[peteretep]

"But they'd be wrong! Truth is, I thought it mattered. I thought that [the marginal hosting costs between cloud service providers] mattered. But does it bollocks. Not compared to how [developer productivity and costs] matter."[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3tFZxhVaXo

[MCRed]

Yes, and going with AWS kills productivity because you have to learn AWS specific APIs, you're locked into their system and then you have to re-work your stuff to be hosted elsewhere when you outgrow AWS.

More than one startup has been killed purely by AWS hosting costs in the past 5 years.

[peteretep]

    > going with AWS kills productivity because you have to
    > learn AWS specific APIs

Products I use:

* Redshift. It's Postgres's API, and I didn't have to learn how to manage petabyte-scale clusters

* EC2. It's Ubuntu. Or CentOS. Or whatever. You choose! Except no messing about with my own virtualization or hardware agreements or going ot the datacenter.

* RDS. It's whichever database you want it to be! Only it scales! And backsup! For free!

* ElastiCache. It's Redis!

etc. etc. etc.

Learning those dang AWS-specific APIs, eh? Who'd do it?

     > has been killed purely by AWS hosting costs

Then they planned badly, because AWS prices consistently go down over time. If your "business" goes under because it becomes popular, then your marginal cost per user is negative, and you're running a charity for the benefit of your users, not a business. Blaming the demise of a company whose business model is giving out free icecream on the cost of icecream is missing the point a little.