The title is clickbait or maybe simply misguided in my opinion. A cheap VM and Serverless services are very different things and not directly comparable.
But I do sometimes get the impression that the simple approaches are discarded too easily today. You can rent a lot of hardware pretty cheap from Hetzner and the raw power you get is much higher than what you get with cloud services for the same amount of money. Of course the cloud also provides more stuff, but you really pay a hefty price for some of the things you get there (cough traffic).
The difference gets even larger when you look at the Hetzner root servers, that's a lot of CPU, RAM and storage for little money. And renting actual servers does seem to be overlooked a bit at times, often the comparison is between the cloud and actually buying servers and doing everything yourself.
It's true the title is clickbait and VMs and serverless are completely different beasts.
However, there is something right in this title: when you take into account how serverless was originally marketed ("you save costs as you run things only when you need so you save on these expensive ec2s running 24/7") and the reality (performance issues, cold boot, arbitrary timeout limit, high cost for longer-running processes) it may turn out that cheap VMs might work much better in scenarios where serverless was initially considered.
Who are comparable providers in your opinion? Hetzner has KYC and needs ID for you to use their services, I’d rather go with a service that didn’t. Any recommendations?
There some hetzner resellers which accept crypto coins instead
OVH(and subsidiaries like server
4 you,kimsufi) is the pricing a bit higher but comparable (in some regions)
But last time I used ovh Hetzner also didn't require Id verification, maybe they changed since then
Ionos also similarly priced didn't need Id last time I used them
OVH wants ID as well in some cases. If you're in the US you aren't getting an OVH overseas anymore to my knowledge. Although, you can get 2gbps unmetered on your servers which is awesome.
I've just been being lazy and buying a ___domain from namecheap and getting the VPS Pulsar (6GB RAM, 4cores), 250mbps up/down for when I do a project. one server does fine for multiple projects usually.
But I do sometimes get the impression that the simple approaches are discarded too easily today. You can rent a lot of hardware pretty cheap from Hetzner and the raw power you get is much higher than what you get with cloud services for the same amount of money. Of course the cloud also provides more stuff, but you really pay a hefty price for some of the things you get there (cough traffic).
The difference gets even larger when you look at the Hetzner root servers, that's a lot of CPU, RAM and storage for little money. And renting actual servers does seem to be overlooked a bit at times, often the comparison is between the cloud and actually buying servers and doing everything yourself.