There are definitely ways to get some really good hardware from lowend shops as well.

Hetzner is pretty decent too actually but I actually think that OVH might be even cheaper while still being competitive, but in the case of OVH, I think one minor issue people can have is the setup fee at times but time to time like during black fridays or special deals, there are ways to get 0 setup fees.

If someone wants something stable, I think that OVH is pretty great as well and is comparable to Hetzner in terms of pure price but I have heard that given their scale, their support can be 50/50 but I recommend joining their discord and maybe even using (twitter oof) to message them as thsi was something which worked for someone on hackernews the last time something like this was discussed.

If you are okay with some more steal factor, use netcup.

You should also probably look at gaming type servers too. I know a person who is a one man shop who was more passionate about these stuff and did have high-end hardware (200k$) in investment in his provider.

Going more into the specifics of finance from provider side, usually the idea is that they recoup the costs in 5 years if running at decent capacity/having sold quite a bit but the first few years so as in example of the 200k$, they currently make IIRC 40k-60k$ per year, you have to somehow find your way to customers but that is being messed up because of AI ram prices as their costs to fix any broken hardware has absolutely skyrocketed eating much of their profits.

It's an extremely competitive market at times so if you are looking for something specific. You can actually ask about it in forums like lowendtalk, lowendspirit and these people/providers can respond matching what you are looking for price/performance in for and they can also provide test servers if need be and there is a unified form of benchmarking within this space called yabs (yet-another-benchmark-script) which you can ask for a provider.

But in all regards, if someone doesn't want to go through this hassle, I will just say that the same provider that I mentioned earlier had also in public mentioned how hetzner prices are pretty competitive and in all honesty I agree with that too.

If someone doesn't want to go through some/any part of this hassle, then hetzner/OVH are my go-to safe options. They are big enough that their downtime shouldn't be blamed on you for picking them while being really good in themselves. (Something which I have actually heard quite often mentioned on hackernews)

And within this space, if you don't absolutely know what you want, there is no generic winner as there are niches that are occupied. So if you ever want to find any alternative to hetzner for even more cheaper, its best that you first decide what are the things exactly that you want and then ask rather than see for pre-existing if possible.

Also if possible, make deals during blackfriday/cyber-monday. Not sure about Hetzner but in OVH/other providers, you can get recurring deals and the sever setup costs etc. removed sometimes.

Why is the n4d-2 spot price nearly double that of the n2d-2?

Awesome write up. I use EC2 t4g instances extensively as I tend to scale workloads horizontal (using Kubernetes, Docker) and admittedly the workloads aren’t cpu constrained. Would be interesting to see how t4g’s compare to other low end comparable VMs on GCP, DigitalOcean, Hetzner. Though I get the difficulty testing as it requires maxing out CPU credits (waiting) for accurate results before starting testing for each VM.

Looking forward to t5g’s whenever (if ever) they release.

"Unfortunately, the [Hetzner] CPX22is available only in eu-central and ap-southeast, but if that’s OK with you it is the best value and fastest overall."

GCP (near the top) 3 years reserved 16 ARM cores + 120 GB costs + 1TB local SSD costs > $1k/month. It does not even match the specs of a Ryzen AI 395 Framework miniPC that goes for ~$4k AFAIK.

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tl;dr Hetzner has best performance for the price. But also Hetzner just bumped prices like 30%

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You can't compare VPS with VMs from major cloud provider, VPS don't offer anything beside basic compute.

Also virtualization from cloud provider is way better because they have custom hardware and software so you don't suffer from noisy neighbours for example.