At GitLab we went from AWS to Azure, then to Google Cloud (this was a few years ago). AWS was what we started with, and I think like most companies very little attention was paid to the costs, setup, etc. The result was that we were basically setting money on fire.<p>I think at some point Azure announced $X in free credits for YC members, and GitLab determined this would save us something like a year's worth in bills (quite a bit of money at the time). Moving over was rather painful, and I think in the months that we used Azure literally nobody was happy with it. In addition, I recall we burned through the free credits _very_ fast.<p>I don't recall the exact reasoning for switching to GCP, but I do recall it being quite a challenging process that took quite some time. Our experiences with GCP were much better, but I wouldn't call it perfect. In particular, GCP had/has a tendency to just randomly terminate VMs for no clear reason whatsoever. Sometimes they would terminate cleanly, other times they would end up in a sort of purgatory/in between state, resulting in other systems still trying to connect to them but eventually timing out, instead of just erroring right away. IIRC over time we got better at handling it, but it felt very Google-like to me to just go "Something broke, but we'll never tell you why".<p>Looking back, if I were to start a company I'd probably stick with something like Hetzner or another affordable bare metal provider. Cloud services are great _if_ you use their services to the fullest extend possible, but I suspect for 90% of the cases it just ends up being a huge cost factor, without the benefits making it worth it.