Ditch the Cloud: Run a Few Linux Servers and Save 10x

The author exited AWS for Hetzner and cut infra costs by ~10x while improving performance, arguing most teams don’t need expensive cloud-managed services. He shows concrete pricing for bare metal and VPS that undercut AWS by wide margins, and notes that buying hardware can be cheaper long-term. With modern datacenters, simple Linux hardening, Cloudflare, and AI-assisted ops, running your own servers is practical and sufficient for most businesses.

Key Points

• Cloud providers impose massive markups; renting or buying servers (e.g., Hetzner or modest on-prem hardware) is often 10x–100x cheaper for typical workloads.
• Most businesses are small and don’t need enterprise-grade cloud features; a single or few well-sized Linux servers can handle large traffic reliably.
• The “you’re using cloud wrong” rebuttal is gaslighting—after serious cost optimization, cloud remains expensive compared to running your own servers.
• Backlash is fueled by misaligned incentives and sunk-cost/cult dynamics around cloud tooling and roles; the debate often becomes semantic or dogmatic.
• Modern datacenters are resilient, server management isn’t a full-time burden, AI greatly lowers the ops barrier, and basic hardening plus Cloudflare is sufficient for many.

Sentiment

Overall, the Hacker News discussion exhibits a highly critical and skeptical sentiment towards the article's dogmatic stance and confrontational tone, despite some agreement with the premise that many businesses overpay for cloud services. While acknowledging that simpler setups can be cheaper for certain use cases, commenters broadly highlight the unacknowledged benefits of cloud (managed services, scalability, time savings, compliance), criticize the article's lack of nuance and its own website's failure to scale, and challenge the author's definition of 'cloud' and TCO comparisons.

In Agreement

• Most startups running a single EC2 instance can save substantial money by moving to providers like Hetzner, Linode, or Digital Ocean.
• Many companies, especially small ones, over-engineer their infrastructure on the cloud, using complex setups (microservices, Kubernetes) when vertical scaling on one or two servers would suffice and be cheaper.
• The high cost of cloud managed services often stems from 'paying for stuff you don't need' or misaligned incentives, with many cloud-centric roles benefiting from complexity.
• Leveraging startup credits or free tiers for MVPs in the cloud is a good strategy, but once a business model is proven, migrating to cheaper infrastructure can save significant money.
• Modular application architectures can allow businesses to selectively host different components where they are most cost-effective, rather than being all-in on one vendor.

Opposed

• Cloud services offer significant advantages like readily available managed services (backups, databases, multi-AZs), no upfront costs, and superior on-demand scalability for peak loads or rapid growth, which the article undervalues.
• The article's own website failing under Hacker News traffic ironically demonstrates a key benefit of cloud scalability and a weakness of less elastic self-hosted solutions.
• The value of engineering time to manage self-hosted infrastructure (e.g., setting up and maintaining highly available databases, security, patching, compliance) can quickly offset perceived cost savings from cheaper bare metal, especially for teams without specialized expertise.
• The article's tone is criticized as obnoxious, whiny, and employing strawman arguments, detracting from any valid technical points.
• For minimal needs, some cloud options (e.g., small AWS instances or Oracle's free tier) can be cheaper than dedicated servers, and the article's comparison doesn't account for these cases or a full Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis.
• Hetzner, while cheap, has specific downsides like strict policies (e.g., concerning IPFS) and issues with hosting malicious content, leading to its IPs being sinkholed by EDR products.