AWS to Hetzner Migration: Step-by-Step Guide

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.

Who it is for: SaaS companies and engineering teams whose AWS bill has outgrown their revenue, especially those with heavy outbound traffic, steady compute load or disk-intensive workloads.

What changes when you leave managed AWS services: on Hetzner you run more of the stack yourself. Databases, queues, load balancing, monitoring and backups need to be designed and operated by your team or a partner, usually on Kubernetes with Terraform and Ansible. The savings are real, but they depend on planning that work up front.

Read online or download: the full walkthrough is also available as an article: AWS to Hetzner migration guide. If you want help with the move, see our cloud migration services.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Hetzner cheaper than AWS?

For steady workloads and high outbound traffic, usually yes, because compute is cheaper and generous traffic is included. The trade-off is fewer managed services, so operations work moves to your team.

How long does an AWS to Hetzner migration take?

It depends on the number of services and how much of the stack relies on AWS-managed services; plan for a discovery phase before committing to dates.