Ask anyone who’s run production workloads on AWS long enough, and they’ll tell you the same thing: your bill grows fast, often unpredictably.
That’s not just due to increased usage — it’s the nature of AWS billing itself. You’re charged for compute, bandwidth, storage, read/write IOPS, managed services, data egress, and even DNS lookups.
What seems like a few cents here and there quickly snowballs into a $10k+ monthly bill.
In contrast, platforms like Hetzner offer flat-rate pricing, predictable billing, and high-performance VMs that don’t nickel-and-dime you for every packet.
Let’s break it down:
Common AWS Cost Traps:
- Data Egress Fees: AWS charges up to $0.09/GB for outbound traffic — Hetzner includes 20 TB free per VM, then only ~$1/TB after.
- Managed Services Premium: AWS RDS, ElastiCache, SQS, Lambda all add layers of cost and margin.
- Per-Request Billing: API Gateway, CloudWatch, S3, etc. charge per request — hard to predict and scale.
- Storage IOPS: EBS IOPS fees balloon costs for disk-intensive workloads.
A recent Data-Aces migration revealed Hetzner cut costs by 70–80% across compute and storage alone — and by over 90% in bandwidth fees. That’s a massive savings opportunity.
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