> 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.

Almost reminds of Rackspace back in...2011

We had a leased server from them, running VMware, and we had Linux virtual machines for our application.

We ran out of RAM. We only had 16 or 32GB at the time. Hey, can we double this? Sure, but our payment would nearly double. How does that make any sense?

If this were a co-located box we owned, I could buy a pair of $125 chips from Crucial (or $250 Dell chips from CDW) and there we go. But we're expected to pay this much more per month?

Their answer was "you can do more with the server so that's what you're paying for"

Storage was a similar situation, we were still on RAID with spinning drives and we wanted to go SSD, not even NVME. Wasn't going to happen. And if we went to a new server we'd have to get all new IP's and stuff. Ugh.

And 10Gb...that was a pipe dream. Costs were insane.

We ended up having to decide between two things:

1. Move to a co-lo and buy a couple servers, ala StackExchange. This is what I wanted to do.

2. Tweak the current application stack, and re-write the next version to run on AWS.

What did we end up doing? Some half ass solution using the existing server for DB and NGINX proxy, while running the sites on (very slow) Slicehost instances (which Rackspace had recently acquired and roughly integrated into their network). So we still had downtime issues, slow databases, etc.

> Doubling the storage on a base server, often increases the price of your server by 50 to 75%

For storage, Hetzner does offer Volumes, which you can attach to your VM and you can choose exactly how large you want them to be and are charged separately. But your argument about doubling resources and doubling prices still holds for RAM.