People don’t seem to realize how simple pricing can be made for the user. I switched to digital ocean too, and it’s great. I think people think it’s not really engineering if it’s not complicated, so they stick with these insane AWS/GCP/Azure setups. But it’s not 2012 anymore, this stuff has been figured out and commoditized, and managing your cloud setup should be “easy” for 99% of products.
Edit: and when I say “99% of products”, I mean “99% of products where the team thinks they are building something too complicated for a simple setup”
Plus, I've never understood the argument that cloud is better because you don't need to deal with the complexity of managing a server. Yes, it's a very deep topic and there's a lot of nuances to managing a Linux box serving web content, but we've been doing that for decades and there is tons of information and tooling available.
Every time I've needed to manage something on AWS I've been shocked at just how over wrought the whole system is. There's tons of As-specific terminology for everything, and lots of stuff is tremendously complicated to manage. I can definitely understand why companies need to hire people who are experts in AWS specifically, it's complicated enough to justify that. However, for me personally I'd rather learn more traditional sysadmin systems. The skills are more evergreen, and I'd rather spend my time learning open systems than one tech giant's specific system.
About 6 months ago I needed to migrate some of our systems from DigitalOcean to Hetzner. It was a 2 day process that was very painless. The only complicated bit was managing the DNS switchover with zero downtime. If we were moving those same 3 components from AWS to GCP or Azure, it would have involved needing to rearchitect and rewrite a lot of software.
Edit: and when I say “99% of products”, I mean “99% of products where the team thinks they are building something too complicated for a simple setup”