When I see the enthousiast reactions to the cloud hosting tip, I often wonder why? What do you see as the advantages, and where does it provide a good fit? I can understand the 5 euro/month vps for a single instance case. As soon as I need redundancy, monitoring and scaling, I still need to understand so much of the underlying infrastructure that the step to DevOps seems awfully small. Neiher Heroku, nor AWS make scaling transparent, AFAIK. That is to say, they'll start up new instances just fine. That only helps when processing is the problem, not internal bandwidth. And solving the wrong problem only leads to high costs. The cost figures I've seen published on the web suggest that most larger scale usage would be better of with at least their regular demand covered by dedicated servers. I know hosting in the US is much more expensive than in Europe. Digitalocean at least seems to give more reasonable price/performance. AWS vs Hetzner seems uncomparable Your thoughts? Stephan