Hetzher vs AWS

I moved a business of ~100 FTEs from AWS to Hetzner once. Aside from the migration cost, the price was roughly 25% of AWS. I left many years ago, the business switched frameworks since then but they stayed on Hetzner.

Thinking again of this old story I now realize that the biggest gain was not monetary, but human. For years, that business could retain skilled engineers who had the opportunity to work closer to bare metal, caring about the nitty-gritty technical details of backups, failover and high availability.

And they did not even cost much. That they had so much leeway in designing the system instead of "relying on the cloud" was a major retainer.