The Cloud Is Just Someone Else’s Computer: Cloud Cost Optimization Beyond AWS
In tech, we often talk about “the cloud” like it’s a single, inevitable destination. But at its core, the cloud is just someone else’s computer. For more than a decade, choosing whose computer to use felt simple: AWS.
At Scalable Path, we’ve relied on AWS since 2011. Honestly, we still do in places. It’s hard to beat the convenience of servers, databases, firewalls, monitoring, and easy scaling living behind one unified console.
But convenience has a price. Over time, that price becomes “gravity”, introducing complexity, hidden costs, and the risk of significant overcharging.
So, we decided to challenge that gravity. Even with a spreadsheet to keep us honest, the results surprised us: we found a path to roughly 80% lower hosting costs, a ~5-month payback period, and a 3-4x jump in raw performance on comparable workloads.
This isn’t an anti-AWS rant. It’s a reminder that “default” is rarely the cheapest option forever.
Table Of Contents
- Why “Big Cloud” Can Mean “Big Bite-Back”
- The Decision to Migrate: An Apples-to-Apples Comparison (and Why We Chose Hetzner)
- Defining the Timeline: How Long Would It Take to Migrate from AWS to Hetzner?
- Smaller Cloud Providers You Can Experiment With
- Migrating from AWS to Hetzner: Modernizing While Migrating
- Conclusion: Is It Time to Revisit Your Defaults?
Why “Big Cloud” Can Mean “Big Bite-Back”
AWS is a wonderful product and a “marvel of engineering”. It’s also designed to make it easy to stay. The ecosystem is vast, services are tightly integrated, and many “one-click” features are engineered to keep you building deeper inside the platform.
That’s not evil. It’s a business strategy. The risk is what happens when your architecture evolves into a web of AWS-specific assumptions and billing line-items you didn’t realize you agreed to.
But simplicity also comes with a hidden cost: misconfiguration. The easier something is to turn on, the easier it is to turn on the wrong thing.