different priorities than individuals. I may think it's stupid to 10x infrastructure costs by using AWS. A company may say "that's 1% of my budget, and it keeps my development running smoothly and developers happy with the familiarity and flexibility. I make that 10x cost back in 30 minutes, every day. Not worth optimizing."
Just having checked out the companies you mentioned, they are cheaper for small-midsize hosting solutions.
For running large memory and bandwidth hungry servers they just can't deliver. On Amazon you can get 256GB of ram with dedicated 10GBps clustered networking. None of the options you listed can go above 1GBps and it won't be dedicated (you'll get a 1GBps port onto a shared network, and you'll be at the mercy of the traffic conditions inside their data center.)
Amazon also has a huge amount of cloudy solutions which is not to be sneezed at.
Ok, that's interesting. It's non-obvious that it was possible from their site. But the network is still a major problem. 10 servers @ 1gbit are not equal to 1 @ 10gbit depennding on your use case. In my case the database is network limited, and it's extremely not-nice to have to partition it horizontally.
From an individual's perspective, that's hard to understand. To a business, it really isn't that difficult to justify the cost.
One of my criticisms of HN commenters is the inability to empathize from a company's POV. Just because it doesn't make sense to you doesn't mean it doesn't make sense!
Companies (especially big ones) have different priorities than individuals. I may think it's stupid to 10x infrastructure costs by using AWS. A company may say "that's 1% of my budget, and it keeps my development running smoothly and developers happy with the familiarity and flexibility. I make that 10x cost back in 30 minutes, every day. Not worth optimizing."