> We rebuilt key AWS features ourselves

At what cost? People usually exclude the cost of DIY style hosting. Which usually is the most expensive part. Providing 24x7 support for the stuff that you've home grown alone is probably going to make large dent into any savings you got by not outsourcing that to amazon.

> $24,000 annual bill felt disproportionate

That's around 1-2 months of time for a decent devops freelancer. If you underpay your devs, about 1/3rd of an FTE per year. And you are not going to get 24x7 support with such a budget.

This still could make sense. But you aren't telling the full story here. And I bet it's a lot less glamorous when you factor in development time for this.

Don't get me wrong; I'm actually considering making a similar move but more for business reasons (some of our German customers really don't like US hosting companies) than for cost savings. But this will raise cost and hassle for us and I probably will need some re-enforcements on my team. As the CTO, my time is a very scarce commodity. So, the absolute worst use of my time would be doing this myself. My focus should be making our company and product better. Your techstack is fine. Been there done that. IMHO Terraform is overkill for small setups like this; fits solidly in the YAGNI category. But I like Ansible.

> A combination of Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki allowed us to replicate — and in some ways exceed — the visibility we had on AWS

Given these existence of these tools, which are fantastic, I'm often stunned at how sluggish, expensive and how lacklustre the UX is of the AWS monitoring stack.

Monitoring quickly became the most expensive, and most unpleasant part of our AWS experience.

I think the most often mentioned problems mentioned are pollution of Hetzner addresses by shady people (might be addressed with "exits" from AWS / Cloudflare) and you are running on hardware which does tend to fail / needs upgrades. Were there some concerns on those from you?

Also, Loki! How do you handle memory hunger on loki reader for those pesky long range queries, and are there alternatives?

For those wondering about ISO 27001 - it's a standard for international security management, and popular in Europe.

However in the US it's not very relevant or even interesting to companies, and some European companies fail to understand that.

SOC 2 is the default and the preferred standard in the US - it's more domestic and less rigid than ISO 27001.

Part of what I expect to get when I pay AWS is that it reduces my operational burden, and this has been true in my experience. I've almost forgotten about all the prep, the stress, etc. that comes from upgrading deprecated mysql clusters now that I've gotten used to using the AWS managed equivalents.

That is not to say that this aspect alone justifies huge fees, but it does have significant value.

Same here, but Azure. About 90% saved, with a very similar stack.

It is a great big cloud play to make enterprises reliant on the competency in their weird service abstractions, which is slowly draining the quite simple ops story an enterprise usually needs.

I don't get the numbers. It used to be 24000$/year. You saved 90%. So you're spending 200$ a month at Hetzner? That's literally one EPYC server. You really don't need distributed systems for that. Can you talk a bit more about requests per second or number of users?

I know OVH and Hetzner gets mentioned a lot as European Cloud, but I thought I should bring UpCloud [1] for HN's attention. I believe their CPU core are actual CPU core and not vCPU as in a single thread ( Although I cant find reference to it which is annoying )

I also sometimes think OVH and Hetzner are not a fair comparison as much as I want competition to HyperScaler. Hetzner uses consumer grade component with a few server grade selections.

[1] https://upcloud.com

I love Hetzner, I run my Internet search engine from there: bare metal FTW.

I did a successful AWS to Hetzner migration myself once, and I'd like to make a business of "back-to-earth migrations" but clients are hard to find.

Everyone talks about it but none wants to be the first mover.

Happy for you, don't get me wrong, but your post is not particularly news, I'm guessing everyone on HN knows bare metal/VPS providers are cheaper than AWS/Azure/GCP.

And also lacking a bit in details:

- both technical (e.g. how are you dealing with upgrades or multi-data center fallback for your postgresql), and

- especially business, e.g. what's the total cost analysis including the supplemental labor cost to set this up but mostly to maintain it.

Maybe if you shared your scripts and your full cost analysis, that would be quite interesting.

I think a European CloudFlare would be nice to exist.

Did you look into prepackaged solutions such as kamal/dokku/caprover for parts of this? What were you missing from those?

With the rise of Agentic AI, this increasingly feels like the right move, unless AWS drastically lowers their prices.

I'm involved with a cloud migration myself so I like the topic, but the Medium article contains less information than this "Shown HN" post.

The Medium post is mostly fluff and a lead generator.

Does anybody care, besides you, that you’re ISO 27001 compliant? I thought SSAE 16 and other SSAE standards were the main things people were concerned with having?

Might be interesting, but doesn’t seem to be a valid “Show HN”

* - https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

How did you decide on Hetzner and OVH and why do you need both?

Have you looked into others as well, like IONOS and Scaleway?

I moved from managed AWS to unmanaged AWS (lightsail), decreasing the cost significantly and still staying in AWS ecosystem. I use S3, Route53, SES and other cheap services, you could consider this path

Any reasons to go for certbot instead of Traefik or Caddy?

Hetzner's biggest problem is that they can and do terminate a user's account without warning if the user starts using CPU resources very heavily or for any reason. This is for very legal usage, of course. This can and does happen to people in months. When this happens, consider your data lost and your account blocked. They will offer no explanation whatsoever, and will even send you a bill for the full month. Hetzner simply cannot be trusted, not even a little bit.

As for OVH, they don't do the above, but they have week-long unplanned downtimes, so using them is okay only as an optional resource.

Even so, there are lots of providers that are cheaper than Amazon and won't screw you over.

I'm not surprised about 90% of savings. I remember that initially AWS was promoted everywhere as being "cheaper" than your own hardware, colocation or VPS/VDS hosting.

Once I was working in a quite small company (around 100 employees) that hosted everything on AWS. Due to high bills (it's a small company that resided in Asia) and other problems, I migrated everything to DigitalOcean (we still used AWS for things like SES), and the monthly bill for hosting became like 10 times lower. With no other consequences (in other words, it haven't become less reliable).

I still wonder who calculated that AWS is cheaper than everything else. It's definitely one of the most expensive providers.