Consider additional cloud providers

[agallant]

It'd be nice to support at least several cloud providers that (a) have a nice API, and (b) have good payment support (i.e. can process payment from a variety of countries). And of course, (c) usable website with nice signup flow (and perhaps a free trial/tier) is also a plus.

It looks like we currently have some level of Heroku support. Other providers to consider (with checkmarks here that should be checked once we've evaluated and decided yes/no):

• [ ] AWS EC2 (docs)
  • Pros: big (unlikely to be blocked?), robust
  • Cons: difficult signup, maybe a bit pricey (though it's come down, and has a 1 year trial)
• [ ] Google Compute Engine (docs)
  • Pros: big (not as AWS but still obviously a large backer), robust
  • Cons: also relatively difficult signup, and proxies may be against TOS
• [ ] Digital Ocean (API)
  • Pros: cheaper and easier signup, no "big company" stigma (some users may prefer)
  • Cons: with smaller size comes more blockability/potentially lower reliability
• [ ] Vultr (API)
  • Pros: comparable to Digital Ocean except even newer/smaller
  • Cons: comparable to Digital Ocean except even newer/smaller
• [ ] Linode (API)
  • Pros: basically a "premiumish" smaller provider that predates Digital Ocean
  • Cons: the $10 plan is competitive w/Digital Ocean but there is no $5 plan, and also more generally the same "it's a smaller company" tradeoff

There's definitely others out there, but for now I think focusing on those with at least a bit of brand recognition (Vultr is the youngest but it seems to be doing okay) as well as a documented API is a good plan. I'm not sure how to check whether or not these providers can process international payment, any thoughts there are welcome.

[agallant]

Digital Ocean is implemented, and Linode is the next-most-similar worth taking a look at. Some other possibilities:

• Heroku (https://www.heroku.com/pricing) - has free tier but you need to sleep 6 hours every 24.
• OpenShift by Red Hat (https://www.openshift.com/pricing/index.html) - has free tier but unclear how flexible the service is (webapp oriented)
• Carina by Rackspace (https://getcarina.com/) - Docker based, currently free beta, future pricing model unclear