This website https://abh.ai has been hosted on almost all of the major players in the cloud hosting business. I started out with Scaleway around 7 years ago when they were providing these small ARM options with 20GB SSD. It was the cheapest solution back then costing less than 5€ (300-ish INR). But that doesn't mean it wasn't a good solution. It was excellent! It was fast and reliable. But because it was ARM and at the time a 32-bit processor, many things like docker could not be properly installed. This is why I decided to look for alternatives, which eventually brought me back to Scaleway!
After my initial experience with Scaleway, I started out with DigitalOcean because I got around 500$ (35000-ish INR) in credit and it lasted me upwards of a year. DigitalOcean was amazing at the time. Despite being an amateur, I was quickly able to set up a Drupal site on a LAMP stack. The simplicity was also in part because of the excellent documentation of DigitalOcean. Initially, it was 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM cloud server, which quickly started running into problems when I moved to Drupal 8. A simple composer install would just fill up the RAM and die. I resolved this for some time by aggressively swapping. This worked for a while but the performance was suffering and I decided to upgrade to a 2vCPU 2GB RAM. This increased my cost every month to be over 10$ which for me was a lot at the time because I was broke. This is when I decided to switch to AWS free tier.
AWS definitely had a lot more options and the free tier was definitely cheaper, being free and all. But I decided to go with t3.small or t3.micro I'm not sure. I'm always confused by their naming system. But it cost me around 2000 INR a month which was again expensive for me. But I lived with it for some time before deciding to move to Google Cloud.
The move to Google Cloud was more because of their 30000 INR credit and also because I wanted to learn how to use it. It was good for a while, but I quickly realized that it was a bad idea after my credits expired before even a year was done and the bill came up to 2500 a month and the forecasts were starting to terrify me! The interface for Google Cloud was also quite confusing. It took me a good 1 hour to figure out how to reactivate my account after it was suspended because of non-payment of bills. So I paid the 5000 something INR bill that was due and moved to Scaleway again.
Scaleway was different this time. It had grown! More options, more speed, slightly more expensive but still cheap. I have a 2vCPU 2GB RAM Debian server which costs me just 7.3€ (640-ish INR). And it is fast! After some optimizations on the Drupal side, I was able to get the performance of this tiny instance to be much faster than what I previously had for the same cost.
This is the performance of this page hosted on a tiny Scaleway Debian instance.
