Railway just posted that their Google Cloud account was blocked, which caused service disruption across their platform. It’s a reminder that many “serverless” or “platform” providers are still heavily dependent on a few large cloud vendors underneath.

This got me thinking about the tradeoff between convenience vs control.

Platforms like Railway, Render, Vercel, etc. are amazing for developer experience and speed. But when something goes wrong at the infrastructure or account level, customers are often stuck waiting because they don’t control the underlying systems.

With VPS providers like Hetzner, Linode, or even direct AWS/GCP instances, you manage more yourself, but you also get:

• More control over infrastructure
• Better portability
• Fewer layers between you and the provider
• Easier disaster recovery strategies
• Potentially lower long-term cost

For people running production SaaS or client systems:
Would you choose managed platforms or VPS today, and why?