Ask HN: which cloud provider do you use

[tigroferoce]

We use AWS, but it's expensive and have a lot of tricks and hidden issues. I'd like to move towards a PaaS provider, but don't know which one.

Applications are written in php and rails.

I know/have tried Google App Engine and Heroku. Would you advocate for one of these? Would you suggest anything else? Why?

[Avalaxy]

Azure is absolutely awesome for PaaS. They have libraries for both PHP and Ruby. The services that Azure provides make it really easy to autoscale, use messaging, storage and caching across multiple servers, and there are services for all kinds of stuff like sending push notifications to mobile devices, transcoding video, etc.

I think it's cheaper than IaaS on Azure, but I'm not sure. I never compared them that well. Fortunately there's a pricing calculator on azure.com.

[kaolinite]

For PHP, you might like https://pagodabox.com - I haven't used it myself but some people are using it where I work and I'm overhearing good things. Not sure if they support Rails yet but they're working on it I believe.

However, I suspect a PaaS will be more expensive than AWS (assuming you're talking about EC2 and not Elastic Beanstalk).