How to Choose a Cloud Provider Without Regretting It

Most “which cloud” decisions are made backwards — comparing price tables across 40 services you’ll never use. Five questions eliminate most of the field first.

1. Where are your users?

Latency is the only spec your users feel. If 90% of traffic is US-East, a Frankfurt-only provider is out no matter how cheap. Check region maps before pricing.

2. Managed or raw?

Managed (PaaS) if you have no ops appetite and low scale. Raw (VPS/IaaS) if you have sysadmin skill or scale that makes PaaS markup hurt. The crossover is roughly: >$200/mo spend → raw wins; <$50/mo and no ops person → managed wins.

3. What’s your bandwidth profile?

Serve lots of data (media, downloads, video)? Bandwidth-inclusive providers (Hetzner, OVH, Contabo) dominate. Mostly API/CRUD traffic? It doesn’t matter — optimize elsewhere.

4. Can you tolerate a weird provider?

Contabo and Hostinger are dramatically cheaper if you can accept clunkier panels and slower support. For dev/staging workloads that’s a free 40% discount. For production revenue workloads, boring reliability wins.

5. What’s the exit cost?

Managed databases and proprietary PaaS features are the lock-in. Plain Linux VMs migrate in an afternoon. If you might outgrow the provider, keep your stack portable — Postgres you can pg_dump beats a proprietary datastore at 2× the price anyway.

The shortlist by profile

• Solo dev, low budget: Hetzner or Vultr.
• No ops, shipping product: Render, Railway, or DO App Platform.
• Bandwidth-heavy: Hetzner or OVHcloud.
• Need GPUs: Vultr or Fly.io.
• Enterprise/compliance: that’s a different conversation — hyperscalers earn their markup there.