Tossing in my qualified opinion on why customers choose big companies for hosting and with emphasis on also paying higher rates.
1. Name recognition matters. Real companies spend fortunes on establishing name recognition. When you achieve commonly known status, the money is auto-pilot and just shows up. Very little is needed to maintain healthy momentum and sustained business.
1.A. Look at brands like say GoDaddy with their Super Bowl ads. Yes, those cost a ton, but GoDaddy has rode that wave for years. I bet your mother knows who GoDaddy is, but has no clue who Digital Ocean is.
1.B. McDonald's doesn't and hasn't historically done regular advertising. Sure they spend on ads and always have, but their efforts are to remind you they are still everywhere. As if those arches big and bright somehow lost visibility. They do more of a supplemental advertising and on somewhat predictable schedules to up buyers during known cycles, mostly down cycles.
2. Brand is name recognition. The more known a brand is, usually the more valuable / more dollars of transactions they are doing. There is usually a strong relationship between the two. There are exceptions notably in hosting where sites like LET have local celebrity brands ran by guys ever on the attention getting emphasis. Those brands are potluck vs. the average stable and known company. They may or may not be outperforming the stable staple companies.
3. Trusting a company is going to be around is unsound. This applies to hosting as much as it does to traditional consumer goods. Technology however is a horrible industry where brands change hands all the time and the buyer axes the old company, murders the products, and mistreats the customers.
3.A. See Endurance International Group and their many botched deals from customer side. Arvixe comes foremost to mind.
4. The scale-on-demand and billed-on-use models are face value when new, appealing. I tried these with Digital Ocean and ended up spending quite a bit more per month. Reason why for me? I don't have a stringed and tied deployment / control system. Things I do are manual and no API dev at this time my side. So resources were used for sandboxes and often teardowns of those didn't happen until end of month or days later, resulting in out of bounds spending.
4.A. Flex billing and flex scaling are high end features for only the most advanced folks. It's very niche. With this comes higher expectations, SLAs, etc. Those all cost to meet, require smart staff with experience, demands better support agents. Read: Cost centers galore.
4.B. Smaller companies can do flex things. However, customers are going to pound them about the terms of service, demand SLA, push them to ramp up staffing. All of these can kill even a well established smaller provider.
4.C. Scaling is truly an enterprise level feature. Sure some tech wunderkinds who like that stuff and engineer nifty thoughtful software to survive mass fails. The big industry though are rather big businesses. Big business tends not to deal with small companies because small companies don't have various certifications on their DC builds, privacy, etc. To a big biz, doing business with such a small company likely violates risk assessment and set policies established to keep the corporation safe and out of the Courts.
5. Most purchasing is done by peer group / endorsements by people you know. Hosting certainly does the same for many. Even here we recommend brands and there is group-think buy-in and try. Small companies tend not to be in said circles with their company and products known / visible. However Amazon and Google and other biggies are in there via proper channels of awareness they developed and marketed to.
6. Reviews are mostly rubbish for hosting.
6.A. There are paid blogger / affiliate sites hawking everything posing as content. Blah.
6.B. There are paid advertising sites meant to look like reviews. Blah.
6.C. There are various forums where some legit customers share. Finding content in such is -- blah.
6.D. Reviews work when person reviewing something has tested something familiar to your own stack / needs / interests. These aren't what you usually find when searching for company reviews.
7. Big companies on average probably perform worse than smaller VPS / cloud companies.
7.A. Tools and stack for most part is pretty common / similar.
7.B. There aren't many enterprise magic tools out there. Sure other virtualization in the paid world, sure some custom panels... But most of this stuff comes down to common gear, common CPUs, common loading, some best practices and some management layer to keep things from breaking ugly or proactively monitoring it all and API to the popcorn maker for when it all goes BOOM!
7.C. There is no transparency or useful metrics across the industry. Best we have is dd's and some peaking at values leaked and throughput tests plus IO wait. These metrics all are flawed and subject to change at any time and might exist at level due to shaping, which is subject to change also.
7.D. Business runs on money and profit. It doesn't make bigger companies have more integrity or honesty about what they are selling. Same corner cutting shenanigans are common in most hosting companies. Corner cutting only happens where companies can truly hide things, points to transparency and the need for such as an industry standard with means to audit such.
7.5 Snapshots, quick scaling --- FEATURES. Features may matter on something like AWS. Locations might matter just as much. Their certifications plus those features is likely the mix for the real money.
Feature driven companies are niche. AWS is a quirky beast all said. Highly complex, not approachable or very polished front side as a n00b. It's a platform guys buy into because their counterparts in other shops did so. Sure AWS works. Performance per dollar metrics of that vs. a good independent VPS provider, pfft AWS loses. But indy provider lacks the certifications and SLA and yes, some features. Indy company can certainly take customers from AWS, Google, or any of them and give a good cost savings. Problem is owners of these indy companies aren't up to the marketing invest, spending to accomplish this or the time it takes to get momentum.
8. FAQ, Wiki, Knowledge base, etc. are all content if done well. They are a form of lead generation if real content is developed that people search and find. Companies like Linode and Digital Ocean have spent a ton on developing these and both are doing well in part due to that investment.
If a brand has this sort of data developed it certainly gives human / buyer signal that the company is legit and more than just a sales organization with the tired arse money grab.
Any brand can fake a website with content, design and images that look and sound 'professional'. Having more content though, real support stuff, How-to's, etc. meh, I can't name one shitco that has such to any healthy level and if one does, odds are it's stolen or respun content.
So I am all over the place... Here's the deal in closing why customers choose big providers. Big businesses globally are just trusted moreso. To achieve that sort of success to be a bigger business, the customer logically thinks the company must be good enough or they never would have gotten that far. All the above apply. Name recognition is the butter on that bread for buying decision time.
