I think you&#x27;re overstating it on mentioning alternatives. There&#x27;s certainly factors that go into picking a particular provider that may justify the price or negate an alternative mentioned. So, I&#x27;m also against anyone mentioning them as a critique without context.<p>However, the flip side is that many services have alternatives that do about what they do. They might do so with a lower price or more capabilities. People mentioning those in comments of articles like this facilitates the discovery of those products for people not aware of them.<p>An example for me was arguing that much of what &quot;cloud&quot; stuff does can be done with dedicated hosting if it was setup correctly. That we just need a combo of the two to satisfy certain markets focused on security and dependability where sharing hardware isn&#x27;t permitted but they want flexibility &amp; low costs. Thanks to a commenter, I found out I had re-invented the concept of &quot;bare metal hosting&quot; and SoftLayer provided exactly what I was thinking about. I wouldn&#x27;t have discovered that if everyone and I were just giving props to the OP or further elaborating their own use case.<p>So, I think exploring the reasons behind the choices of company in question <i>and</i> bringing up alternatives are beneficial. One facilitates understanding. One discovery.