Out of curiosity, what advantages do the small VPS hosts offer compared to the big 3 (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)? Customer Service? Pricing? Local Data Center?

Until recently I had a 4gb ram 80gb ssd+2tb hd VPS running debian in a Montreal data centre with a real use 700 mbit pipe to my city with a budget provider for the equivalent of $80USD/year. When fio speeds were slow they moved me to a less crowded server. I gave it up as don't need it and moved my personal sites back to NFS for peanuts a year and services to my NAS. The pricing, offsite storage for my backups, Canadian sovereignty, lack of perceived complexity with a big provider was all attractive. I'm a physician with a tech hobby and last serious tech work was in the LAMP days with perl and php. Trying to think of learning about AWS and screwing up usage based billing was daunting!

Much better prices, and simplicity. The power you get from Hetzner or Kimsufi is crazy compared to AWS.

If I need to host something small, I don’t want to mess around with the many permissions and quirks that are required to deal with AWS. It is often much easier to just setup the server on a standalone service.

Most of my customers (small VPS host here) don't like the companies behind AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, especially the amount of influence they have in the world and how they wield it. And the pricing often isn't that much different between a small VPS host and either a cloud provider or one of the larger VPS providers (Akamai/Linode, Digital Ocean, etc.) - larger providers have economies of scale, but smaller providers don't have as much overhead for paying sales and C-suite.

There's also the human touch in terms of who you talk to: a lot of the smallest VPS hosts are 1-2 people, both technical, so customer support = sysadmin = contact for everything.

If the only thing you need is "server, accessible via the internet, always online", and you're not interested in all the vendor lock-in masquerading as useful services offered by the big cloud providers, then small VPS hosts are 100% the way to go. For mid-sized servers they're cheaper (i.e., stuff that wouldn't be free on the big clouds, but not "I want a petaflop"), with more transparent pricing (I pay $12, every month. If I get inundated with traffic, I'll get cut off until I choose to pay more).

I could pay like 30 bucks a month for an absolutely overspecc'd VPS (64GB/16c) that would cost around 20X on AWS (According to ChatGPT; which sounds about right based on the last time I cared to even look into it)

Does it have a billion 9's of reliability? No, but I don't care, it has literally never not worked when I've used it

Customer Service so far has been human, but that will vary greatly for the provider

I also use a different provider for work related hosting, and the reduced latency of being within 20 ms of the DC has been probably the single biggest (perceived) perf improvement my users have ever seen, specially on the legacy webforms platform we recently decomissioned (We're a bit too geographically far for most Datacenters of most large providers)

I'd use digital ocean over AWS for any SMB or lean startup (so... anyone not attached to an infinite money hose that has to either scale to NEED AWS, or die trying) just because of 1) their UI not being broken glass you have to crawl over and 2) not having eight trillion features that make doing simple things hard and 3) pricing

Price. 1 vCore, 2GB RAM, 20GB SSD, unlimited traffic (though throttled to 200mbit/s after transferring 2TB within 24 hours) = 1.85€

That is a nice way to have a static IP on the internet and enough resources to do small things like host a nameserver and/or OpenVPN/Wireguard.

I may have had 4 hours of downtime in one year, always announced days in advance.

Low cost, simplicity and customer service.

AWS does offer Lightsail which is similar pricing.

I used a vps service hosted in a country with strong digital privacy laws to host a personal wireguard+pihole vpn. I could probably think up a decent argument why that privacy with the smaller guy was only nominal but I could absolutely think up a good argument why doing that on a big name would have no privacy guarantees at all, especially as someone who would be in the bottom rung payment-wise.

Never had problems with downtime and I payed, like, 40 bucks a year over 3 years. I think I had to restart the thing once because of something dumb I did on my end.

There are ones that don’t price gouge you on bandwidth.

Much cheaper. The big 3 are costing you as if it's still 2009, and they don't change this because people have an irrational attachment to overpaying.

The only advantage is cheapness, for personal use.

If you’re a government agency or a company you don’t care about saving $14/month, you want a secure provider. And these hosts are not secure, you’re basically just on your own.

Small VPS hosts oversell like crazy and they offer much lower prices. Also their reliability might be worse, because they don't migrate VM between hosts.

Spending caps is the biggest reason for me. Granted, some VPS don't offer this (vital!) feature, but none of the big 3 or similar services do.

10-100x cheaper

Where small VPS hosts can make a difference: require no KYC, accept crypto payments.

Others have mentioned the general pricing, simplicity etc.

Outbound data pricing is a potentially huge saving.

AWS is as much as $90/TB outbound with 1GB free. Hetzner is $1.20/TB (in EU and US) with 1TB/20TB (US/EU) free.

(Good) Smaller places are more likely to have actual technical staff you can talk to.

Simplicity, price, stability.

Not being US owned can be an important one in this geopolitical climate.

I like Vultr for the simplicity of my own projects. I really hate spending my time on provisioning and similar labyrinths.

Pricing (both cheaper and more predictable), and reduced complexity.

Predictable and extremely low costs for less critical stuff. My 2 main ones are respectively around 4 and 8 EUR per _year_.

I use them to run wireguard to evade geoblocks when I'm travelling, a few redundant monitoring scripts alerting me of reachability issues of more critical stuff I care about, they serve as contingency access channels to my home (and home assistant) if my primary channels are down.

I get no support, no updates, it's all on me - which is fine, it allows me to stay current and not lose hands-on practice on skills which I anyway need for my job (and which are anyway my passion). I don't even get an entire IPv4 - I get.... 1/3000th of it? (21 ports, the rest are forwarded to other customers). Suits me fine.

Pricing mostly, and also simplicity. Big cloud is incredibly expensive when you really look at it. The markup is huge.

It’s weird because in most of this industry scale results in lower prices. Not in cloud.

Simplicity, and low price.

VPS services are usually really, really simple and fairly cheap.

I'd say that actually VPS prices is where we actually see computing prices going down rather than on the big 3.

AWS used to optimize further and pass down the savings to the customers back in the day, now they don't do it anymore.

Pricing. They overprovision aggressively but most people actually just need a 0.1 CPU available remotely for the majority of their use cases.

I replaced with a home server and it costs way more just in power hahaha.

Not being Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

I moved from AWS to Hetzner, because: 1. lower prices, 2. not American