How We Cut Cloud Costs by Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

Cloud bills creep up quietly. Reserved instances you forgot about, oversized EC2 boxes, NAT gateway charges, and S3 egress add up — especially for SaaS products with steady but modest traffic. One of our clients, FormationSystems, was paying for AWS capacity they no longer needed.

We planned a phased migration to Hetzner Cloud: audit workloads, containerise where it made sense, move stateless services first, then databases with tested failover. The goal was lower cost without sacrificing uptime.

What we moved first

Stateless API services and background workers went into Docker on Hetzner first. We kept AWS running in parallel until traffic was validated on the new stack. The survey application was containerised so deploys became repeatable — no more snowflake servers.

DNS and TLS were switched with low TTLs so rollback was fast if anything looked wrong. Monitoring and alerting were in place before cutover, not after.

Results

The client saw meaningful monthly savings and simpler operations. Deployments got faster. Incidents became easier to debug because environments matched production.

Not every workload belongs on Hetzner — but for many B2B SaaS and internal tools, a hybrid or full move away from hyperscaler pricing can make sense. We help teams model costs, plan migration windows, and execute without drama.

Need a cloud review?

If your AWS or GCP bill feels high for what you run, we offer cloud consulting and migration planning. See our cloud consulting page or contact us through arvyo.com.