AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Cost comparisons and pricing assumptions

  • Many note Hetzner (especially bare metal) is dramatically cheaper than AWS/Azure/GCP — often 4–10x on raw compute, and traffic can be ~100x cheaper than Azure.
  • Others argue realistic AWS/Azure pricing uses 1–3 year reservations/savings plans, bringing VMs to ~2x Hetzner, not 10x.
  • Some say DigitalOcean/Linode are roughly in Hetzner’s ballpark; others claim Hetzner is still significantly cheaper.
  • Several anecdotes of 70–80% cost reductions or “saved millions” after moving workloads off AWS to Hetzner/OVH.

Managed services vs “dumb VMs”

  • A major theme: hyperscalers are not just VM providers; the real value is managed databases, queues, analytics, storage, serverless, and platform services.
  • For many startups and enterprises, paying for RDS/DynamoDB/SQS/S3/etc. plus 24/7 support is cheaper than hiring ops staff and reinventing those services.
  • Counterpoint: you can self-host with Kubernetes and operators (“half‑managed”), getting ~80–90% of the functionality far cheaper, especially at scale.
  • Others argue most small apps just need “a couple of VMs and Postgres,” and complex cloud stacks are often premature.

Operational complexity and lock‑in

  • Several complain that savings plans and reservations reintroduce old-style capacity planning and vendor lock-in, undermining the original “pay for what you use” cloud pitch.
  • Some stress that once you are deep into many 3‑letter AWS services, migrating off becomes very hard and expensive.

Reliability, HA, and support

  • Hyperscalers provide automatic instance replacement, multi‑AZ/region primitives, and strong support (TAMs, engineers, cost guidance).
  • Others note you still must design for fault tolerance; bare metal can also be made highly available with proper architecture.
  • Example: a long outage at a non‑cloud provider due to hardware/network issues is cited as a tradeoff; critics respond that similar outages exist in clouds, and HA is solvable anywhere.

Traffic, locations, and use cases

  • Hetzner’s generous or unmetered bandwidth is a major advantage for high‑egress workloads; multiple commenters migrated only bandwidth-heavy components.
  • Hetzner now has EU, US, and Singapore regions but fewer locations and fewer “one-click” services.
  • Consensus: use the cheapest option that fits your real needs; for simple, low‑criticality workloads Hetzner (or similar) often wins, while complex, regulated, or fast‑moving orgs often prefer AWS/Azure/GCP.