Use One Big Server (2022)

One of the more detrimental aspects of the Cloud Tax is that it constrains the types of solutions engineers even consider.

Picking an arbitrary price point of $200/mo, you can get 4(!) vCPUs and 16GB of RAM at AWS. Architectures are different etc., but this is roughly a mid-spec dev laptop of 5 or so years ago.

At Hetzner, you can rent a machine with 48 cores and 128GB of RAM for the same money. It's hard to overstate how far apart these machines are in raw computational capacity.

There are approaches to problems that make sense with 10x the capacity that don't make sense on the much smaller node. Critically, those approaches can sometimes save engineering time that would otherwise go into building a more complex system to manage around artificial constraints.

Yes, there are other factors like durability etc. that need to be designed for. But going the other way, dedicated boxes can deliver more consistent performance without worries of noisy neighbors.

> At Hetzner, you can rent a machine with 48 cores and 128GB of RAM for the same money.

The problem that Hetzner and a lot of hardware providing hosts have, is the lack of affordable flexibility.

Hetzner their design is based upon a base range of standardized products. This can only be upgraded within a pre-approved range of upgrade options (limited to storage/memory).

Upgrades are often a mixed bag of carefully designed "upgrade paths". As you can expect, upgrades are not cheap. Doubling the storage on a base server, often increases the price of your server by 50 to 75%. The typical customizing will cost you dearly.

This is where AWS wins a lot more. Yes, they are expensive as hell, but you often are not stuck to a base config and a limited upgrade path. The ability to scale beyond what Hetzner can offer is there, and your not forced to overbuy from the start. Transferring between servers is a few buttons and done. With Hetzner, if you did not overspec from the start, your going to do those fun server migrations.

The ironic part is, that buying your own hardware and running it yourself, often ends up paying back within a 8~12 month periode (not counting electricity / internet). And you maintain a lot more flexibility.

* You want to use bifurcation, go for it.

* You want to use consumer 4TB nvme's for second layer read storage (what hetzner refuses to offer as they limited those to 2TB and only one a few servers), go for it.

* You want a 10Gbit interlink between your server, go for it. No need to pay a monthly fee! No need to reserve "future space".

* O, you want a 25Gbit, go for it (hetzner = not possible).

* You want 50Gbit ...

* You want to chuck in a few LLM capable GPUs without breaking the bank...

Its ironic that we are 2025 and Hetzner is stil limited to 1Gbit connection on its hardware, when just about any consumer level hardware has 2.5Gbit by default for years.

Your own hardware gives you the flexibility of AWS and the cost saving beyond Hetzner. Maybe its just my environment, but i see more and more smaller to medium companies going back to their own locally run servers. Not even colocation.

The increase in consumer level fiber, what used to be expensive or not available, has opened the doors for businesses. Most companies do not need insane backbones.

The fact that you can get business fiber 10Gbit for a 100 Euro price in some EU countries (of course never the north), is insane. I even seen some folks combining fiber with starlink & 5G as backup in case their fiber fails/is out.

As long as you fit within a specific usage case that is being offered by Hetzner, they are cheap. But its the moment you step outside that comfort zone, ... This is one of Hetzner weaknesses and where AWS or Self hosted comes back.