Use One Big Server (2022)

Those servers are mainly designed for enterprise use cases. For hobby projects, I can understand why someone would choose Hetzner over AWS.

For enterprise environments, however, there is much more to consider. One of the biggest costs you face is your operations team. If you go with Hetzner, you essentially have to rebuild a wide range of infrastructure components yourself (WAF, globally distributed CDN, EFS, RDS, EKS, Transit Gateways, Direct Connect and more).

Of course, you can create your own solutions for all of these. At my company, a mid-size enterprise, we once tried to do exactly that.

WAF: https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis

CDN: Hetzner Nodes with Cache in Finnland, USA and GER

RDS: Self-hosted MySQL from Bitnami

EFS: https://github.com/rook/rook

EKS: https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s

and 20+ more moving targets of infra software stack and support systems

The result was hiring more than 10 freelancers in addition to 5 of our DevOps engineers to build it all and handling the complexity of such a setup and the keep everything up-to-date, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, our AWS team, consisting of only three people working with Terraform, proved far more cost-effective. Not in terms of dollars per CPU core, but in terms of average per project spending dollars once staff costs and everything were included.

I think many of the HN posts that say things like "I saved 90% of my infra bill by moving from AWS to a single Hetzner server" are a bit misleading.

Most of those things you listed are work arounds for having a slow server/system.

For example, if you serve your assets from the server you can skip a cors round trip. If you use an embedded database like sqlite you can shave off 50ms, use dedicated CPU (another 50ms), now you don't need to sever anything from the edge. Because your global latency is much better.

Managing a single VPS is trivial compared to AWS.