Or, "Old Man Yells at Cloud Hosting".

Currently I host all of my various web sites and services (business and personal) on a single physical Linux box leased from a small ISP. That's been working out fine for me for many years. However, of late my ISP has become so non-responsive to support requests that I can't interpret that any way other than, "We are no longer interested in being an ISP".

So, sadly, I think I need to find new hosting.

My initial instinct, because I am an unfrozen caveman, and your modern ways frighten and confuse me, is to find someone else to rent me a 1U server. But those appear to be nearly nonexistent these days, because in this modern world, That Is Simply Not Done.

(And though there are a few companies that do this, the fact that there are so few makes me suspect that they won't be in business at all a couple years from now.)

So I'm looking at virtualization options from Amazon and Digital Ocean and whatnot, and it's all very confusing. In particular, figuring out how much my performance, storage and bandwidth requirements are actually going to cost is absurdly complicated.

Here's what I have now, that I need to replace with equivalent-or-better:

• 8 core 2GHz (faster would be nice)
• 32 GB RAM
• 2 TB disk
• a backup of that disk
• Outbound bandwidth: 2 TBytes / month

Right now I'm paying $300 / month for that.

So it looks to me like Digital Ocean and Amazon are the closest replacements for that, but it's hard to tell. I think that the closest options are:

• Digital Ocean: Their $240 option (32 GB RAM, 4 core, 90 GB storage, 7TB transfer) looks close, but that's not nearly enough storage, and they charge $100/TB, so that brings it to $440/month. Also they don't specify how fast those cores are.

• Amazon: The m4.2large option (32 GB RAM, 8 core, no storage) looks close, at $258 (paid a year in advance); plus 2TB storage at $200/month. So that puts us at $458/month already. They also don't specify core speed, and that's for 1Gbps, and if I'm doing my math right, 2TB/month is 6.1Mbps, and I can't even tell what they charge for that.

It blows my mind how much they want to charge for disk. I can buy a physical 2TB drive that will last 5+ years for $80, but these jokers want me to pay $200/month for that. That is a markup of 150x! What the hell!

Options I am not interested in:

• Try to get 2TB of bandwidth into the DNA Lounge building and manage my own high availability data center, for a single server.

• Rewrite 20+ years of code that is in a variety of languages into whatever toy-du-jour Google insists things be written in to take advantage of their hosting option.

• "Virtual hosts are great because when you realize you need more, you can instantly upgrade them and start paying more!" I know this excites many of you, so much, but this feature is completely uninteresting to me because my requirements are static and because I prefer to know what I'm paying ahead of time.

• Also, just to head this off too: I realize that many people are of the opinion, "You should run each web site, and each service, on its own virtual server", and while that sounds sensible to me in principle, it sounds less good when each of those virtual servers is an additional $250/month. At that price, I'll run all of my sites out of the same Apache instance, thanks.

So what should I do?