I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

> It's also a large barrier to adoption.

e.g. for me. I never dared to get my foot wet with AWS, despite interest. Better safe with a cheap, flat-rate VPS than sorry.

I've also shot myself in the foot with various APIs, e.g. I racked a 3k bill in a month with Google APIs for my side project, just because I wasn't checking the usage, I didn't think I was using that much. This is more of my fault I guess, but luckily support waived that fee for me after some back and forth. Also I'm not from the US so this bill is larger for me compared to US folks. But honestly also Google APIs are pretty expensive. For hosting my side projects I use a single dedicated DO droplet for $320 a month, where I have 40+ docker containers.

That’s still very expensive. At that point you’d be well served by going dedicated hardware.

The droplet I have is 32 GB ram, 160 GB disk, 16 vCPUs (dedicated CPU, Regular Intel).

What would you suggest me instead?

I see Hetzner and maybe OVH could cost significantly less.

Actually looks like with Hetzner I would get better specs at 115 eur per month. With 16 vCP, 64GB ram, 360 GB SSD.

That's crazy, I didn't realize there's such a huge difference.

I think your comment is actually impressively valuable to me...

I'm going to bring it all over during the weekend. That's really exciting to find out much cheaper prices, because I've had disk space running out constantly on my DO. I do all my docker builds, files, databases and everything there as well. And for side projects I usually value all the cache and development speed as opposed to trying to optimize everything to take min performance and storage.

Also I spend way too much on Supabase. I think also $300+/month and increasing, I will bring that over and self host with a large SSD. I think at this point I prefer self hosting a postgres anyway to Supabase. I just tried it for a while, but the costs started going up.

Thank you so much.

Edit: there's some limits in Hetzner initially, so it might take few months before I can actually migrate.

Same. I will never touch AWS because the risk of accidentally bankrupting our business due to some small configuration mistake is just way too large.

I have a personal account that I'm meticulously careful about (but still terrified of).

I also have an account with L̵i̵n̵u̵x̵A̵c̵a̵d̵e̵m̵y̵ A̵C̵l̵o̵u̵d̵G̵u̵r̵u̵ PluralSight: and while the courses are very variable (and mostly exam cramming focused) it has their Cloud Playground as a super nice feature.

I get four hours to play around with setting things up and then it will all get automatically torn down for me. There's no cloud bill, just my subscription (I think that's about $400pa at the moment - can't check right now as annoyingly their stuff is blocked by our corporate network!) It has a few limitations, but none that have been problems for me with exploring stuff so far.

Also be aware it's not all roses with Hetzner.

There are stories online of folks getting their accounts deactivated or not even getting approved.

https://x.com/theo/status/1827480999305118135

https://x.com/heyandras/status/1856747621962191126

I was able to buy a 8 vCPU instance right now - do you know how frequent this problem may be?

I use a visa gift card for AWS, I only risk what I have on the card.

I miss my ACG account. I feel like the sandbox more cost effective than the Wild West of my company’s sandbox aws account.

In that case you are risking getting perma banned if anything goes south and you end up not paying anyways.

I'd prefer a permaban over permadebt to Amazon!

If you don't actually need colocation for your side project, looks like you could buy an i7-11700k, 64 GB of DDR4, a motherboard, and a 512 GB NVMe drive for ~$430. That's looking at new parts on amazon. You might be able to do better with e.g. ebay.

Honestly can’t say how frequent it happens but I’ve read a few accounts that say you geographic location plays a big role in whether you are treated nicely or not.

You mean I would host at home? I like the idea however I maybe should get a separate internet package for that purpose I think, as to not mess with what I do at home.