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3 posts tagged with "hetzner"

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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.

PostgreSQL Benchmark: AWS RDS vs Hostim vs Self-Hosted on Hetzner (2026)

· 9 min read

Short answer first: at the same size (2 vCPU / 4 GB, PostgreSQL 16), Hostim had the fastest writes, about 2.5× the write throughput of AWS RDS db.t4g.medium and 2.1× a default self-hosted Postgres on Hetzner. Hetzner had the fastest reads, on raw per-core CPU speed. RDS was slowest or near-slowest on both, and its listed price is the smallest part of the real bill.

This post shows every number, the exact commands to reproduce them, and (because it changes the conclusion) what high availability actually costs on each platform.