Pick the host for the workload, not for the logo
There is no single best host, and a firm that tells you otherwise is selling its own convenience. Different workloads have different shapes, and the cost of forcing all of them onto one platform is paid in workarounds. The vendor neutral position is to know what each host is genuinely good at and to place each workload where it fits.
The shapes that matter
A push to deploy web application with per branch previews wants a host built around git and the framework. A piece of always on work, a queue consumer or a scheduled job, wants a host that keeps a process alive rather than one that spins up per request. Media that gets read far more than it gets written wants storage where you do not pay every time a byte leaves. A heavyweight data or machine learning workload wants the big cloud with the managed services to match.
A rough decision map
- Web app, fast iteration, previews per pull request: a git native application host.
- Global edge, media, and zero egress object storage: the edge platform.
- Long running services, workers, cron, persistent connections: an always on host.
- Heavy compute, data warehouse, managed training and inference: the enterprise cloud.
None of these excludes the others. A single product often uses three at once: the app on one, its media on another, its nightly job on a third. The connective tissue is that they all read their configuration from one secrets manager and deploy from one repository.
The cost of getting it wrong
Run a cron job on a platform that bills per invocation and scales to zero, and you will rediscover that it was asleep when the job should have run. Serve large media from a host that charges egress, and the bill arrives as a surprise. Most hosting pain is not a bad host, it is the right workload on the wrong one.
The takeaway
Treat hosting as a portfolio decision. Match each workload to the platform whose default behavior already matches the workload's shape, and you spend your engineering time on the product instead of on fighting the platform.