1. Best DX

2. faster, cheaper, most secure

3. Google is a thought leader in the cloud space (among many)

That being said, I also like Cloudflare a lot

Co-location or a VPS seems like a best choice in all cases except when you're an enterprise.

BenderCloud: just a bunch of VPS and physical server providers

I like my cloud best because I can shift financial resources to the provider behaving the best and dial down those that are misbehaving. I do not utilize any vendor-specific services for my hobby junk. It also means if a vendor tries to passive-aggressively cancel me I can just flip DNS and stop rewarding them with money.

AWS because I know how it breaks, Google Cloud if you’re starting from scratch due to great DX, Oracle Cloud if you trust them to not go all Oracle with it someday since it’s solid tech, Azure if you spent Thanksgiving dinner eating crayons at the kids’ table, IBM “Cloud” if you hate your company and yourself.

Serious uncomplicated work shit - AWS

Serious complicated work shit - GCP

Because they pay for my dinner dates - Azure

I like GCP because they overcomplicate everything. (That api is not available because 1. You have to activate it 2. Your permissions don’t allow it 3. Your quota is exceeded 4. It is deprecated 5. It is in alpha 6. All of the above)

I like azure because it’s just like AWS but with a bunch of unwanted windows support that will actively make everything worse.

Hetzner was cool, but they do some insane routing things.

OVH seems like they came to the party a decade late even though they were here day one.

That’s all I know.

I've been a customer of Big Cloud and Small Cloud (DO, Linode).

From a position of zero knowledge otherwise, I would probably default to Azure just because I have a lot of faith in it being able to drive enterprise workloads while staying compliant with whatever regulations exist under the sun. If I find out that more or less we don't care about that I then pass the torch to AWS because they tend to have a slight pride advantage. If I find out yet more information, like e.g. the client prefers running everything on VMs they themselves control, I might look into Hetzner, etc. Cloudflare for very specific egress or serverless needs... But you can see it really all depends on the project, and if you don't know any better you might as well just pick one of the big three at random and go for it.

Microsoft Azure was also very confusing and I don't think I was even able to use it because I had no clue how.

Google had the best dashboard and I never had issue with anything, despite it lacking in offering(back then).

In the end, I ditched all cloud providers and went to standard VPS providers because cloud is good to get you going when you might need elasticity for unknown growth. Buts after that, it makes no financial sense and is a huge vendor lock-in trap.

PS and no, companies that provide VPS hosting are not "cloud".

Because others are overpriced or overengineered. Often both (looking at you, aws, gcs, azure).