Full disclosure: I currently work at Alibaba Cloud. That said, this review contains *only* my personal opinion.First things first: there are two "Alibaba Cloud"s out there. The first is aliyun.com, the second is alibabacloud.com.aliyun.com is Alibaba Cloud's domestic site: users sign up with domestic Chinese phone numbers, pay in Chinese RMB, and the site is available in Chinese only (the console however does support English, for some products). It's intended for Chinese users. This site boasts 200+ products and services, phone and chat support at nearly any time of day, and a thriving developer forum. This Alibaba Cloud holds a 46% market share in the Mainland Chinese market, more than the next 4 or 5 providers combined. It is a mature service that has been operating since 2009 and it is a respected brand inside China.I don't work for that Alibaba Cloud, and chances are most reviewers here have not used it. Instead, they have used alibabacloud.com. This is Alibaba Cloud's International entity, which takes payment in USD and allows sign up using non-domestic-Chinese information (foreign phone numbers and bank accounts). This is a new, young offshoot of the domestic Alibaba Cloud and is still not at the level of maturity foreign users are used to from AWS, Azure, or GCP. It's trying hard to get there, though.alibabacloud.com doesn't offer all the services aliyun.com does, but it offers all of the basics you need to build a highly available web application, such as CDN, object storage (OSS), server load balancers (SLB), and a managed database service (RDS). Most of these core services map nicely onto AWS, so it's easy to get started if you are an experienced AWS user.I use alibabacloud.com every day as part of my day-to-day work and although there are occasional frustrations getting things to work with 3rd party tools like terraform, I trust the platform and have not experienced any failures or nasty unexpected behaviors. Judging from the reviews here, one big issue people are having is with the billing system. It's true that the way we handle subscriptions is not intuitive and needs some work. What I typically recommend to customers is to *always* choose Pay-As-You-Go when starting out, then switch to subscription later, once you are sure you know what you want. This will avoid issues around buying a subscription in the wrong region, or buying the wrong instance specification and then being unable to change.Also, if you are a new user who is using coupons for the first time, pay close attention to the *final* price listed in the lower right hand corner of the checkout page. This is the price you will pay *after* coupons are applied. Some people miss that, and end up with a surprise bill. If that number is not "$0.00", you are going to be charged. Hope this review helps some newcomers!
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