This is a snippet from an advisory mail that we sent a customer who is using AWS for his previous hosting, and is now contemplating which hosting service to use for Odoo.
To their credit, AWS is unparalleled in their breath of services and height of scalability. The brand is just as potent, though Google and Azure’s cloud services come close as well.
Support
In moments of distress, whatever the cause maybe, the hosters in Germany connect straight to a technician within minutes. As usual with infrastructure, 99% of the times it just runs without an incident. Then something suddenly happens, at which time, you need all hands to put off a fire.
Once on the phone, they tick like a German technician, without routing call overseas, playing music, opening mail tickets and such.
Direct and Deep Access into Systems
AWS has a huge middleware overhead using API-calls, web-interfaces etc.
So for example to dive deep into a Linux system to find the cause of a crash, swap the offending Python library and restarting the services, is a “long-way” using AWS.
On Hetzner for ex. on the other hand, we fire up a terminal, one command, and the technician has full control of the machine.
AWS needs Special Skills
This is a big one: the learning curve of operating AWS is significant, sometimes requiring courses, certifications etc. There are "AWS experts", and being a Linux expert doesn’t guarantee that they can be quickly operational on AWS.
German Hosters like Hetzner cut the chase.
If a sysadmin is adept at managing a Linux box, he can move like a Ninja around their infrastructure.
Costs
AWS is about 4-5 times more expensive (unnecessary, with no proportional value-add).
Accessible, yet scalable
Last I heard, Hetzner is approaching a 100,000 hardware units, and if ever a customer wonders where their systems are running, he can be pointed to accessible facilities like https://binged.it/3wKRMz2.
I agree this is a perception thing, but many customers just don’t buy into “somewhere across the oceans, in the cloud” when it comes to their mission-critical software.
From VMs, to self-managed hardware units, to managed-services, to scalable storage units, scaling has never been a problem in our 10+ years of experience with Hetzner.
