It really is so much cheaper. After dropping S3/RDS/ECS for OVH bare metal running Proxmox, my costs decreased significantly. I still use Route 53 and back up to S3, though.
My "one weird trick" for spotting this behavior is using my middle initial on LinkedIn. LinkedIn stores it as a part of my first name, so their spam always starts off with "Hey Mark P.!"
Those emails get ignored. I ignore most automated agency emails as well.
I will always reply to personal emails from in-house recruiters or employees, however. I am starting a new job soon, though, so it's only to thank them for writing.
Before purchasing and installing your own server, I would try out a bare metal server from a company like OVH for a couple months. You'll get a better sense of the additional setup steps necessary (as compared with a VPS) without buying hardware or committing to a collocation contract.
I've learned a ton (and saved a bunch of money) transitioning from EC2, RDS, and Elastic Cloud to a single OVH dedicated server running Proxmox to host multiple VMs.
This reminds me a lot of PARKROYAL on Pickering[0], a very cool-looking hotel in Singapore. It's probably much easier to pull off this look in a tropical rainforest climate, though.
The PRC's pressure on Muslims is hardly limited to Uyghurs. Please consider this recent NPR report ("'Afraid We Will Become The Next Xinjiang': China's Hui Muslims Face Crackdown") in Gansu and Henan: https://www.npr.org/2019/09/26/763356996/afraid-we-will-beco...
I'm pretty sure I tried this—I think the prompts were even in English, if I'm remembering correctly. However, I gave up after several tries of it looking for a taxi and not finding one while I was standing in the rain on a dark street corner. It would sit and look for minutes and appeared to be a broken feature.
I ended up taking a BRT line to get back to my hotel and it was great. All of my experiences with transit in Beijing were excellent. I just wish taxis or car services were an option for tourists.
Can you set up Alipay with a non-Chinese bank account or card?
It works great for Chinese people and foreign residents of the PRC who have a bank account. However, my experience as a tourist was that it was impossible to link my US credit card using the PRC version of the app downloaded while in China.
I was in China (Beijing and Wenzhou) in April. I had NO success finding a taxi in Beijing—the only way to get a ride was to use an app like Didi Chuxing.
I was able to install and use it just fine. The problem was that it is impossible to link a non-PRC payment method to it. The same is true for WeChat Pay or Alipay—you've got to use a Chinese bank account or card as a source. I was not able to find a way around this despite over an hour of experimenting with the apps.
In contrast, it was easy to get taxis in Wenzhou. The drivers all initially asked for electronic payment, though, so it's probably only a matter of regulation that is preventing them from going cashless.