Best Cloud Infrastructure Providers

For straightforward compute, Hetzner, Vultr, DigitalOcean and Scaleway are usually cheaper than AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. The hyperscalers charge more because you are buying an enormous catalogue, global scale, and an ecosystem that removes integration work. If your workload is a single service, the specialist wins on price; if it touches twelve services, the hyperscaler often wins overall.

Infrastructure as a Service is used when you need control over the operating system, the network topology, the security groups and the storage layout. It suits legacy applications, specialised runtimes, and anything with non-standard requirements. Most modern greenfield workloads do not need IaaS — serverless and managed platforms are less work and often cheaper.

Bare metal removes the hypervisor overhead and gives you dedicated CPU and storage, which matters for latency-sensitive databases, licensed software and high-frequency trading. It costs more and you manage the OS and the hardware yourself. A virtual machine is the better default for most workloads including databases.

The biggest wins are rarely cutting the hourly rate. Right-size instances, use sustained-use or committed-use discounts, shut down non-production environments outside working hours, move cold data to cheap object storage, and control egress by keeping traffic inside the provider network. Most bills are dominated by a handful of idle resources.