"How much does the cloud cost?" depends not only on load but on the provider you pick. AWS and Hetzner are two poles: the first gives hundreds of managed services and compliance, the second gives powerful hardware for noticeably less money. Let's see when each wins.
The fundamental difference
AWS sells not servers but an ecosystem: managed databases, queues, load balancers, autoscaling, compliance out of the box. Hetzner sells compute — VPS and dedicated servers — at a fraction of the price for the same CPU and RAM. For AWS's convenience you pay a premium; for Hetzner's low price you take on more engineering work.
When AWS is worth it
- You need compliance out of the box (SOC 2, PCI-DSS, HIPAA)
- A global audience and dozens of regions
- You want managed services instead of running your own
- Sharp, unpredictable load spikes
When Hetzner wins
- Predictable load and price sensitivity
- You have engineers (or a vendor) ready to manage infrastructure
- A European audience and EU data requirements
- A startup that can't afford to burn budget on the cloud bill
You don't have to pick just one
Often the optimum is a hybrid: the main load on Hetzner for price, with specific managed services or global points on AWS/GCP. The key is to describe infrastructure as code so there's no vendor lock-in and you can move between providers.
At IntoClouds we calculate TCO for each cloud before migration and move production with zero downtime. Want to know what's cheaper for your load? Drop us a line and we'll work it out.