AWS Cost Saving Recommendations
If you&#x27;re somewhat poor like me (living in Eastern Europe, current net salary around 1500 euros a month; provides decent quality of life here but not in a globalized economy), then the first step of saving money would be not to bother with the expensive cloud vendors: AWS, Azure and GCP.*<p>* this advice does not apply if you&#x27;re a cog in an enterprise, then use whatever the company mandates<p>Here&#x27;s a few alternatives, from the most expensive to the least expensive:<p>DigitalOcean: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digitalocean.com&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digitalocean.com&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;</a> A pretty popular VPS provider that i&#x27;d say is cheaper than the above to start us out. They also offer a whole bunch of different managed services, if you&#x27;re into that sort of stuff.<p>Vultr: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vultr.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;cloud-compute&#x2F;#pricing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vultr.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;cloud-compute&#x2F;#pricing</a> Much like DigitalOcean, sans some of the managed services. On the upside, they also sell smaller instances, though those tend to be sold out in my experience.<p>Scaleway: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scaleway.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scaleway.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;</a> Have a look at their Development or Starburst instances (the latter are smaller ones like Vultr), also they rival DigitalOcean in their managed offerings. Pretty good CPU performance as well, in my experience.<p>Hetzner: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hetzner.com&#x2F;cloud" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hetzner.com&#x2F;cloud</a> I&#x27;d say that they&#x27;re cheaper than all of the above, but also have a reasonably modern control panel, as well as block storage services if you need more space. ID verification might be necessary if you&#x27;re from an undesireable country, though, so YMMV.<p>Time4VPS: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.time4vps.com&#x2F;?affid=5294" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.time4vps.com&#x2F;?affid=5294</a> I have used them for almost all of my servers in the last 4 years or so (hence affiliate link in case you check them out) - the control panel is somewhat more dated and the managed offerings are limited, but they&#x27;re one of the cheapest legitimate hosts, since they&#x27;re owned by a Lithuanian telco. They also offer noticeable discounts if you reserve instances for a year and i&#x27;d say they&#x27;re a good choice for most purposes, provided that you have backups (i have a few backup servers in my home for that purpose).<p>Contabo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;contabo.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;vps&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;contabo.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;vps&#x2F;</a> Perhaps the best specs that you can get on the cheap, especially if you&#x27;re after a decent amount of storage, which is larger than most of the other hosts provide you with (in lieu of block storage services). They do have a setup fee for the instances, the process seems at least partially manual on their part, the web UI is the most antiquated i&#x27;ve seen of the bunch, the performance of the instances is mediocre (they probably overprovision), but it all seems to work regardless.<p>There are also other hosts out there, but the shadier they are, the more likely data loss and&#x2F;or theft is. But hey, balance your needs with your capabilities to find what works the best for you! Perhaps i&#x27;ll even write a blog post and include some automated benchmarks in the future on my blog.<p>Edit: if you feel like spending some of your time looking for bargains (yaay for low alternative costs), then feel free to have a look at LowEndBox, where interesting deals are sometimes advertised: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lowendbox.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lowendbox.com&#x2F;</a><p>Personally, however, i&#x27;d only pick companies that have been around for $SOME years.