We moved from AWS to Hetzner, saved 90%, kept ISO 27001 with Ansible
Earlier this year I led our migration off AWS to European cloud (Hetzner + OVHcloud), driven by cost (we cut 90%) and data sovereignty (GDPR + CLOUD Act concerns).
We rebuilt key AWS features ourselves using Terraform for VPS provisioning, and Ansible for everything from hardening (auditd, ufw, SSH policies) to rolling deployments (with Cloudflare integration). Our Prometheus + Alertmanager + Blackbox setup monitors infra, apps, and SSL expiry, with ISO 27001-aligned alerts. Loki + Grafana Agent handle logs to S3-compatible object storage.
The stack includes: • Ansible roles for PostgreSQL (with automated s3cmd backups + Prometheus metrics) • Hardening tasks (auditd rules, ufw, SSH lockdown, chrony for clock sync) • Rolling web app deploys with rollback + Cloudflare draining • Full monitoring with Prometheus, Alertmanager, Grafana Agent, Loki, and exporters • TLS automation via Certbot in Docker + Ansible
I wrote up the architecture, challenges, and lessons learned: https://medium.com/@accounts_73078/goodbye-aws-how-we-kept-iso-27001-slashed-costs-by-90-914ccb4b89fc ↗
I’m happy to share insights, diagrams, or snippets if people are interested — or answer questions on pitfalls, compliance, or cost modeling.
In this technical retrospective (2025), @sksjvsla shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 ↗