They will first fill the local demand for all their electronics manufacturing. Then their massive computer infra and AI. And if any is left, it will be bundled to local PC exporters like Lenovo.

China also needs RAM for AIs, especially since they have plenty of electrical power and building speed to pump out data-centers.

That's probably what is going to happen, it's a strategic opportunity for the Chinese government here, there's a big market demand that can fuel their domestic production capabilities that nobody wants to take.

Exactly this. The old hardware from a year ago is fine as the typical use-case for a VPS didn't change.

Yes, even if prices would triple, VPSs would still be an attractive offering.

At a certain price people choose not to buy

Until recently I had a 4gb ram 80gb ssd+2tb hd VPS running debian in a Montreal data centre with a real use 700 mbit pipe to my city with a budget provider for the equivalent of $80USD/year. When fio speeds were slow they moved me to a less crowded server. I gave it up as don't need it and moved my personal sites back to NFS for peanuts a year and services to my NAS. The pricing, offsite storage for my backups, Canadian sovereignty, lack of perceived complexity with a big provider was all attractive. I'm a physician with a tech hobby and last serious tech work was in the LAMP days with perl and php. Trying to think of learning about AWS and screwing up usage based billing was daunting!

Much better prices, and simplicity. The power you get from Hetzner or Kimsufi is crazy compared to AWS.

If I need to host something small, I don’t want to mess around with the many permissions and quirks that are required to deal with AWS. It is often much easier to just setup the server on a standalone service.

Price. 1 vCore, 2GB RAM, 20GB SSD, unlimited traffic (though throttled to 200mbit/s after transferring 2TB within 24 hours) = 1.85€

That is a nice way to have a static IP on the internet and enough resources to do small things like host a nameserver and/or OpenVPN/Wireguard.

I may have had 4 hours of downtime in one year, always announced days in advance.

I'd use digital ocean over AWS for any SMB or lean startup (so... anyone not attached to an infinite money hose that has to either scale to NEED AWS, or die trying) just because of 1) their UI not being broken glass you have to crawl over and 2) not having eight trillion features that make doing simple things hard and 3) pricing

If the only thing you need is "server, accessible via the internet, always online", and you're not interested in all the vendor lock-in masquerading as useful services offered by the big cloud providers, then small VPS hosts are 100% the way to go. For mid-sized servers they're cheaper (i.e., stuff that wouldn't be free on the big clouds, but not "I want a petaflop"), with more transparent pricing (I pay $12, every month. If I get inundated with traffic, I'll get cut off until I choose to pay more).

I used a vps service hosted in a country with strong digital privacy laws to host a personal wireguard+pihole vpn. I could probably think up a decent argument why that privacy with the smaller guy was only nominal but I could absolutely think up a good argument why doing that on a big name would have no privacy guarantees at all, especially as someone who would be in the bottom rung payment-wise.

Never had problems with downtime and I payed, like, 40 bucks a year over 3 years. I think I had to restart the thing once because of something dumb I did on my end.

Small VPS hosts oversell like crazy and they offer much lower prices. Also their reliability might be worse, because they don't migrate VM between hosts.

Low cost, simplicity and customer service.

AWS does offer Lightsail which is similar pricing.

Others have mentioned the general pricing, simplicity etc.

Outbound data pricing is a potentially huge saving.

AWS is as much as $90/TB outbound with 1GB free. Hetzner is $1.20/TB (in EU and US) with 1TB/20TB (US/EU) free.

(Good) Smaller places are more likely to have actual technical staff you can talk to.

10-100x cheaper

Where small VPS hosts can make a difference: require no KYC, accept crypto payments.

Simplicity, price, stability.

Simplicity, and low price.

VPS services are usually really, really simple and fairly cheap.

I'd say that actually VPS prices is where we actually see computing prices going down rather than on the big 3.

AWS used to optimize further and pass down the savings to the customers back in the day, now they don't do it anymore.

Not being US owned can be an important one in this geopolitical climate.

Pricing. They overprovision aggressively but most people actually just need a 0.1 CPU available remotely for the majority of their use cases.

I replaced with a home server and it costs way more just in power hahaha.

Pricing (both cheaper and more predictable), and reduced complexity.

Not being Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

I moved from AWS to Hetzner, because: 1. lower prices, 2. not American

You definitely can use Linux with few simple servers with 128 MB RAM.

Install can be tricky indeed, but if you have installed system, it's easier.

My NixOS SSH jump host server here idles at 234 MB of which 64 MB is systemd-journald (which I assume can be reduced with some settings of how much to keep in RAM).