![[Home]](/img/sr_logo.jpg){kind=logo}
I have been hosting my personal website on a nanode Linode instance for over a year without issues (including running test shiny apps), and have used digital ocean for experiments for the past several months, and these seem comparable in terms of reliability. Though the services are different, there are subtle variations (sometimes critical) which make one offering more suitable than the other for different purposes, and this mix and match is apparently necessary if you are budget conscious.
[[1][Scaleway's]] offering is well aligned to experimental and development work. DO/Linode are mature services and have excellent documentation for most things you need. DO's interface is the best among them. In addition to 75 GB of storage Scaleway's S3 storage place no limits in data transfer, especially say from their own compute instance, say running a shiny server. The S3 volumes could provide backup for the database, files etc. However, both DO and Linode offer 250 GB of S3 compatible object storage for 5$/month with 1TB of data transfer (which I think is sufficient for small-medium apps and DB's). A bunch of scaleway's products are not yet released, and I had some niggles working with their S3 storage. Again, there are variations - for example one cannot create folders on Linode’s object storage service. This is why I said DO for production and reliability. In terms of cost and basic reliability for POC's and etc things that are 'ephemeral' - Scaleway is quite economical.
Imo - AWS has a lot of sensible aspects and their tiered system could certainly save costs for established workflows and relatively larger budgets. However, I think I'm intimidated by the pay for each and every thing model, particularly with respect to data transfer charges. FWIW: AWS have a cool 'developer support' tier (Higher of 30$ per month or 3% of the cost you run up) that reduces experimental and proof-of-concept deployment costs as well. That might actually be a very cost efficient method to do things on AWS, and is probably where I am headed eventually. Even so - AWS does not offer a platform like Matrix DS, wherein docker containers can be easily launched as 'apps', and switched On/Off very easily. i.e shiny applications can be launched when needed very conveniently. Matrix DS imo is economical for deploying ephemeral shiny apps that don't need to be ON all the time.
Probably worth noting, at the moment, GCP offer 300$ credit valid for one year to try out GCP (new users). If your time line is <1 year, is reasonable to run a decent app + db.