I have tried using AWS and Digital Ocean for personal stuff, and Azure at work.
AWS for me personally was too complicated interface wise. It was easy to lose track of running instances and being billed for things, the vast amount of types of things you can spin up also made it sometimes hard to navigate without lots of reading. I think if one of my side projects ever gets to a point where it needs a CDN, scalable EC2 instances and things like that, I'd research AWS, but probably only move to it if I had to. With all this said I do use Amazon SES for my newsletters I run as it's so cheap, I send a 4k subscriber list an email a week, costs about 60p a month.
Digital Ocean is my go to. It's stupidly easy to use, a great UI, genuinely a pleasure to use even compared to work VMWare enterprise stuff. I've been thinking lately about AWS due to load balancing being built in without me having to run my own keepalived stuff, but DO have announced load balancers are almost ready, so I'm rethinking. Here's a shameless referral link that'll give you some free credit: https://m.do.co/c/f24e8a65668a
Azure is Ok. It's not great, it could be worse. The original interface is now called 'legacy', and that's good because it was pretty bad. The new one is a lot nicer to use, but as someone who's biased towards Mac/Linux for the desktop, it feels like Microsoft designed it. It can be a bit clunky, it can be difficult to figure out what the IP of something is instead of its hostname or to jump between different places without having to go through tons of breadcrumbs.
Price wise you can figure that out yourself using publicly available calculators, specific to your needs. DO is probably slightly more than AWS, but for the instant VM spin up from a really nice drag-drop UI (with lots of prebuilt images), easy automated backup, auto SSH key deployment and so on - I can't see myself leaving DO unless I have a specific requirement they can't meet.
AWS for me personally was too complicated interface wise. It was easy to lose track of running instances and being billed for things, the vast amount of types of things you can spin up also made it sometimes hard to navigate without lots of reading. I think if one of my side projects ever gets to a point where it needs a CDN, scalable EC2 instances and things like that, I'd research AWS, but probably only move to it if I had to. With all this said I do use Amazon SES for my newsletters I run as it's so cheap, I send a 4k subscriber list an email a week, costs about 60p a month.
Digital Ocean is my go to. It's stupidly easy to use, a great UI, genuinely a pleasure to use even compared to work VMWare enterprise stuff. I've been thinking lately about AWS due to load balancing being built in without me having to run my own keepalived stuff, but DO have announced load balancers are almost ready, so I'm rethinking. Here's a shameless referral link that'll give you some free credit: https://m.do.co/c/f24e8a65668a
Azure is Ok. It's not great, it could be worse. The original interface is now called 'legacy', and that's good because it was pretty bad. The new one is a lot nicer to use, but as someone who's biased towards Mac/Linux for the desktop, it feels like Microsoft designed it. It can be a bit clunky, it can be difficult to figure out what the IP of something is instead of its hostname or to jump between different places without having to go through tons of breadcrumbs.
Price wise you can figure that out yourself using publicly available calculators, specific to your needs. DO is probably slightly more than AWS, but for the instant VM spin up from a really nice drag-drop UI (with lots of prebuilt images), easy automated backup, auto SSH key deployment and so on - I can't see myself leaving DO unless I have a specific requirement they can't meet.