AWS Handed Us a €1,600 Egress Bill. So We Moved Back to Dedicated Metal.
Public cloud is great for prototypes, but bandwidth traps and noisy neighbours kill your margins. Here is what we learned moving heavy workloads to dedicated boxes.
Public cloud platforms are brilliant when you are hacking together an MVP over a weekend. You swipe a credit card, provision instances in thirty seconds, and take advantage of startup promotional tiers.
The headache begins in year two.
As soon as your application starts doing continuous background operations, processing image uploads, or running steady database writes, the bill starts ballooning. On AWS or Azure, you don't just pay for compute instances; you get charged for NAT gateway data processing, provisioned IOPS tiers, inter-zone transfers, and roughly nine cents per gigabyte of outbound network traffic.
On one of our media extraction pipelines, our monthly invoice crept past eighteen hundred euros. Over six hundred euros of that was pure network transit and managed storage markups.
We migrated those services off multi-tenant instances and onto dedicated bare-metal hardware hosted in Dublin and Frankfurt datacentres.
The total monthly bill for that entire workload dropped from nearly two grand down to one hundred and sixty-five euros.
Here is how we divide our hosting footprint today:
For web frontends, staging branches, and lightweight reverse proxies, a standard VPS makes total sense. You can spin up an instance in under a minute, attach an automated snapshot routine, and upgrade virtual CPU cores as needed.
For high-write databases and continuous worker pipelines, dedicated hardware is dramatically superior. On shared virtualized storage pools, noisy neighbors can spike database query latency from three milliseconds to three hundred milliseconds during peak hours. On a dedicated NVMe machine, you own the entire disk bus and CPU scheduler twenty-four hours a day.
Our dedicated machines come with unmetered gigabit network ports. That means we can push terabytes of customer data and automated backups every night without worrying about unpredictable line items at the end of the billing cycle.
If your team understands basic Linux server management, paying a heavy markup to hyper-scale cloud providers for predictable, steady workloads is money you will never get back.