What are your value drivers when choosing where to run your apps

deployment
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Besides cost, what are the value drivers you use to choose where to run your production applications?

To get you started, I’ve described some non-exhaustive scenarios below.

Perhaps you run a marketing.agency that needs access to detailed performance analytics to tune app performance under load? What do those look like?

Perhaps you have a small, less technical staff with needing campaign dashboards? What basic dashboards would you expect out of the box vs. customizations you would need for your own purposes? Would on-host visualization capabilities matter?

Perhaps you’re part of a global organization where the speed of page loads in Adelaide must be just as quick as they are in Mexico City or Talinn. What are the capabilities and features that matter to you?

Perhaps you have a strategic relationship with a non-AWS hosting services. What do you value then?

Maybe you run an ecommerce site. Or a local NGO. Or a ticketing/reservation/booking platform. Or you your app hosts community activities - both in realtime and async.

Besides price, what are the features and capabilities you look for when choosing where to run your apps? What really matters? What are must haves and what, if there, (1) makes managing them easier or cheaper, and (2) gives you back time for other projects?

If you host in your own datacenter because, are there parts of your workload you do not host yourself? If so, which ones, and again, how do you choose that environment? Beside price, what matters most when making that decision?

Would love to understand your circumstances, how you go about your selection process, and see what are the key value drivers for choosing your provider.

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Well, my view is very limited. Besides cost I look on how the service is going to work with my stack and support my mission. So these are often features and connection to other services that we use. Another one is support and technical support to assist when needed.

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Lately its mostly - what can get me to “infinite scale” - as more and more services are offering that. I’d rather burn money than have product outages.

At the same time - I want to avoid vendor lock-in. A lot of services do a good job at managing this balance. For example, Expo can handle all your operations for your React Native app, but you can also eject the code base at any moment.

Privacy is also important. For example, the team at Galaxy can (probably) easily see the traffic on my apps. On Heroku, you’re kind of invisible, and you can even go for HIPPA compliant hosting, etc.

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