AWS Is a Money-Suck
Stop paying Amazon to cheat you.
Over the weekend, I ran into a Medium post about a Danish workforce-management start-up that pulled its servers out of Amazon Web Services completely (to a startling result). Driven by a need for data autonomy, respect for privacy rights, and the simple desire to keep costs reasonable, they hit upon a perfect solution: move to Europe.
Perhaps that's the reason this interested me so: I would also like to up and move to Europe. Ha.
Anyway, this group used a host that I'm familiar with, Hetzner, and promptly chopped ninety percent off its monthly bill.
One of the things you have to understand is that data in the United States is inherently insecure. Not simply because big corporations, the police, and our own federal spy agencies use big black market data brokers to buy our private data... no, it's because back doors into all private data are baked into our laws.
One of the key laws is the CLOUD Act, which allows American courts to demand data from any U.S. company, even if that data sits in Europe. If you’ve read my work (like the piece about swapping Google for Proton’s privacy-first bundle), you know that this is an issue near and dear to my heart. By picking hosts actually governed by EU law, this Danish group cut the United States completely out of the picture.
But for many people, it's the money side that will have the biggest punch.
This group spent about $2000 on Amazon Web Services. In comparison, Hetzner costs about the same as a lunch out—one Redditer priced a similar Hetzner server at 24 euro per month.
Isn't it incredible to see enshittification in action? I keep talking about this because it's important for ordinary folks like you and me, as much as it is for a business trying to save $24k a year. Whenever a monopoly (or a monopsony like Amazon) appears, everyone else suffers.
There's a lot more to this story, but it's mostly technical stuff that is better read in the original format. The point ultimately is, for a little extra work, the company's engineers said the trade felt a lot like learning to cook after years of take-out: clumsy the first week, empowering by the third.
We need to start actively asking the only question that matters: does the tool respect the person using it? If the answer is “not really,” take a cue from our Danish friends and take your life back.