Cloud providers compared

Deep dive

The landscape

Price orders of magnitude (2026-ish, on demand, check the pricing page)

Rule of thumb: 1 TB served from a hyperscaler costs about $90; the same terabyte from a Hetzner server is inside the bundle.

Decision table

Code

Price a workload before choosing; egress and storage usually decide it.

/// Rough monthly cost model; plug in the current pricing-page numbers.
fn monthly(vms: f64, vm_price: f64, egress_tb: f64, egress_per_gb: f64,
           included_tb: f64, storage_tb: f64, storage_per_tb: f64) -> f64 {
    let egress = (egress_tb - included_tb).max(0.0) * 1000.0 * egress_per_gb;
    vms * vm_price + egress + storage_tb * storage_per_tb
}

fn main() {
    // 10 VMs, 50 TB/month served, 20 TB stored (order-of 2026 prices)
    let hyperscaler = monthly(10.0, 140.0, 50.0, 0.085, 0.0, 20.0, 23.0);
    let hetzner = monthly(10.0, 30.0, 50.0, 0.001, 10.0 * 20.0, 20.0, 6.0); // 20 TB included per server
    println!("hyperscaler ~${hyperscaler:.0}/month, hetzner ~${hetzner:.0}/month");
    // hyperscaler ~$6110/month, hetzner ~$420/month
}

Efficiency

• Cost: the meters are VM-hours, GB stored and GB sent to the internet; for bandwidth-heavy products egress dominates. Hetzner EU cloud servers include 20 TB of traffic per month (Hetzner traffic docs) and R2 has no egress bandwidth charge (R2 pricing), both as of 2026-10. Other prices on this page are order of. Bound: egress price, not CPU.
• Levers:
  • serve downloads from zero-egress storage or a bundled-traffic server — removes the per-GB line (R2 pricing; Hetzner traffic docs) — bandwidth-heavy products
  • commitments on the steady floor — up to 72 % off covered compute (AWS Savings Plans User Guide) — steady base on a hyperscaler
  • spot for interruptible work — up to 90 % off (AWS Spot Instances page) — batch, CI, rendering
  • keep chatty traffic in one region and zone — cross-region and cross-cloud transfer is billed as egress (order of) — replicas, pipelines
  • commodity bare metal for steady cores — 3-10x lower per core (order of, price lists in Sources) — teams that can run Linux
• Naive → standard → state of the art:
  • everything on one hyperscaler at on-demand list price · baseline
  • commitments on the floor, spot for batch · up to 72 % / 90 % off the covered part
  • hyperscaler control plane, commodity compute, CDN or zero-egress storage for the heavy bytes · egress line near zero

Implementation notes

• Hybrid is normal: hyperscaler for managed control-plane pieces (auth, DNS, small DB), commodity servers for heavy compute and bandwidth. Put a VPN (WireGuard) or the provider's private network between them.
• Pick the region next to your users and your data; cross-region and cross-cloud transfer is billed as egress.
• Hyperscaler "free tier" and startup credits hide the real run-rate; model the post-credit bill on day one.
• Quotas: new accounts on every provider start with low vCPU/GPU limits. Request increases before launch.

Pitfalls

• NAT gateways: order of $0.045/GB processed on AWS on top of egress; a chatty service pulling images through NAT can cost more than its VMs.
• Public IPv4 addresses are billed on AWS (about $3.6/month each since 2024).
• Cross-AZ replication traffic of a database or Kafka cluster is billed both ways and is often the largest line item.
• Commodity providers can lock accounts on abuse reports or failed KYC; keep backups and DNS outside the provider.
• Comparing list prices only: hyperscaler commitments and spot change the answer for steady fleets.

Implementations

Sources

• AWS, Amazon EC2 On-Demand Pricing and EC2 Data Transfer pricing (web pages). pricing
• Hetzner Online, Cloud and Dedicated Root Server price lists (web pages). cloud · dedicated · traffic
• Cloudflare, R2 pricing (web page). pricing
• Sarah Wang and Martin Casado, The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox, Andreessen Horowitz, 2021. post