Migrating from AWS to Hetzner (opens in new tab)

I cannot overstate the performance improvement of deploying onto bare metal. We typically see a doubling of performance, as well as extremely predictable baseline performance.

This is down to several things:

- Latency - having your own local network, rather than sharing some larger datacenter network fabric, gives around of order of magnitude reduced latency

- Caches – right-sizing a deployment for the underlying hardware, and so actually allowing a modern CPU to do its job, makes a huge difference

- Disk IO – Dedicated NVMe access is _fast_.

And with it comes a whole bunch of other benefits:

- Auto-scalers becomes less important, partly because you have 10x the hardware for the same price, partly because everything runs 2x the speed anyway, and partly because you have a fixed pool of hardware. This makes the whole system more stable and easier to reason about.

- No more sweating the S3 costs. Put a 15TB NVMe drive in each server and run your own MinIO/Garage cluster (alongside your other workloads). We're doing about 20GiB/s sustained on a 10 node cluster, 50k API calls per second (on S3 that is $20-$250 _per second_ on API calls!).

- You get the same bill every month.

- UPDATE: more benefits - cheap fast storage, run huge Postgresql instances at minimal cost, less engineering time spend working around hardware limitations and cloud vagaries.

And, if chose to invest in the above, it all costs 10x less than AWS.

Pitch: If you don't want to do this yourself, then we'll do it for you for half the price of AWS (and we'll be your DevOps team too):

https://lithus.eu

Email: adam@ above domain

I think you can get much farther with dedicated servers. I run a couple of nodes on Hetzner. The performance you get from a dedicated machine even if it is a 3 year old machine that you can get on server auction is absolutely bonkers and cannot be compared to VMs. The thing is that most of the server hardware is focused towards high core count, low clock speed processors that optimize for I/O rather than compute. It is overprovisioned by all cloud providers. Even the I/O part of the disk is crazy. It uses all sorts of shenanigans to get a drive that sitting on a NAS and emulating a local disk. Most startups do not need the hyper virtualized, NAS based drive. You can go much farther and much more cost-effectively with dedicated server rentals from Hetzner. I would love to know if they are any north-american (particularly canadian) companies that can compete with price and the quality of service like Hetzner. I know of OVH but I would love to know others in the same space.

We’ve been seeing the same trend. Lots of teams moving to Hetzner for the price/performance, but then realizing they have to rebuild all the Postgres ops pieces (backups, failover, monitoring, etc.).

We ended up building a managed Postgres that runs directly on Hetzner. Same setup, but with HA, backups, and PITR handled for you. It’s open-source, runs close to the metal, and avoids the egress/I/O gotchas you get on AWS.

If anyone’s curious, I added here are some notes about our take [1], [2]. Always happy to talk about it if you have any questions.

[1] https://www.ubicloud.com/blog/difference-between-running-pos... [2] https://www.ubicloud.com/use-cases/postgresql

I love how few comments on this and similar posts give much context along with their advice. Are you hosting a church newsletter in your spare time or a resource intensive web app with millions of paying enterprise customers and a dedicated dev ops team in 3 continents?

Any advice on price / performance / availability is meaningless unless you explain where you're coming from. The reason we see people overcomplicating everything to do with the web is that they follow advice from people with radically different requirements.

I've been running my SaaS on Hetzner servers for over 10 years now. Dedicated hardware, clusters in DE and FI, managed through ansible. I use vpncloud to set up a private VPN between the servers (excellent software, btw).

My hosting bill is a fraction of what people pay at AWS or other similar providers, and my servers are much faster. This lets me use a simpler architecture and fewer servers.

When I need to scale, I can always add servers. The only difference is that with physical servers you don't scale up/down on demand within minutes, you have to plan for hours/days. But that's perfectly fine.

I use a distributed database (RethinkDB, switching to FoundationDB) for fault tolerance.

We've helped quite a few teams move from AWS to Hetzner (and Netcup) lately, and I think the biggest surprise for people isn't the cost or the raw performance, it’s how simple things become when you remove 15 layers of managed abstractions.

You stop worrying about S3 vs EFS vs FSx, or Lambda cold starts, or EBS burst credits. You just deploy a Docker stacks on a fast NVMe box and it flies. The trade-off is you need a bit more DevOps discipline: monitoring, backups, patching, etc. But that's the kind of stuff that's easy to automate and doesn't really change week to week.

At Elestio we leaned into that simplicity, we provide fully managed open-source stacks for nearly 400 software and also cover CI/CD (from Git push to production) on any provider, including Hetzner.

More info here if you're curious: https://elest.io

(Disclosure: I work at Elestio, where we run managed open-source services on any cloud provider including your own infra.)

Best feature of (some) the dedicated servers Hetzner offers is the unmetered bandwidth. I'm hosting a couple of image-heavy websites (mostly modding related) and since moving to Hetzner I sleep much better knowing I'll pay the same price every single month, and have been for the ~3 years I've been a happy Hetzner customer.

Hetzner is really great until you try to scale with them. We started building our service on top of Hetzner and had couple 100s of VMs running and during peak time we had to scale them to over 1000 VMs. And here couple of problems started, you get pretty often IPs which are black listed, so if you try to connect to services hosted by Google, AWS like S3 etc. you can't reach them. Also at one point there were no VMs available anymore in our region, which caused a lot of issues.

But in general if you don't need to scale crazy Hetzner is amazing, we still have a lot of stuff running on Hetzner but fan out to other services when we need to scale.

Long long ago, at the start of my career I was at a great company. We were using a Postgres DB version not supported by RDS. So I had to manually set up postgres over and over again on EC2 instances. This was before Docker was reliable/standard.

I wasted hours on this, and the moment RDS starts to support the postgres version we need it everything was much easier.

I still remember staying up till 3:00 a.m. installing postgres, repeatedly.

While this article is nice, they only save a few hundred dollars a month. If a single engineer has to spend even an hour a month maintaining this, it's probably going to be a wash.

And that's assuming everything goes right, the moment something goes wrong you can easily wipe out a year saving in a single day ( if not an hour depending on your use case).

This is probably best for situations where your time just isn't worth a whole lot. For example let's say you have a hobbyist project, and for some reason you need a very large capacity server.

This can easily cost hundreds of dollars a month on AWS, and since it's coming out of your own pocket it might be worth it to spend that extra time on bare metal.

But, at a certain point you're going to think how much is my time really worth. For example, and forgive me for mixing up terms and situations, ghost blog is about $10 a month via their hosted solution. You can probably run multiple ghost blogs on a single Hetzner instance.

But, and maybe it was just my luck, eventually it's just going to stop working. Do you feel like spending two or three hours fixing something over just spending the $20 a month to host your two blogs ?

I use Hetzner for this reason, but there are caveats. They're great but their uptime isn't as good as AWS and they don't have great region coverage. I strongly advise people to pair them with Cloudflare. Use Hetzner for your core with K8s, and use R2/D1/KV with Container Durable Objects to add edge coprocessing. I also like to shard customer data to individual DOs, this takes a ton of scaling pressure off your data layer, while being more secure/private.

We discovered a similar cost saving and I ended up building an internal PaaS that i ended up open sourcing, that works well on hetzner.

The biggest downside to hetzner only is that it’s really annoying to wrangle shell scripts and GitHub actions to drive all the automations to deploy code.

The portainer team recently started sponsoring the project so Ive been able to dedicate a lot more time to it, close to full time.

https://canine.sh

I really liked Hetzner but I got burned by one issue. I had some personal projects running there and the payment method failed. Automated email communications also failed among so much spam and email notifications I receive, and when I noticed the problem they had wiped all my data without possibility of recovery.

It was a wake up moment for me about keeping billing in shape, but also made me understand that a cloud provider is as good as their support and communications when things go south. Like an automated SMS would be great before you destroy my entire work. But because they are so cheap, they probably can't do that for every 100$/month account.

I've had similar issues with AWS, but they will have much friendlier grace periods.

Related: Michael Kennedy moved TalkPython [0] hosting to Hetner in 2024. There's a blog about the move here [1] and a follow up after Hetzner changed some pricing policy [2].

He's also just released a book on hosting scale production Python apps [3]. Haven't read yet though would assume it'll get covered there in more detail too.

--

[0] https://talkpython.fm/

[1] https://talkpython.fm/blog/posts/we-have-moved-to-hetzner/

[2] https://talkpython.fm/blog/posts/update-on-hetzner-changes-p...

[3] https://talkpython.fm/books/python-in-production

Saving $400/month covers about 3-5 hours of engineering time per month. In a year, call it 30-50 hours. Did this project take more than 30-50 person-hours?

(The obvious argument about how it might pay off more in the future are dependent on the startup surviving long enough for that future to arrive.)

After being immersed in cloud-native hell for a few years, I'll say it:

This setup is probably also easier to reason about and easier to make secure than the messy garbage pushed by Amazon and other cloud providers.

People see Cloud providers with rose-colored glasses, but even something like RDS requires VPCs, subnets, route tables, security groups, Internet/NAT gateways, lots of IAM roles, and CloudWatch to be usable. And to make it properly secure (meaning: not just sharing the main DB password with the team) you need way more as well, and it's hard to orchestrate, it's not just an option in a CloudFormation script.

Sure securing a server is hard too, but people 1. actually share this info and 2. don't have illusions about it.

Love it!

We are unfortunately moving away from self-hosted bare metal. I disagree with the transition to AWS. But it's been made several global layers above me.

It's funny our previous AWS spend was $800 per month and has been for almost 6 years.

We've just migrated some of our things to AWS and the spend is around $4,500 per month.

I've been told the company doesn't care until our monthly is in excessive of five figures.

None of this makes sense to me.

The only thing that makes sense is our parent company is _huge_ and we have some really awesome TAMs and our entire AWS spend is probably in the region of a few million a month, so it really is pennies behind the sofa when global org is concerned.

Hetzner is great for dedicated servers, but for those of us who need smaller-scale secure/confidential VMs I'm afraid that there isn't really any other choice than hyperscalers.

Does anyone know if there is a VM vendor that sits somewhere in between a dedicated server host like Hetzner in terms of performance + cost-effectiveness and AWS/GCP in terms of security?

Basically TPM/vTPM + AMD SEV/SEV-SNP + UEFI Secure Boot support. I've scoured the internet and can't seem to find anyone who provides virtualised trusted computing other than AWS/GCP. Hetzner does not provide a TPM for their VMs, they do not mention any data-in-use encryption, and they explicitly state that they do not support UEFI secure boot - all of these are critical requirements for high-assurance use cases.

This is also what we did at my company.

We kept most smaller-scale, stateless services in AWS but migrated databases and high-scale / high-performance services to bare metal servers.

Backups are stored in S3 so we still benefit from their availability.

Performance is much higher thanks to physically attached SSDs and DDR5 on-die RAM.

Costs are drastically lower and for much larger server sizes which means we are no getting stressed about eventually needing to scale up our RDS / EC2 costs.

OVH sells bare metal servers with 6 cores 32 gb ram and 512 nvme disks in raid 1 (!) with *unmetered* 1gbps line, for 70 bucks. 70 united states dollars.

How much of AWS EC2 you can get out for 70 bucks?

Now, this OVH still makes money on it. They make money, despite these servers require actual human being to put them into datacenter, plug network, power, etc. You are literally getting the OG RAW POWER and a slice of a datacenter for 70 bucks and they still make money.

How much amazon makes on every single silly vm that they charge for compute, storage, network, ip, network again, oh and credits, cpu credits, startup credits, whatever credits, oh an api calls ;]

We've moved most of our Apps off AWS to Hetzner years ago by switching to SQLite/Litestream > Cloudflare R2 replication to avoid needing to using a managed RDBMS and saved a bunch of $$$ [1].

Although for our latest App we've switched to using local PostgreSQL (i.e. app/RDBMS on same server) with R2 backups for its better featureset, same cost as we only pay for the 1x Hetzner VM and Cloudflare R2 storage is pretty cheap.

[1] https://docs.servicestack.net/ormlite/litestream

Yup. It's very good for the ecosystem for AWS to have good competition.

Amazon gets far too greedy- particularly bad when you need egress.

Also an "amazon core" is like 1/8th of a physical cpu core.

What is an actual and solid reason to choose or stay AWS these days?

The topic of paying hefty amounts of money to AWS when other options are available has been discussed many times before.

My view of AWS is that you have bazillions of things that you might never use, need to learn about it, you are tied to a company across the Atlantic that can basically shut you down anytime they want for whatever reason and finally the cost.

Are there decent US based alternatives to Hetzner? I'd like to have my servers located in the US for a variety of reasons, but most of the alternatives I've seen to Hetzner seem to be pretty fly-by-night shops.

I finally started migrating our app from Heroku to Hetzner. Started by moving Postgres, and boy, what a difference in performance. I pay 1/5th of what I previously paid, and performance is through the roof. Like, as if we had rewritten our Rails app in Rust (metaphorically speaking). I know that in theory you get much more from managed postgres than a simple self-managed server, but I have pgbouncer and Wal-G set up, and it really seems like it's not that hard to manage that instance. Most of all, we were really hitting performance limits on Heroku, not theoretical "what if the server goes down" but real ones that users could tell every day.

Will move the app server itself next (basic Rails). Really wish I had done the move earlier. Hetzner is like cheating for indie devs.

Been thinking about fully self hosting my small stuff for a bit but a mini managed k8s ($10) is just so convenient. I build a new docker image for some thing, add a manifest file to my k8s repo and apply it - my “cluster” spins up a new pod, I can easily hook it up to tailscale or Cloudflare warp to make it accessible, and it’s available

Been using this approach for the past years and if something gets bigger, I move the container to fly or a different k8s cluster in a couple hours max

On my bigger k8s I can then easily add more nodes or scale up pods depending on need, and scale them back down when idle.

Still the main issue with any setup I see is the database. No matter what I use I’d either have a managed Postgres somewhere, or something like litestream, and if that’s not in the same data center it’s gonna add latency sadly

> In reality, there is significant latency between Hetzner locations that make running multi-location workloads challenging, and potentially harmful to performance as we discovered through our post-deployment monitoring.

found this little bit buried near the end. all that glitters is not gold, i guess

This is pretty bad still, with colocation you can get the costs down to 1/100th with good deals at datacenters especially ones that are struggling to attract customers. Most of your bill is power so if you rack efficiency optimized servers you can have a lot of compute for very cheap.

In terms of networking many offer no-headache solutions with some kind of transit blend.

<rant>I recently had to switch away from hetzner due to random dhclient failures causing connectivity loss once ip's expired, complete failure of the loadbalancer - stopped forwarding traffic for around 6 hours and the worst part is that there was no acknoledgement from hetzner about any of these issues so at some point I was going insane over trying to find what is the issue when in the end it was hetzner. (US VA region)

First of all, thx for documenting the mogration. That is very interesting.

Your monthly bill is smaller now. But how many hours did you invest into the migration? And how many hours more per month do you put in maintenance? I mean you have to take care of security patches now and many more things.

You used AWS in the most expensive way. Of course its expensive if you use on demand offering. You can cut costs by using Spot instances for ECS. Another way is by using reserved instances for ECS. If you pay 3 years upfront, you can get discounts up to 75%. That works for ECS and RDS.

I'm running ZEIT.IO on AWS and I had similar problems. But I don't want to manage VMs. As soon I have to SSH into something, I have a ton of problems I don't want to deal with.

In my opinion, this is not always a true thing because size of the needed maintenance team can mean a lot. I find that for small-medium deployments cloud can be a lot more efficient despite being more expensive because it can - take away a lot of the expensive maintenance and management of things like databases, backup, storage, that would otherwise requiring at least a couple more people. So if your bill is <10k/month it certainly isn't worth hiring more people - allow you spin up systems with almost 0 cost(think cloud run / container systems) for very low usage systems. - give you global coverage & distributed reliability that can be otherwise hard to get.

AWS/GCP/Azure Cloud turns the audit beast into a house-cat: one IAM rule, one log stream, one firewall and etc. Otherwise, you need to fill out a lot of documents to prove that your bare metal is safe to host, for example, cardholder data.

Well, from what see the authors exchanged AWS managed Kubernetes cluster with self-hosted Kubernetes cluster on Talos Linux. Question is if $449.50/month paid for AWS will cover additional work needed for self-hosting.

The public cloud is priced as if availability, reliability, durability, and latency matter to your business. If they don't, you can get far with just a single machine.

A great deal of the work in cloud engineering is ensuring the abstractions meet the service guarantees. Similarly you can make a car much cheaper if you don't need to guarantee the driver will survive a collision. The cost of providing a safety guarantee is much higher than providing a hand-wavy "good enough" feeling.

If your business isn't critical then "good enough" vibes may be all you need, and you can save some money.

There are footguns to be found with a self operated k8s cluster, and definitely (costly) ones with cloud native database orchestration. Not to mention all the risks which come with migrating to "new things" in general. I know for me that when I moved away from those things to managed AWS versions, I could definitely see the value of a cloud solution.

But that cost difference is huge...

It is a interesting tradeoff to consider I think (I'm not criticizing either Hetzner or AWS or any team's decision, provided they've thought the tradeoffs through).

There's a value curve for infrastructure, I'll use an analogy...

  Low Cost                                           High Cost
  ==============================================================
  FARM     WHOLESALER     GROCERY     RESTAURANT     DOORDASH    
  BUILD    CO-LOCATION    HETZNER     AWS            VERCEL           

While it's not a perfect analogy, in principle it holds true.

As such, it should come as no surprise that eating at a restaurant every day is going to be way more expensive.

We've experienced something similar: for compute-heavy rendering tasks, AWS just wasn't good enough. EC2 machines with the same spec perform much worse than Hetzner machines

Only problem with Hetzner is that they don't seem to accept Accounts created from African countries. Tried creating an account with them twice from Kenya, and in both instances my account got blocked 5 minutes after creation with zero explanation. tried reaching out to support and got zero reply.

I get it's their business and they can do as they please with it, however, maybe tell me before I create an account that you don't accept accounts from my continent

With AWS you are paying for the ancillary things; pretty good network, reliable portal, reliable management APIs, nearly perfectly commoditized products (one VM like any other, though in practice I observe minor exceptions to this all the time predominantly with worse connectivity to other services or disk). But the performance bare metal is good (AWS offers bare metal too but at insane price point because they only buy enormous servers).

Having deployed servers well before AWS was a thing, AWS alwyas felt incredibly overpriced.

The only benefit you get is reliability, temporary network issues on AWS are not a thing.

On DigitalOcean they are fairly bad (I lose thousands of requests almost every month and I get pennies in credit back when I complain - while my users churning cost way more), on Hetzner I've heard mixed reviews.

Some people complains, some say it's extremely reliable.

I'm looking forward to try Hetzner out!

3x seems quite low, I routinely get 7-11x higher performance on Hetzner when compared to AWS. Also the conclusion of this old benchmark is still partially true: https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-...

The cost improvements are great. If you miss the automation that AWS does for database servers consider using something like https://www.ubicloud.com/ that is great for PostgreSQL servers. On bare metal these typically also support 5x the number of IOPS without paying through the nose.

You are doing calculations all wrong if you think saving $500/month is 75% of your cost.

Also first three lines of new stack is a sure shot way to get PTSD. You shouldn't manage database in your plane, unless you really know the internals of the tools you are using. Once you get off AWS then you really start to see the value of things like documentation.

Of course.

A dedicated server or VPS from OVH, Hetzner, Scaleway, etc., or even Docker containers on Koyeb, will give you way more bang for your buck.

Call me a dinosaur, but I’ve never used any of the big cloud providers like AWS. They’re super expensive, and it’s hard to know what you’ll actually end up paying at the end of the month.

I get the point. But those are incomparable. Hyperscalers don't compete on price, they compete on scale and services offered. The compliance, the security, the support, the integrations, the backups.

Can you host your own object storage open source software, key vault OSS, VPN, queue service, container registry, logging, host your own Postgres/MySQL? Sure, but you will need to research what is best, what is supported, keep it maintained, make sure to update it and that those updates don't break anything, wake up in the middle of the night when it breaks, make sure it's secure. And you would still need to handle access control across those services. And you would still need a 3rd party service for DDoS protection, likely CDN too. And you would likely need some identity provider.

Hetzner's ARM servers are the best kept secret in tech. Unbelievably capable and mindbogglingly cheap.

This doesn't make sense to me. Businesses don't switch to save from $500 to $150. It just doesn't make sense. I think they did it because of political reasons, but they should just say so.

I am in US, I would use Hetzner just the same, but not to save few bucks here and there.

Nice writeup, I like it and would definitely bookmark for future reference.

One weak take however in the article that I felt not quite right is the pricing saving part. By saying 1/4 of the price. I was expecting to see the AWS bill in the range of $10k/month, or more but it turned out to be just around ~$550 or, a total saving of $420.

Whith the above said, it does really make me questioning whether it worth the hassle of migration because, probably, one of the main reasons to move away from AWS is to save the cost.

Finally, let me conclude with this comment from /r/programminghumor:

    You're not a real engineer until you've accidentally sponsored Amazon's quarterly earnings

Context is important for stuff like this, I've served 350M requests (with db interaction) for $49 via cloudflare before, but it all depends what you're trying to do.

Abstracted infrastructure like Kubernetes is expensive by default, so design has an impact.

In my experience, there has been an interesting ebb and flow on the use of 'dedicated' hardware and auto-scaling power of AWS/cloud instances. When first starting out, super cost-conscious, you're getting ideal performance. As soon as you start experiencing interesting traffic patterns, auto-scaling makes sense. Then, your bill grows to such a point as it makes economical sense to pull back to more powerful dedicated services, then lean a little into auto-scaling, etc. A pendulum of underlying services and people to support it. A balancing act of finding efficiencies during wild growth periods, and reaching some sense of stability.

> We saved 76% on our cloud bills while tripling our capacity

The claim here is that their cloud bills lowered. Nowhere is mentioned the cost of engineering and support. This will increase their overall cost, which is not mentioned here at all.

When you are a startup, you don't have a lot of headcount. You should be using your headcount to focus on your product. The more things you do that eat up your headcount's time, the less time you have to develop your product.

You need a balance between "dirt-cheap cost" and labor-conserving. This means it's a good idea to pay a little bit of a premium, to give you back time and headcount.

> How much does a 2x CPU, 4 GiB RAM container cost on AWS Fargate? Just over $70/month. We run two worker instances, which need these higher resources, along with smaller web instances and all the other infrastructure needed to host an application on AWS (load balancer, relational DB, NAT gateway, ...). All together, our total costs for two environments of tap grew to $449.50/month.

The classic AWS mistake: they're talking retail prices. AWS gives every customer multiple opportunities to lower costs below this retail price. You don't have to be an enterprise. In fact, you can ask them directly how to save money, and they'll tell you.

$70/month is the retail price of Fargate on-demand (for that configuration). Using a Compute Savings Plan[1], you can save 50% of this cost. Additionally, if you switch from x86 to ARM for your Fargate tasks, the cost lowers an additional 25%. So with Graviton and a Compute Savings Plan, their Fargate price would have been $26.25/month, a 62.5% savings.

And there's more to save. Spot instances are discounted at 70%. NAT Instances save you money over NAT Gateways. Scaling your tasks to zero when they're not needed cuts costs more. Choose the cheapest region to pay the least.

[1] https://repost.aws/questions/QUVKyRJcFPStiXYRVPq-KU9Q/saving...

This is similar to our experience migrating a SadServers k8s service; basically Hetzner is way cheaper and more performant than the big cloud providers BUT you have to take into account man-hours for the migration and be careful with missing services or ancillary tooling: https://docs.sadservers.com/blog/migrating-k8s-out-of-cloud-...

When I used AWS startup credits in 2019, the AWS console made it very difficult to estimate the bill after the credits ran out. I lost a lot of trust in AWS. Also, there were buried mines in the APIs, like the risk of bad logging running up a $70,000/day bill with CloudWatch Logs.

If I could go back and do it again, I would rent a single machine and deploy with ssh (git pull & docker-compose up) and backup to my laptop.

+1 to running services on physical servers, OVH in my case. I'm really enjoying CI pushing to servers and having managed database provided by a 3rd party like Mongo Atlas.

Quick note that while I hear nothing but good things about Hetzner, the approach is generic -- applies to the many other bare metal "SmallCo" providers. For example we use Hivelocity and have been very happy. Perhaps also worth mentioning that you can literally buy computers and rent space to plug them in and hook up to the internet in a place we call a data center. That's even cheaper when you know your workload long term and have access to capital.

There is no one size fits all. On the small scale "managed" cloud which takes care of as many things as possible is effective. As you scale though it will cost proportional to environment size, except some discount. With solutions like Hetzner you get a lot more of hardware for the price but have to invest more labor into managing it, with automation however this labor does not grow nearly as much as your environment size.

Questions for people who migrate off-cloud:

1. How many nodes do you have? 2. Did you install anything to monitor your node(s) and the app deployed on these nodes? If so, which software?

I see the allure of dedicated servers. All is great when everything works. What I miss in this picture is failure scenarios.

How many dedicated servers do you need to run to afford losing one of them to a hardware failure? What is the cost and lead time for a replacement? How much overprovisioning do you need to do, and how well ahead, in anticipation of seasonal spikes, or a wave of signups from a marketing campaign?

I'm at a small scale with https://pagecord.com but I did the same earlier this year. Couldn't be happier!

https://olly.pagecord.com/migrating-the-pagecord-rails-app-f...

Hetzner are great.

Cloud was a reaction to overlong procurement timeline in company managed DC. This is still a thing, it still takes half a year to get a server into a DC!!

However probably 99% of use cases dont need servers in your own DC, they work just fine on a rented server.

One thing though, a rented server can still have hardware failure, and it needs to be fixed, so deployment plans need to take that into account - fargate will do that for you.

We at ayedo[0] are specialized for this kind of migration away from inflated hyperscalers onto European cloud providers like Hetzner, IONOS, Plusserver etc. we provide the missing cloud-native services like databases, storage, loadbalancing, etc so teams don’t need to adjust that much.

[0] https://ayedo.de

Very interesting and detailed article!

I'd love to hear more about how you use terraform and helm together.

Currently our major friction in ops is using tofu (terraform) to manage K8s resources. Avoiding yaml is great - but both terraform and K8s maintaining state makes the deployment of helm from terraform feel fragile; and vice-versa depending on helm directly in a mostly terraform setup also feels fragile.

Really digging these post-mortems on major public cloud migrations of late, either to smaller providers like Hetzner or privately-owned solutions in data centers. It gives me more ammo when an organization tasks me with saving them money, by showing that these are, in fact, perfectly viable options whose tradeoffs may be worthwhile for specific organizational needs.

Startup founders and employees are you really paying insane bills to AWS? How? We are really paying peanuts compared to other expenses.

AWS won't raise the limits on our new account (we're stuck at 1GB RAM in Lightsail after 2 months, even though we need to launch this month).

Looking at Hetzner or Vultr as alternatives. A few folks mentioned me Infomaniak has great service and uptime, but I haven't heard much about them otherwise.

Anyone used Infomaniak in production? How do they compare to Hetzner/Vultr?

Anyone here using

https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s

Or

https://github.com/kube-hetzner/terraform-hcloud-kube-hetzne...

For a K3S cluster? Would love to hear any experience. Thanks!

Dedicated servers on a host like Hetzer and OVH surely beats any virtualization based cloud offering on price and performance. The tradeoff is availability. It's a great choice for entities that are optimizing on cost, but not a great choice if your business cannot tolerate downtime.

A good example is a the big lichess outage from last year [1]. Lichess is a non-profit, and also must serve a huge user base. Given their financials, they have to go the cheap dedicated server route (they host on OVH). They publish an Excel sheet somewhere with every resources they use to run the services and last year, I had fun calculating how much it would cost them if they were using an hyperscaler cloud offering instead. I don't remember exactly but it was 5 or 6x the price they currently pay OVH.

The downside, is that when you have an outage, your stuff is tied to physical servers and they can't easily be migrated, when cloud provider on the opposite can easily move around your workload. In the case of Lichess outage, it was some network device they had no control of that went bad, and lichess was down until OVH could fix it, that is many hours.

So, yes you get a great deal, but for a lot of businesses, uptime is more important than cost optimization and the physicality of dedicated servers is actually a serious liability.

[1]: https://lichess.org/@/Lichess/blog/post-mortem-of-our-longes...

Deploying to bare metal Hetzner for years, very happy with the service. Smart hands work fast and reliable. As soon as you got your stack worked out (which admittedly takes a while), maintaining bare metal is not much different from maintaining cloud, apart from swapping disks sometimes. And the cost is so low, in comparison, it's ridiculous.

If people stop using AWS,Azure and GCP the economy would improve by 10%. Using cloud services is a massive waste of money.

I tried my best to start using Hetzner, but they wouldn't let me.

I got my account validation rejected despite having everything "in norm" and tried 3 times, they wouldn't give me a reason why it ended up rejected.

I think it's better that way, I wouldn't like to get the surprise my account was terminated at some point after that.

> tap is a data-intensive SaaS that needs to be able to execute complex queries over gigabytes of data in seconds.

> minimum resource requirements for good performance to be around 2x CPUs and 4 GiB RAM

This is less compute than I regularly carry in my pocket? And significantly less than a Raspberry Pi? Why is Fargate that expensive?

Estimating the cost and performance up front is impossible unless you've deployed something similar before. I'm probably wrong but it seems to me like AWS (Azure / Google Cloud) is a good enough place to start, get a feel for what you need and then move on to bare metal only if needed.

It’s amusing the outages of hyper scalers are posted here on HN regularly enough but there’s plenty of turkeys in this thread mentioning you have to use hyper scalers if you need 100% uptime.

Newsflash - no one has 100% and your over equitied startup is just burning other people’s money with no clue as per usual.

My last co runs hundreds of servers with Hetzner for a semi-stateless workload. With AWS, the pricing let alone the performance wouldn't be viable. At some point we also used Heroku for the application (more recently EKS); the combo drove folks nuts as, it was "weird".

I'd like to thank everyone moving their hosting away from shared hosts to VPS.

Been on the same shared hosting platform for 15+ years and the hardware's load average dropped to ~16% on a 64-core Epyc /w 512gb RAM. Easily handles half million unique bursts without breaking a sweat.

At my home, I have the PUD fiber Internet with Starlink as the backup WAN. I have two non mission critical servers we were using on AWS for and I set up two old laptops locally to run. Saving $1,000 a month now. I am looking at my $4,000 a month of mission critical servers now.

I've always thought these services seemed overpriced, like users were subsidizing a ferocious amount of R&D and speculative expansion off their fees. I mean, it's just hosting webservices - this feels like it should be a commodity at this point.

The part they never tell you is how Hetzner has a substantially higher unfair risk of account termination without warning. If you are okay with your account being terminated like that with zero notice or reason, then Hetzner is cheap.

Just yesterday they released a new 'Shared regular performance' offering https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/

I love azure app service because I can focus on our code and code security and leave server management, OS security and physical security to Microsoft.

No servers, no VMs, no containers, just our code to focus on.

They went from $559.36 to $132 a month on Hetzner, and they seem happy about the performance. This matches my own experience as well, I have been stunned regarding Hetzner and how cheap it can be.

I use Hetzner for personal projects and love it, the one thing stopping me from pushing it up the chain at work, is that we're based out of the US exclusively and AZs are pretty sparse.

Is this a shocker? In the cloud, you pay for convenience. This is basically running your own Kubernetes cluster. Right for the right teams (highly technical infra engineers).

Makes sense. If you don't need the redundancy, certification/legals or the big cloud 100s of integrated other lego blocks then big cloud vps prices just are a rip off.

Is anyone using Yugabyte self host? It looks like maybe the best solution these days for HA Postgres on bare metal or VPS. (And very friendly open source license.)

It was never about price or performance. Price and performance may be things you care about as a hobbyist, but as a business you have a lot of other considerations.

The title should have been "...from AWS and DigitalOcean".

If it were only from AWS, they would probably also have mentionned a drastic reduction of API complexity.

The cloud makes sense when you have someone else's money to burn, and don't care about being held hostage with lock-in if you aren't careful.

$500 a month for two environments with 4 CPUs and 8 GB of memory is diabolical. The only thing more expensive and with worse performance than AWS is Azure.

The world is healing.

How do people deploy docker containers on a machine like this? We currently use Cloud Run, which is very hands off. How is a deploy done?

Can anyone recommend a good cloud for GPU instances?

Was trying to find a good one for 30B quants but there’s so many now and the pricing is all over the place.

I dream of the day when I can have my servers at home with solar power and batteries. I still have a ways to go, but it will come.

I tried to register a Hetzner account multiple times but didn't get approval. I chose Netcup as a better alternative.

I keep sending links like this to AWS when their sales reps reach out, then I ask for a discount, and they never get back.

Shhhh don't talk too loud about Hetzner!

DO NOT USE HETZNER

they actively seem to hate their customers and will delete all your data at some junior interns whim

Cloud was never about performance. It was about offloading costs involved in admin stuff like backups and stuff.

Their Storage box offerings are great too. Think like a big ftp drive except supports lots of transfer protocols

OP Can you expand a little on kustomize? I think it could use a little more real estate on your article!!

Woooowww we literally today switched Object Storage prod from AWS S3 to Hetzner.

Now #1 on HN. Destiny.

How do you get rid of AWS SES?

Maybe we should stop talking about Hetzner before they raise their prices guys.

i ll immediately do the switch but please tell me how do I use CDK on hetzner

Gee, another "we did not need cloud, so by not using cloud, we stopped spending on something we did not need"-story. Duh. The real story is why someone who doesn't need cloud services starts using them anyway.

If you need it, use it, if you don't need it, don't use it. It's not the big revelation people seem to think it is.

Hetzner is the best.

Any k8s self-hosters here? How is that going?

No mention of SST.dev running on Hetzner ?

The struggle is real. A lot of people think cloud lock-in is due to using cloud-specific services like SQS... but its the data. Try and exfil 300TB out of S3 without paying an enormous transfer cost =(

I want to move our infra out of AWS but at the end of the day we have too much data there and it is a non starter.

As competition heats up, the relative “enshitifcation” of AWS is real.

There just isn’t a compelling story to go “all in on AWS” anymore. For anything beyond raw storage and compute the experience elsewhere is consistently better, faster, cheaper.

It seems AWS leadership got caught up trying to have an answer for every possible computing use case and broadly ended up with a bloated mess of expensive below-bar products. The recent panicked flood of meh AI slop products as AWS tries to make up for its big miss on AI is one such example.

Would like to see AWS just focus on doing core infrastructure and doing it well. Others are simply better at everything that then layers on top of that.

hardware always goes faster. software often goes slower.

its also very easy to run windows on their linux cloud VPS's...if you need to run windows.

Second hand hardware for the win

The executives at <bigcorp> will not allow bare metal or other alternatives anytime soon because either most of them have drunk the AWS/Azure koolaid or AWS/Azure has already bought out the Rolodex of most of these companies by the 1) promise of hiring senior tech leadership if they drink the koolaid 2) influence of previous executives who accepted roles at Amazon.

You've gotta hand it to Amazon for their strategy.

You've saved $426/mo but inherited a $10k/mo full-time DevOps job.

> Why two cloud providers? Initially we used only DigitalOcean, but a data intensive SaaS like tap needs a lot of cloud resources and AWS have a generous $1,000 credit package for self-funded startups.

So some Kubernetes experts migrated to AWS for $1k in credits. This is madness. That's weeks of migration work to save the equivalent of a day of contracting.

Frankly the idea of managing the db myself seems like a horrible idea and a lot of work. But perhaps I've been indoctrinated by the big cloud.

also if you need spikes of gpus vast.ai

Great! Now if you go full homelab, you can get 1/30th of the price ;)

AWS and DigitalOcean*: $559.36, Hetzner: $132.96

Perspective: this difference is one hour of US fintech engineer time a month. If you have to self-build a single thing on Hetzner you get as "built-in" on AWS, are you ahead?

If this is your price range, and you're spending time thinking about how to save that $400/month (three Starbucks a day) instead of drive revenue or deliver client joy, you likely shouldn't be on AWS in the first place.

AWS is for when you need the most battle tested business continuity through automations driving distributed resilience, or if you have external requirements for security built into all infra, identity and access controls built into all infra at all layers, compliance and governance controls across all infra at all layers, interop with others using AWS (private links, direct connects, sure, but also permission-based data sharing instead of data movement, etc.). If your plans have those in your future, you should start on AWS and learn as you grow so you never have a "digital transformation" in your future.

Whether you're building a SaaS for others or a platform for yourself, “Enterprise” means more than just SSO tax and a call us button. There can be real requirements that you are not going to be able to meet reasonably without AWS's foundational building blocks that have this built in at the lego brick level. Combine that with "cost of delay" to your product and "opportunity cost" for your engineering (devs, SREs, users spending time doing undifferentiated heavy lifting) and those lego blocks can quickly turn out less expensive. Any blog comparing pricing not mentioning these things means someone didn't align their infra with their business model and engineering patterns.

Put another way, think of the enterprise column in the longest pricing grid you've ever seen – the AWS blocks have everything on the right-most column built in. If you don't want those, don't pick that column. Google and Azure are in the Team column second from right. Digital Ocean, CloudFlare, the Pro column third from right. Various Heroku-likes in the Getting Started column at the left, and SuperMicro and Hetzner in the Self-Host column, as in, you're buying or leasing the hardware either way, it's just whose smart hands you're using. ALL of these have their place, with the Getting Started and Pro columns serving most folks on HN, Team best for most SMB, and Enterprise best for actual enterprise but also Pro and Team that need to serve enterprise or intend to grow to that.

Note that if you don't yet need an enterprise column on your own pricing grid, K8s on whoever is a great way to Get Started and go Pro yourself while learning things needed for continuous delivery and system resilience engineering. Those same patterns then can be shifted onto on the Team and Enterprise column offerings from the big three (Google, Azure, AWS).

Here's my TL;DR blog post distilling all this:

If YAGNI, don't choose it.

I'm going to be that guy and ask which service is the cheapest for AI to bring up new infrastructure and deploy to it?

aws and azure are massively overpriced. there is no reason to use them.

Saving $426/mo for a business seems like a waste of time and resources. The excessive frugal developer complex. How many hours did it take to do the migration?

You got me with the title and I was curious at first but then I got to the part where it shows the bill and realized this is just toy project.