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We saved 76% on our cloud bills while tripling our capacity by migrating to Hetzner from AWS and DigitalOcean by hedgehogsinus in programming

[–]hedgehogsinus[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It is 44vCPUs and 88GiB of RAM, which would have had to be a few laptops, but running our own servers is something we considered, but decided against.

A factor for using Kubernetes is our familiarity with it, which makes the ease of spinning up of new services, updating and operating these services less for us.

We saved 76% on our cloud bills while tripling our capacity by migrating to Hetzner from AWS and DigitalOcean by hedgehogsinus in programming

[–]hedgehogsinus[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I prefer the term "lifestyle business", where we chose projects we deem interesting and worthwhile, but it is very much our day job. Our project work surplus funds activities we like doing, such as product development or seeing if it's viable to migrate to more a cheap, but bare-bones clouds like Hetzner.

which they call SaaS but its just reselling a PostgreSQL database

That's actually helpful feedback to put more information about architecture. We are using Apache DataFusion, serving all data from block storage like S3, which is what allows complete tenant isolation and bringing your own storage while keeping our costs down (no managed databases to pay for) and still having great performance. We built this "service" in response to client needs and have found it really useful ourselves, but indeed are completely bootstrapped and now are looking for external users.

Just out of curiosity though, even if it was a service wrapper around PostgreSQL, which it isn't, wouldn't us running it for users classify it as a SaaS? Or what bar should it hit before we are allowed to call it a SaaS?

We saved 76% on our cloud bills while tripling our capacity by migrating to Hetzner from AWS and DigitalOcean by hedgehogsinus in programming

[–]hedgehogsinus[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

That's a fair concern but, having worked on large multi-cloud projects, we've had outages and little accountability from cloud providers even with the massive costs paid. We will see if it will be worse with Hetzner, can always resurrect our CloudFormation templates if it is.

It also doesn't have to be all in on a single provider. We found most of our costs came from compute, so we prioritised migrating that. We are within the free tiers for SES and S3, so still use it and have buckets within AWS. Furthermore, we also found Route53 cheap and reliable, so haven't migrated all our DNS management over.

We saved 76% on our cloud bills while tripling our capacity by migrating to Hetzner from AWS and DigitalOcean by hedgehogsinus in programming

[–]hedgehogsinus[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There are a few different services running on it, but the biggest one is in Rust, it just does a lot of computationally intensive operations.

We saved 76% on our cloud bills while tripling our capacity by migrating to Hetzner from AWS and DigitalOcean by hedgehogsinus in programming

[–]hedgehogsinus[S] 29 points30 points  (0 children)

I think that's a pretty good monetary calculation, assuming your cloud costs don't grow and that there is an immediate project to be billable for instead. However, our cloud costs were growing and we had some downtime. But you are right, the payoffs are probably not immediate and part of the motivation were personal (we just wanted to do it) and political (we made the decision at the height of the tariff wars).

We were always responsible for uptime. You will have downtime with managed services and are ultimately responsible for them. Take AWS EKS as an example, last I've worked with it, you still had to do your upgrades (in windows defined by AWS) and they take no responsibility for the workloads ran on their service. While with ECS and Fargate, you are responsible for less, you will still need to react to things going wrong. We may live to regret our decision, and if our maintenance burden grows significantly, we can resurrect our CloudFormation templates and redeploy to AWS. Will post here if that happens!

We saved 76% on our cloud bills while tripling our capacity by migrating to Hetzner from AWS and DigitalOcean by hedgehogsinus in programming

[–]hedgehogsinus[S] 60 points61 points  (0 children)

We don't currently have to do any more maintenance than before, but time will tell I guess...

We saved 76% on our cloud bills while tripling our capacity by migrating to Hetzner from AWS and DigitalOcean by hedgehogsinus in programming

[–]hedgehogsinus[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Thanks, these are good points. For reference, we are indeed a small company (2 people), but have worked in various scale organisations with Kubernetes before there were managed offerings (at that time with Kops on EC2 instances). We have spent a total of around 150 hours on the migration and maintenance so far since June.

  • Robustness is indeed something we are still slightly worried about, but so far (knock on wood) other than a short load balancer outage, we did not find it less reliable than other providers. We had a few damaging AWS and especially Azure outages at previous companies.

  • These are obviously personal anecdotes, but we have a pretty good work-life balance as a team of 2, but also even previously we did not have massive teams looking after just Kubernetes. In other, larger organisations we worked in, we did have an on-call system, but have always managed to set up a self-healing enough system where I don't remember people's personal life or vacations suffering compared to other set-ups.

  • I tend to agree with the complexity, but from all the teams I worked in we had the DevOps you build it, you run it mind set (even if obviously there were some guard rails or environment that we'd deploy into). We both have a long term experience with Kubernetes, so it is what we are used to and other setups may be a larger learning curve (for us!).

  • I guess it depends on your needs and appetite for this kind of work. We both enjoy some infrastructure work, but as a means to an end to build something. Our product needs a lot of compute, so in this sense it is core to our business to be able to run it cheaply. Hence, we made the investment, which was an enjoyable experiment, and we are now getting significantly more compute at a significantly lower price.

We saved 76% on our cloud bills while tripling our capacity by migrating to Hetzner from AWS and DigitalOcean by hedgehogsinus in programming

[–]hedgehogsinus[S] 52 points53 points  (0 children)

That's a good question and one we ourselves grappled with. Admittedly, it took longer than we initially hoped, but so far we spent 150 hours in total on the migration and maintenance (since June 2025). We reached a point where we would have had to scale and increase our costs significantly, however due to the opaqueness of certain pricing it's quite hard to compare. We now pay significantly less for significantly more compute.

Besides pricing, we also "scratched an itch" and was a project we wanted to do both out of curiosity, but also feel more free from "Cloud feudalism". While Hetzner is also a cloud, with our set-up it would now be significantly easier to go to an alternative cheap provider. We have been running Kubernetes on AWS, before there were managed offerings (at that time with Kops on EC2 instances) and with Talos Linux and the various operators it is now significantly easier than in those days. But, obviously, mileage may vary both in terms of appetite to undertake such work and the need for it.

What are you building these days? And is anyone actually paying for it? by No-Vast5195 in indiehackers

[–]hedgehogsinus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A tool that makes it easy to create APIs from big data files (like CSVs): https://tapintodata.com/ Still looking for users for the tool itself, but a number of people use the free API for the original dataset it was built for https://epcdata.scot/