That's not why <cloud provider> networking is so much more expensive than a VPS provider... All of the big providers have fairly serious networking investments (and I think it's fair and honest to say that Google's is the largest) that provide a network quality and performance you won't match with any VPS provider. Do you want to stream more than 100 Gbps during the Olympics to people all over the world? Don't try that on OVH, DO, etc. but you can do it on us. We (Google) in fact charge more than AWS for our networking because of our massive global network.
tl;dr: you get what you pay for, and you don't always need our crazy network!
I understand that in principle, but before paying the big cloud providers between 10 and 20 times what I would be paying Vultr/DO (for network traffic), I would like to know a great deal more about the actual performance difference.
I know it's probably on me to find that out myself.
Interesting... so with Google and Amazon and the like I am paying more for the existence of capacity that I could hypothetically utilize?
DO and Vultr are colocated at very large sites. For many locations they sit right next to carrier hotels. I am a bit skeptical of whether the real world difference is that huge, especially if I sprawl my endpoints across both these providers and many locations.
tl;dr: you get what you pay for, and you don't always need our crazy network!