Every service, ranked by real customers

Has used DigitalOcean for years, finds it very reliable and has never needed to contact support because it has always just worked.

Stopped using Railway after security incidents and because prices skyrocketed once there was some traffic; now on cheaper Hetzner servers.

They could not open a support ticket during the outage even as owner and creator of the subscription, getting through automated support agents only to be told to ask their provider to open it.

Liked not thinking about infrastructure on Railway, but recent downtime is a blocker and they are looking at self-hosting.

They had about an hour of trouble with their SQL elastic pool in West Europe where the server was reachable but no tables were accessible.

They saw not only SQL problems but also disconnected virtual machines during the West Europe incident, all of which came back later.

Their AKS VMs were live migrated several times a week, which exposed a Redis client config issue causing latency and pod restarts. After tuning pings and keep-alives they have had no VM freeze in months.

They ran a cluster of 40 then 120 nodes on Azure and hit network backplane flooding, fixed by bigger VMs and then API refactoring. They say Azure documents these best practices poorly.

They found the Azure health history still showed no event for their subscriptions during the West Europe incident and felt the status and health reporting is lacking.

They chose Railway for its managed setup and infrastructure visualizer at a price close to a VPS, and say it is far cheaper than AWS for them, despite its reliability issues.

They saw no problem during the West Europe outage because their Azure SQL server is only privately accessible, which they suspect explains why others were hit.

They had to restart a stuck elastic pool with eight databases during the incident, with SSMS not showing logins and a job looping on authentication.

Their VMs sat on full servers with no capacity, so every small hiccup shuffled the whole rack slowly, and they eventually moved region.

Their Windows VMs crashed right after provisioning with disk hardware errors and a month of work with support, including kernel dumps, got no result. They switched from spot to on-demand VMs at higher cost.

They hit an Azure SQL outage in West Europe where connections failed intermittently and tables could not be listed in SSMS on the primary of their failover group, while the read-only failover copy looked fine.

They could connect to their server but not browse the databases in their Azure SQL elastic pool, and restarting the pool failed with an internal server error while service health showed nothing.

They lost metrics and databases during the West Europe elastic pool outage, a restore failed, and support gave no response for two hours beyond generic automated replies.

For a month their AKS Linux VMs froze together with connectivity issues and support was not useful. Switching from Dasv6 to Dsv7 stopped the freezes but costs more.

They report essentially zero downtime in the 5 years their team has used Render.

AI API key stolen via Railway; an Anthropic alert, not Railway, revealed it, and a spend cap limited the loss.

They lost invoice access entirely, and after weeks support told them to create another subscription for billing. First-line support just follows a script until a senior engineer gets involved.

As a student they used the $300 trial to host a Minecraft server on virtual machines and ended up with a $157 charge. Their billing account is closed and support redirects them to an automated assistant.

Railway is insanely fast to deploy with a nice UI, but security and reliability let them down; switching permanently.

With about a decade in cloud, they ran two startups on GCP and never had a billing or alerting issue.

After an earlier outage they moved their services from Railway to AWS. After the latest incident they cancelled their subscription, saying even the support page would not load.

Their team spent a full day rotating secrets after the Railway incident and lost count of the complaints in their chat.

Beta site on Railway: Gemini key abused for about $2k in two hours, no notice from Railway, deleted all accounts.

Started on Railway because it was easy and cheap, but two years of outages and the breach handling are pushing them off.

On a 7-day Railway trial, could not deploy on day 3 and is not happy.

Moved everything to Cloudflare; Railway's infrastructure stability was not consistent.

API credits drained despite usage limits after the Railway breach, and they could not redeploy for 30+ hours.

Revoked an OpenAI key before it was used, but says Railway has had too many issues and will use a better-known host for sensitive apps.

They had downtime during the Railway incident while they redeployed their app on DigitalOcean, and do not plan to return.

They moved their Rails apps to DigitalOcean Kubernetes a few years ago using the Cuber gem and say it works perfectly.

They use Heroku for all their client work and say elsewhere they have had no issues in about 10 years.

After the Railway incident, migrating to Fly.io was far easier than expected, about 30 minutes.

They describe a Railway outage running toward 48 hours with their availability dropping from 99% to about 95%.

Their app got a big traffic boost from a podcast shoutout, but new users could not sign up and they could not deploy a fix because Railway deployments were down.

They say Railway's status page claimed slow builds while deployments were not working at all, even on the pro plan.

Railway asked them to change exposed variables but they could not deploy a new build, leaving their service inoperable.

Cybersecurity worker says Railway was unreliable for six months before the env-var breach and is moving off.

Solo founder's OpenAI and Anthropic keys were compromised; rotated them but could not deploy because Railway paused deployments.

Anthropic disabled a Railway-linked key after unauthorized use; Railway never notified them.

Outages are common on Railway and the breach handling gave no proper notifications or dashboard warning.

Spent hours rotating keys after the Railway breach only to find the new ones leaked again; fixes would not deploy.

Liked Railway but the env-var breach spooked them into moving small projects to EC2.

Production database down for hours with no way to restore or redeploy on a Hobby plan.

Third time burned by Railway; migrated their business to DigitalOcean.

Many issues lately; says Railway is not worth the $200/month they pay and is moving.

OpenAI key leaked through the Railway incident and was burned; a spend cap limited the loss.

OpenRouter disabled leaked keys; Railway never said which projects or keys were affected.

Their Anthropic key was used by an unknown party after the Railway breach and deployments stayed down for 10-14 hours.

A 7k increase in OpenAI costs from a key leaked via Railway.

They say Railway has had major issues for over a year and two incidents in two days left them unable to update projects. Even support was down, and they are asking for an alternative.

They needed to ship an important product and Railway had been unable to deploy for 12 hours.

They could not deploy a critical update to their PHP services during the Railway outage and had to take the services down.

As a paying customer running client applications, they could not access projects or deploy during the outage. They give Railway 24 hours before cancelling their subscription.

They moved projects off Railway after the underlying GCP provider cut it off for about a day. They also saw services locking up and needed repeated restarts.

Railway deployments began failing just before they pushed their new Android app announcement to production, and had been down since.

They have thousands of users and could not deploy during the Railway outage, so they are asking for alternatives.

They have the opposite experience of the complaints: they are amazed by Railway's performance and by the features they get for the cost.

They deliberately run on Google-operated regions in Belgium and the Netherlands rather than the London colo region. They were unaffected by the europe-west2 outage and hope it leads to improvements.

They have used Azure since 2010 but are migrating to AWS after a year in which they say support went from present to non-existent.

Free-tier Flask apps deployed on Render were suspended, forcing a search for alternatives.

They once had a support ticket open for a year; the issue was known but support said they lacked access to fix it.

They see capacity shortages across many GCP machine families and regions, even on the alternative GCP suggested, which threatens production scaling.

Despite paying for a support subscription, their Azure ticket was answered by an AI that kept asking and suggesting.

Hosts a site on Fly.io with no problems and perfect 100 scores across the board on page insights.

They report almost all GCP machine types (C3, C4, C4A, N4A, N2, N4) currently unavailable and call it a disaster.

Paid account suddenly said the trial ended, nothing worked, and support was useless.

Clusters on DO, Linode, AWS and Hetzner over a decade: DigitalOcean never had an incident in years.

Tried AWS Lightsail once and never liked it because of poor performance.

Found AWS-native snapshot consistency tricky for SQL Server on EC2 if not set up right, and had a restore fail once.

Left DigitalOcean because the control panel interface lags terribly.

They tried for five days to migrate to Cloud SQL Enterprise Plus, which worked in every region except us-central1.

They run their C# app as a docker image with docker-compose on a DigitalOcean droplet, fronted by nginx and letsencrypt.

They spent a month failing to get a Kubernetes networking setup working on AWS EKS, then had it working the same day on GKE, which uses eBPF.

Their new GCP free-tier project was suspended within seconds of enabling Gmail APIs. The appeal got a nonsense reply and no further answer, so they filed to delete the whole org.

Their startup project on Google Cloud was hit by an exploited old service account that spammed Model Garden APIs for 20+ hours, producing a charge of about 600k they cannot pay.

At their company, moving terabytes of Cloud Storage data from Standard to Archive tier triggered Class A operation charges of about $170k. They say Google would hold the customer responsible, so no refund was possible.

They run many training workloads on GKE with H100 GPUs and say it has been great so far, and they like the project structure. They found Azure VMSS painful and slow when scaling about 1000 L4 GPUs.

They have been on GCP for 7 years and criticise Google for not implementing network ACLs and for pushing everything into Private Service Connect. They say VPC Service Controls only covers googleapis.

They call Google Cloud enterprise support a joke and add from their own experience that most of their issues are known bugs with no ETA for a fix.

Runs production apps with around 500 users each on shared CPU droplets and recommends premium AMD.

Not a single five-minute downtime in over four years.

Shared CPU droplets for internal apps and testing without problems for years.

Shared droplets caused occasional Minecraft lag spikes, but work fine for production cron scripts and they are very happy overall.

Tested shared premium AMD droplets and is moving all servers since no performance impact is noticeable.

They would trust Azure with production only if UI, support and reliability matched AWS, and their one Azure use case has constant issues.

Moved to DigitalOcean because droplets are cheap and the support is still really good.

After 10 years DigitalOcean capped domains at 20 per account and only raised their 132 to 50, so they are leaving.

Runs self-managed database nodes on EC2 for network control and NVMe drives, plus a fleet for ECS task placement.

Free Oracle VPS works for IPv4 termination with WireGuard behind CGNAT.

Moved from AWS and GCP to DigitalOcean for the simple UI, but a redesign has cluttered the dashboard.

They report about 2600 dollars in unexpected Azure charges and cannot find how to open a billing or support ticket, only seeing a refund option that loops back.

They stopped using Google Cloud because usage billing controls are obscure and only notifications can be set, with no hard limit.

Their Azure account was hacked and used to create unnecessary virtual machines and storage accounts. After Azure investigated, the invoice was reverted.

They had a billing case in which the Azure billing team forgave a 15 dollar debt.

A billing account and project they never created were generated in Google Cloud and they were charged $70. Support could only give a simple refund and could not fix the root cause.

Railway's only downside for them is occasional downtime and outages.

Railway has had flaky uptime in recent months though the developer experience is nice.

Runs a Node and Postgres production setup on Railway that has been solid for background jobs and cron.

Left Render for Cloudflare Workers because of cold starts.

Railway handles Node and Postgres with zero configuration headache and its built-in cron jobs work flawlessly.

Using Railway on a project for a while with no complaints; simple setup and pay for what you use.

Render is super easy but webhooks only come with the $20/mo plan, so they moved to a cheaper Hetzner VPS.

Runs a Node and Postgres stack with about a hundred users on Railway; it has been solid for months.

Railway is cheap and easy but a couple of major outages took hours to resolve; moving off to AWS.

They find unoptimized Azure cost slightly higher than AWS but for them it ends up cheaper thanks to lower transaction and bandwidth costs.

They are moving a legacy single-subscription environment to landing zones and support only raised their subscription limit from 5 to 10 while repeatedly demanding business justification. They remained blocked for weeks.

A min-instances=1 setting sat unnoticed in their Cloud Run config for months and quietly cost $206 in idle warm containers. They only caught it because config changes now land in a reviewed diff.

They have used Google for 8+ years but hit capacity problems, including an 8 hour period without one instance, and are now talking to AWS and OCI.

They are struggling to provision AlloyDB and Valkey clusters on GCP because of capacity limits.

They keep hitting stock out errors on regular CPU instances across node sizes and regions, and must search all regions for on-demand compute.

They have C4 capacity problems on GCP and may have to move production GKE workloads to another region.

They found suspicious sign-ins and a very large Azure bill, stopped all components and contacted Microsoft.

On a non-PAYG free account gets only about 50Mbps each way, the standard cap for free accounts.

Their service account keys lived only in GitHub Actions secrets, yet the same compromise happened to them, and they could not reach support.

Added free Oracle nodes to a home Nomad cluster over WireGuard for extra compute at no cost.

In France, repeatedly gets out-of-capacity errors trying to create the free 24GB A1 server.

On a PAYG A1 instance in Stockholm measured about 1.9 Gbps down and 2 Gbps up, so no 50 Mbps cap.

DigitalOcean permanently deleted their infrastructure after a billing issue and refused any refund or explanation after escalation.

A commitment applied on a FinOps recommendation led to a roughly $12,100 charge, and support first promised a full refund in writing then reversed to 50 percent after repeated agent handoffs.

Took about two months of scripted attempts to get an Ampere A1 without a PAYG account.

They pay for the most expensive enterprise support and say it is still hit or miss, with calls declined or rerouted for months, worse than basic AWS support.

They ship faster on Cloud Run and avoid the works-in-dev-not-in-prod issues they had with Lambdas.

Forgot an experimental EC2 instance for two weeks and was billed about $1,700.

DigitalOcean has worked great for over a month with no issues or ID verification.

Their multi-region setup (SQL primary/secondary, app services with Traffic Manager, Kubernetes in both regions) failed over automatically during the West US outage with little impact.

During the West US outage their App Services and even the scm portals were unreachable for at least 30 minutes before the portal showed an alert.

Using DigitalOcean since 2012 but, having seen abysmal support even before the layoffs, would never recommend it for an important workload.

During the West US outage their traffic was not reaching the Application Gateway and VPN gateway failed; they say moving to another region would take days to weeks and cost thousands.

Has used DigitalOcean for more than twelve years, likes the fixed payments and always-available resources, and recalls only one unrecoverable droplet crash; support is just OK.

During the West US outage they lost connectivity to several Windows VMs while Ubuntu VMs were unaffected, a redeploy did not help, and they could not open Cloud Shell.

Their AKS clusters in US West were not working for several hours during the outage.

Ran sites and a SaaS on DigitalOcean Kubernetes and droplets but moved to AWS because all outgoing SMTP is blocked and support said it cannot be unblocked.

They report about 16,000 dollars in unauthorized Azure AI Foundry charges after an apparent account compromise and have a billing support case open.

Has used DigitalOcean since 2017, almost ten years, with no complaints.

Runs all web infrastructure on DigitalOcean droplets; monthly bill varies by only about $50 in the worst cases.

Uses Lightsail for unified communications: fixed and heavily subsidized cost, but not business-ready and needs separate infrastructure to manage.

Got a free instance but found it flaky, needing constant reboots because sshd broke.

A compromised service account was used to spin up VMs, producing an $8.8K bill; billing support denied the waiver and a debt recovery notice followed.

They lost about 2k through Google API keys with no limits, but after a month Google made them whole again.

They got a 47k dollar bill over two days and three months later have no resolution, so they have moved off Google where they can.

Their DigitalOcean startup program application got no answer for weeks, so they switched to Google Cloud and Dokploy.

They had a 5K spike within a few hours and billing support, after bot chat and escalation to a human agent, waived it.

Upgraded to PAYG but still could not create an instance in any of the three availability domains in their region.

Tried to register for Oracle Cloud twice and each time was rejected at the final stage for an unclear reason.

They say Google Cloud is bad after a similar billing incident and are moving everything off GCP.

Got a free Ampere instance last week in the Sydney data center.

They were banned from GCP in 2023 during a college hackathon and had their Shell access blocked, apparently over policy violations they did not know about.

A four-year droplet was trouble-free, but changing account access took two weeks of back and forth and apparently wiped their SSH keys.

They had a service account with only a logging role exploited and an attacker still managed to use the Gemini API on it.

They use the Maps API on a personal account without a payment method and say it simply disables itself when the monthly limit is reached.

After an expired card renewal failure, DigitalOcean deleted the droplet and all associated backups.

They used startup program credits and then got a 200 dollar overage bill while Vertex AI drained the rest of the credits after a tool used their Cloud account.

They switched to Azure as their main cloud because they think GCP is not mature enough, and say Google support was helpless on a spend issue.

They accidentally paid for usage meant to be covered by student credits, and customer support helped them recover all of the money.

They saw billing jump from about 50 dollars monthly to almost 20K in a day after enabling Gemini on an old project, and the billing cap did not stop it.

They had an AI agent loop and spend nearly 400 dollars overnight and find Google's monitoring and limit tools confusing.

They report owing Google Cloud about 36K dollars after hackers abused their Maps API access to run up Gemini usage, and are seeking a Google contact.

They got hit with a huge Maps API bill, and after about a month of polite escalation requests got 90% credited back.

They were charged 400 dollars in one hour from a Google Maps API on their website and say they have had no message from support.

They ran a test data population for a local app and suddenly had a 400 dollar bill, having not realised how expensive the requests were.

They have an ongoing 55k dollar bill dispute and managed to get an escalation manager looking into their case.

They incurred the same kind of runaway charges in May and a Google support specialist declined their case without giving a reason.

They were banned in May 2025, and three appeals since have stayed in processing with no response from Google.

They self-host mail with mailcow on an 8GB DigitalOcean instance and it has worked fine for family, friends and small orgs, roughly 80-100 mailboxes.

After a failed $25 payment their client's DigitalOcean account was terminated and resources permanently deleted about 48 hours after the first warning.

Calls DigitalOcean dogshit compared with Hetzner when comparing CPU benchmarks.

Their first droplet is still around nine years later and DigitalOcean was always reliable.

Satisfied with a $6 droplet and good pricing and UX, but contradictory credit-program communications make them leave.

Their firm is all-in on Railway.

They used DigitalOcean as their go-to server provider for many years (not recently) and found its tutorials fantastic.

They host their personal static site on DigitalOcean App Platform free tier and get a $0 invoice each month.

They were recently unable to get cores for PostgreSQL and Kubernetes in Azure North and West Europe.

A longtime AWS user learning Azure for a year, they find deploying resources with Terraform takes twice as long.

A former data center builder, they have run workloads on Azure for years, would not go back, and judge the bundled services worthwhile compared with colo.

They hit a Postgres Flexible issue in East US and were told to move region, then had vCPU quota requests for AKS in East US 2 backlogged for days with no support reply.

They could not start even the cheapest VM during the day because of capacity limits, and at a previous company could not power all VMs on at once to patch.

They are moving workloads off Azure because of long-running East US capacity constraints, weak networking and poor support.

They had to relocate about 10 live applications between regions because of quota availability.

Having used both clouds for a long time, they find Azure stronger on PaaS, Microsoft integration and security, but fiddly compared with AWS.

In their experience Azure scales very well with fewer than 50 developers and the portal is practical for enterprise apps, though the CLI feels bulky.

They find Azure's scaling and pricing model and security model horrible and confusing, with tier gating that forces costly SKU upgrades.

They like Azure's searchable portal and say Entra integration, such as managed identity auth to Postgres, is amazing.

After using both clouds for a long time, they say Azure gives them headaches with unfinished features, and Linux admin is clunky.

They have run a $4 DigitalOcean VPS with SQLite and Cloudflare R2 as their favorite setup for a while, able to run practically any server.

Over 5 years across two companies they have had good experiences with Azure frontline support, which escalates to the product team and gets issues resolved in a timely manner.

They have run AKS with a load balancer and app gateway on Azure for 5+ years at under 10k a month without anyone pressuring them to use managed services.

They run large GKE Autopilot clusters that handle updates, scaling and a service mesh by themselves after setup, so no dedicated platform team is needed. They note it is expensive.

Their Azure RDS-to-Flexible Server migration tool never worked, and support took 4 days to say so. They also hit capacity shortages and were told to try again at night.

They say Azure Professional Direct support has never fixed a problem for them, spending months asking for debug data before saying nothing can be done. AWS Enterprise support has helped them far more.

Their startup ran managed Docker services and VMs on Azure credits. They were denied higher credit tiers, which they link to being easy to migrate away, though they call the program amazing with helpful resources.

A compromised Gemini API key ran up about $19,000 on their nearly idle account, charges kept growing after deleting everything, and billing support gave only generic replies.

After an early $25 usage-threshold billing hold, DigitalOcean suspended the account with a same-day deadline and deleted four years of data.

They had a similar runaway bill over a year ago, negotiated it down to about 2k, and are still arguing with Google to reduce it.

They say DigitalOcean support does not read what is sent and just auto replies.

Uptime has been really bad lately with no error logs; migrating to another host.

They built an MCP agent on Container Apps and Azure AI Foundry with scale to zero, spent under NZ$10 so far, saw 10 to 30 second cold starts, and liked the built-in observability.

They call GCP the most user hostile cloud and say its support experts do not know the product, so customers must re-educate them.

They woke up to a bill of around 75 lakh INR from generative API calls on their project.

They switched to Azure app containers after the Railway outage and found it surprisingly easy using the Azure CLI.

Their production sites went down in a Railway outage and they could not reach the .env keys stored there, so they plan to switch.

They say Railway has gone down repeatedly because of Google, and they left after the first incident.

Their CRM with 30+ clients was inaccessible during the Railway outage and they plan to move to DigitalOcean and keep daily database backups.

As a solo dev they find Railway makes deployment and backend previews easy with little setup, and call it a good experience so far despite the outage.

They like Railway's development tooling and use its CLI a lot to trigger deployments on their staging environment.

This is their second Railway outage in four months and they are now planning to move to AWS.

They just started with Railway and enjoy the developer experience, performance and pricing, but their traffic dropped to zero in the outage and they call it a warning shot.

They chose Railway Metal for their deployments but found the dashboard had been flipped to public cloud without their knowledge.

They report frequent service issues on Railway lately and are in the middle of migrating to Koyeb.

Using Railway and likes it, but the free hobby tier is gone and $5/month is steep for early stages.

Free VMs are usually unavailable and, when granted, are randomly removed without clear reasons.

A Cloud Run app behind IAP and GCIP suddenly lost sign-in across 14 deployments, and despite paying thousands monthly for enhanced support it took days with no replication.

Their account was suspended for alleged abuse after a hackathon, locking them out of billing and projects while a charge still hit their card. Appeals went unanswered until a support ticket eventually fixed it.

Has used Oracle's free ARM VM for a couple of years and finds it very stable.

Four weeks on Railway Pro for database and software: no complete outages, but timeouts on heavy calculations and deploy problems.

They love the platform but say first-line support cannot interpret bug evidence, so you need an account rep to escalate.

They tried moving Cloud Run workloads to Azure for a client and had real problems with the docs and with building from a plain Dockerfile.

They found Google Cloud a mess to navigate as a new user, with help pages pointing to deprecated information.

They like GCP design but call its support the worst they have seen and report finding dozens of bugs in its services.

They had a gcloud and Workspace issue open for over a month while support bounced them between teams without a fix.

Their team uses GCP and finds it a colossal pain to use and ungodly expensive.

Having worked with both AWS and GCP in enterprises, they prefer GCP for org hierarchy, console UI, VPC setup, Kubernetes and data products, though internal navigation and escalations are harder.

Main DB writer sat in the affected us-east-1 AZ during the May 2026 thermal event and was badly hit.

They have had a P1 case open for almost a month and support gave them hallucinated gcloud commands, then ended the call when challenged.

They say GCP support is poor even at enterprise level, with cases taking months and half-baked features, but its ML services are second to none.

They use both clouds and like GCP Kubernetes and global VPCs, but found GCP account reps churned and less supportive than AWS teams.

During a us-east-1 power event had a degraded EBS volume and a t2 instance in bad shape; a stop/start fixed it.

Has run a SvelteKit app on Railway with Drizzle and hosted Supabase for nearly two years without seeing the error others hit.

Hosts a WordPress site on Oracle PAYG using only free-tier resources, with weekly boot volume backups.

Runs half a dozen sites and many subdomains on a single DigitalOcean Ubuntu droplet.

They ran VMs and a fastapi endpoint on GCP and had the project suspended without notice for vague TOS violations, losing access to billing and logs.

A solo developer whose Gemini spend cap did not stop a charge of about 5x the limit after a stolen key, then saw six support agents over five weeks and only a partial courtesy refund.

They hit the same delayed-billing problem on GCP, where damage was done before charges showed up, and say their team is moving off GCP because of how Google handles it.

They set a usage cap on Google Cloud and never received an alert when it was exceeded, which they call predatory.

They find it hard to reach a human at Google Cloud support and only get an AI operator that hangs up on them.

Their Gemini API project had a $120 monthly spend cap but the system failed to throttle, producing over $1,800 in charges in one day.

Google support closed their case refusing any credit for charges from leaked API keys, saying the decision was final, and they consider legal action.

Bakes an AMI with Packer and updates containers on EC2 through GitHub Actions and SSM; works fine, used because they need a static IP.

Their team faced $32,000 in charges within 24 hours, and their support case has been pending ten days with poor support.

Cannot migrate VMs flagged for firmware maintenance on OCI; the only option is to wait for forced shutdown.

They woke up to about $4000 in charges from unauthorized Places API usage after a budget alert fired overnight.

They were hit with an unexpected $369 charge and Google offered to refund only $18.

They report the same runaway-charge incident hitting them on March 12, with about $200k USD per day, and are still struggling with a support case.

They saw a huge Gemini API cost spike and charges continued after support said they would stop. Two weeks later their projects are still down and support was bounced around and useless.

They had a spend cap of 1500 INR but woke up to a 4000 INR bill and a suspended project, with no way to reach billing support.

They were charged about $5 a day for ten days, ignoring their $10 budget. Support eventually refunded around 90 percent.

They were charged about 500 pounds on a dead, unused project in a few minutes. Their account was restricted and the appeal has gone unanswered for four weeks.

They noticed a 160 euro Gemini API spike, and while talking to support 12k euro more accrued. Support has no authority and they have waited three weeks for a refund.

They had about 60000 euro of Gemini API calls exploited overnight against a 100 euro budget limit, and Google raised their tier automatically. Support only says to wait.

Their team received a $12,000 bill on a Gemini API key they doubt was leaked and they are trying to reach a real support agent.

Their company was caught by about 4k of unauthorized charges, blaming laggy billing and key design where Gemini was enabled on an unrestricted Firebase key.

They were charged 100 dollars in one day from an unused random key and Google left the bill in place when they appealed.

Their low-traffic e-learning site ran up about 3,000 rupees in one night against a 100 rupee budget, so they shut it down and moved to Vercel.

They describe GCP as buggy and hard to set up, with billing arriving a day later so overspend goes unnoticed.

Runs WireGuard on a Lightsail instance and says it works nicely.

Calls Railway's RBAC broken and support non-existent; cannot even file a ticket because project selection is broken.

Their monthly usage of about 200 USD jumped to 10000 USD in 2 hours; billing took 24 hours to reflect and Google only cut the invoice to 2800 USD as goodwill.

They suffered 220k of spending in 3 days and are still waiting on a support case while pushing back with their reseller.

They received a huge bill while using only the free tier after an API leak, and after long back and forth Google still wanted them to pay.

They run 11 internal sites and APIs on Azure shared compute for about 65 dollars a year and like the easy integration and telemetry. They add it would need optimization and would not suit prod.

After 10+ years on AWS they have used Google Cloud for 2 years and are impressed by its comparative stability and cohesive APIs.

After enabling Gemini API in a test project, an old unrestricted Maps key was abused and the billing report showed about 36,824 euros in a week.

They have spent 3 years at an Azure-only company building small to medium solutions on PaaS. They say it is not bad to work with once RBAC, managed identities and SKUs are understood.

They find Fly.io the closest thing to it just works for deploying Node apps, with a small team and simple product and no heavy IAM setup.

Ran a single EC2 Spot instance for 14 months without an interruption, while cautioning to plan for the two-minute reclaim warning.

Uses Cloudflare Workers plus a DigitalOcean droplet for anything needing a real server; about $12 a month in total.

After a couple of years of professional use, they saw things that worked yesterday stop working with no changelog, and docs trailed actual API behavior by months.

Uses EC2 Spot instances as GitHub Actions runners, about 90% cheaper than GitHub-managed ones, and they work flawlessly.

They consider Azure the best of the big three, like its UI and report no downtime on any of their products.

Runs entire production EKS clusters with dozens of nodes on EC2 Spot, picking less common instance types to cut terminations.

They have used Azure for pretty big projects and never had the slightest problem.

Ran EC2 Spot nodes in production EKS clusters for years; volatile but less so than the documentation suggests.

Runs a gaming server on EC2 Spot: gets a two-minute warning to back up and restore on a new instance, paying less with no noticeable difference in the best case.

Used a $6 DigitalOcean droplet for load tests because it spins up quickly; it handled about 1,700 req/s before tuning.

DigitalOcean blocks mail ports and their IPs were listed as bad spam sources, unlike a clean OVH IP.

Used Heroku for two years at work; it made spinning up test environments super easy.

Found DigitalOcean the best price, performance, uptime and feature set in testing and it keeps working.

Moving clients off Heroku but misses its maturity; once you knew how it worked it was pretty reliable.

Their only-region EC2 server went down when me-south-1 was hit and the app has been unreachable for days with no migration path.

Dev time on support and maintenance for Railway was not worth it and client reputation suffered, so they moved.

Their free instance stopped working after the trial period, could not be rebooted, and a new one could not be created in London because of capacity; no live chat support.

Runs standalone Next.js builds on Fly.io and is super happy with it.

Five years on Oracle free tier with no issues or downtime.

They run a Node.js app on Fly.io and see real downtime they trace to the provider's servers. Their own monitoring does not match Fly's status reports.

Used DigitalOcean with no issues ever; the only reason to leave is the price.

Frustrated by Fly.io outages and no longer advises it.

Company has used Heroku for over a decade and its cost is negligible, so they will just move to another PaaS.

After a few months on Railway calls it a solid choice with much more predictable pricing than Vercel, feeling more like owning the infrastructure.

Runs services with 100+ users on Railway; outages are mostly builder-related and have not hit running workloads, but only non-critical services stay.

Says DigitalOcean App Platform costs 5 dollars a month, only needs a GitHub repo, and can auto-scale if needed.

Loved the Railway developer experience over two years but left for a self-hosted VPS because of major outages every two to three months, sometimes six hours or more.

Moved two SaaS products from Railway to DigitalOcean App Platform: less user friendly, more flexible for scaling.

Has loved Render so far because they always know what they will spend every month.

Says Railway at 5 dollars a month handles most cases for an organically growing app and runs smoothly with light caching.

Hosts a few Next.js and Vite apps on Railway for less than 10 dollars a month and likes its pricing model.

Has run postfix mail servers on DigitalOcean droplets for about 10 years.

Only ever had mail deliverability problems when running on a DigitalOcean droplet.

They ran up about 3k dollars of Maps API usage on a free GCP account; Google voided the charge after they cited a school project but shadow banned the account.

As a student founder with startup credits they were billed about 4000 GBP in 3 days for Claude models via Marketplace that credits did not cover, and support said it could not adjust the charge.

Calls Oracle's always-free tier absurdly generous (200GB storage, up to 2 VMs) but notes idle instances can be reclaimed and Ampere ARM capacity is hard to get.

Has used DigitalOcean for many years without issue.

Account suspended after an abuse notice with no detail; lost access to droplets and database backups for almost 48 hours.

Account was suspended with nothing running, then reinstated a day later with no wrongdoing found.

DigitalOcean suspended their account for unspecified platform abuse; it was unlocked after 24 hours with a generic false-flag reply.

A DigitalOcean account for over 10 years; occasional abuse reports always resolved without issue.

Several years on DigitalOcean; abuse cases always came with a chance to fix them and never a lockout.

DigitalOcean shut them down twice with no way to reach anyone or learn why, so they moved the backend to Linode.

They are doing a cost-saving analysis at work and find duplicated logging and workspaces plus insane Log Analytics pricing for little use.

Creating a free VM failed with no free-tier capacity in their Milan region, which cannot be changed after signup.

Lost database connections on 3 projects during an outage with no support contact; moved to Render, which is slower but more reliable.

They raised Cosmos RU throughput to speed a data transfer and were hit with a $550 monthly bill.

Their current Log Analytics spend is about 300k a year, so they are moving to self-hosted Grafana LGTM with OTEL.

They find Log Analytics very expensive, with bills exploding if a service like APIM or Firewall is misconfigured. Hard limits are awkward because they stop logs being written.

Their team had high Log Analytics bills and moved some logs to Azure Data Explorer to cut cost.

A Logic App polling every couple of minutes with the 90 day default run history stored about 5TB of hidden data, costing them a couple of thousand euros before they cut history to 7 days.