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The rule of growth
(i.imgur.com)
I’d like to thank the admins for being so open and direct about the issues that they’re facing.
Habit (guess). Its what is used professionally, despite being proven over and over that cost-per-speed is terrible compared to less known providers.
If the average Web engineer's salary capable of running a site like this is ~$180,000, then a $30,000 difference in cost is only about 2 months salary. Learning and dealing with a new hosting environment can easily exceed that.
Maybe, maybe that hosting provider doesn't exist in the long term, maybe that hosting provider crashes more often or makes sudden api changes and causes more ongoing work and headaches that chew up more time and salary, maybe you end up needing a more complex over the top service that they don't offer and need to go to AWS / Azure anyways.
What's that? Taxes? And no way do I agree with this. $30k is a lot, no matter how much you make. Learning a new environment is not THAT hard.
It is, but learning a new environment, then dealing with any down the line troubleshooting or instability can easily add up to $30,000 if you actually track where salaried employees time is going.
That, and like others mentioned their flexibility, plus the fact that they're fairly reliable (maybe less than some good Iaas providers but a fair bit more than your consumer vps places). Moments ago I went to the hetzner site to check them out and got:
Annoying if it's you nextloud instance down for a minutes, but a worthy trade off if you're paying 1/4 of the price. Extremely costly for big business or even risking peoples's lives for a few different very important systems.
Hetzner has four nines availability, usually higher. AWS claims five nines but chances are you'll mess up something on your end and end up at three to two nines, anyway. If you really need five nines you should probably colocate and only use the likes of AWS as a spike backup.
And I guess "messed something up on your end" happened in that case: I don't think Hetzner is necessarily in the habit of maximising availability of their homepage at all cost (as opposed to the hosting infrastructure), you probably caught them in a middle of pushing a new version.
...speaking of spike backups: That is what AWS is actually good for. Quickly spinning up stuff and shutting it down again before it eats all your money.
I'm not a server admin, but I am a dev, and for many of us it's just what we know because it's what our employers use. So sadly, when it comes to setting up infrastructure on our own time, the path of least resistance is just to use what we're already used to.
Personally I'm off AWS now though, but it definitely took some extra work (which was worth it, to be clear).