There are some moments in life where picking the cheap option is the way to go. Cheap pair of sunglasses? Sure. One dollar bacon cheeseburger? Why not. Cheap cloud provider? Not so much.

Look, we get it, it's tempting to pick the cheapest cloud provider to save some cash. After all, it's all the same, right? Not even a little bit. See, while going with one of these cheaper providers may seem like a good idea at first, when it comes time to change vendors you'll find yourself wishing you'd done a little more research. Is it oversubscribed with no customer support? Or does it have enterprise-class technologies with 100 percent SLA guarantees and dedicated support personnel?

See, one of the biggest issues with some of these tempting providers is there's no standard stack!

EWEEK pointed out that Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft all have their own versions of cloud computing structures. In fact, even OpenStack, which claims to have a common core, in reality has various vendors providing different branches off of that core.
This means that if you find you've made the wrong vendor choice, or simply want to switch to a different provider that can offer you more, it's going to be ridiculously complicated to switch.

Remember, you get what you pay for. That $3 sushi from the gas station is probably not going to do you any favors the next day – sometimes, it's better to pay a little more now to avoid a lot of pain later.