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Hi,

I don't post much, but I read a lot from the content here and haven't seen too much written about choosing a cloud provider for a SaaS Startup.

It seems to me a critical decision in the life of a startup, that if you get wrong, can cost you at least a few months of catching-up to get back to your initial pace.

Does anyone have any similar experiences to share ?

Not a single mention of the biggest risk that apparently no one considers anymore: Vendor lock in.

If your business is tied specifically to Amazon or Google or Azure "cloud" services, you might as well get out the hacksaw because you've already shot yourself in the foot and it's turned gangrenous while you had a circle jerk about how your startup is so "cloudy".

Besides that. Jesus fucking christ 2MB of shit to serve me 12KB of text on a white page? Are you fucking kidding me?

Well, everyone is speaking about what they have encountered. But I see your point. Companies should look ahead to when they reach a bigger scale.
Vendor lock-in isn't just an issue with scale.

You can be a small player and still get fucked over when your sole vendor increases prices/stops running a service/changes a service drastically/has large amounts of downtime/etc

If you use standard components that you deploy yourself, you are beholden to no single provider, and you can even split your hosting between DCs operated by different companies, to reduce the chances of 'whole-of-org' issues.

Honestly a server vendor should be treated how most people want phone/internet companies to act (dumb pipes): a dumb VM/Physical Host provider.