I Moved Everything to a $4.50 Hetzner Box. Here's What Broke and What Didn't.

Last year my side project was running on AWS. A t3.small EC2 instance, an RDS PostgreSQL db.t3.micro, an S3 bucket, and a CloudFront distribution. Total bill: $47/month for an app with 200 daily users. Then someone on Reddit told me to look at Hetzner. I now run the same stack on a single CAX21 (4 vCPU ARM, 8GB RAM, 80GB SSD) for €5.49/month. Here's exactly what happened. The Migration What I was running on AWS: Node.js API (Express) PostgreSQL database Redis for sessions Nginx reverse proxy Static files on S3 + CloudFront What I moved to Hetzner: Same Node.js API PostgreSQL installed directly on the server Redis installed directly on the server Nginx + Certbot for SSL Static files served by Nginx Total migration time: one Saturday afternoon. The hardest part was setting up automated backups (solved with a cron job + Hetzner's snapshot API). What Broke Nothing critical, but: No managed database failover. On RDS, if the database crashes, AWS restarts it automatically. On Hetzner, if PostgreSQL crashes at 3 AM, I'm the one fixing it. In 8 months, this has happened zero times. But it could. No CDN by default. My static assets now serve from a single Hetzner datacenter in Germany. For my EU-heavy userbase, this is actually faster than CloudFront. For US users, it's about 50ms slower. I added Cloudflare (free tier) in front and the problem disappeared. Deployment changed. No more eb deploy or push-to-deploy. I wrote a 12-line bash script that SSHs in, pulls from git, runs migrations, and restarts PM2. Takes 8 seconds. Honestly prefer it — I know exactly what's happening. The Cost Comparison at Every Scale This is what surprised me most. The gap isn't just at my small scale — it gets wider as you grow: SpecAWSDigitalOceanVultrHetzner2 vCPU, 4GB$30/mo$24/mo$24/mo€4.50/mo4 vCPU, 8GB$61/mo$48/mo$48/mo€8.50/mo8 vCPU, 16GB$122/mo$96/mo$96/mo€16/mo Hetzner is roughly 5-7x cheaper than AWS at every tier. DigitalOcean and Vultr sit in the middle. 👉 Calculate your exact costs When