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What Does 'Hello World' Actually Cost on AWS vs Bare Metal? (2026)

· 10 min read

Short answer: one "hello world" container with a domain and HTTPS costs about $32 per month on AWS if you set it up carefully, and about $69 per month if you follow the default AWS tutorial. The same thing on a small Hetzner Cloud server costs €5.99 per month. Bare metal is the surprising one. A Hetzner AX42-1 costs €97.30 per month, which makes it the most expensive option here, not the cheapest.

Two results are worth explaining, and neither is what people usually say:

  1. Compute is not the expensive part on AWS at this size. In the realistic setup, the container is 15% of the bill. The other 85% is the load balancer and the NAT gateway. Those cost the same whether you serve one request per month or a million.
  2. Bare metal is not cheap. It is cheap per app. A dedicated server only pays off when you fill it. For one container it is a bad deal.