Whether this is completely out of the box or a multi-year engineering project to get equivalent levels of utility in the long term is completely up to how one specifically uses Fly.io.
E.g. a load balancer in front of some relatively stateless http microservices is really not going to tie you to Fly.io because of complexity. A globally distributed edge compute environment with database, RPC, varying scaling patterns, and environment certifications is probably not going to have the value prop impacted by this kind of minor pricing change though.
True, but managing 5 servers requires overhead. Where does the load balancer sit? What happens when it goes down? What if the entire datacenter loses comms? That is why cloud providers have AZ's that are physically separated from one another at different sites. When your boxes are spread across different physical networks, how do you connect them securely? For true HA you need a system that can self heal. Just throwing servers at the problem does not make things better. Reminds me of the expression 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month.
None of this is impossible, but when you are a small startup it makes sense to offload this to someone else and not waste time reinventing the wheel.
For the record, hetzner cloud also has multiple data centers (at least in Europe, haven't checked for US) with sharedand load balancers . What you don't get is managed services like k8s, databases, sqs, lambda/faas. These are generally easy to setup via preconfigured Terraform or ansible scripts, but if something goes wrong, you'll have to look at the logs yourself - that's true. (But that's ignoring that such a small team as you're proposing would likely be better served with a more mundane setup, avoiding all of these extra points of failure you'll have to manage... Making a simple bare metal setup once again the less involved and better performing alternative)
Im pretty sure you're vastly underestimating the amount of performance you get from today's hardware.
You won't be a small team by the time you're at a scale to need horizontal scaling. Only the biggest consumer facing/social media sites get value from that.
If you cannot tolerate downtime you need a redundant load balancer and you need nodes in different datacenters. Scale really doesn't matter in this equation. Now maybe you don't need five-nine's so then the risk is worth keeping it simple.
I read it. Historically Hetzner has been popular in the dedicated server space. I cannot speak to their IAAS/cloud offerings, I have never used them. I will take them for a spin, though, seeing as it is really the only way to use their services in the US with good latency.
E.g. a load balancer in front of some relatively stateless http microservices is really not going to tie you to Fly.io because of complexity. A globally distributed edge compute environment with database, RPC, varying scaling patterns, and environment certifications is probably not going to have the value prop impacted by this kind of minor pricing change though.