Technology Videos

I'm Leaving the Cloud! (...and Why You Probably Should Too)

In this video, SaaS founder Simon Hoiberg explains his decision to migrate the bulk of his five‑product portfolio—from a fully managed AWS stack to dedicated bare‑metal servers hosted by Hetzner in Germany. He now runs roughly 80 % of his infrastructure on three Hetzner servers using Docker, Kubernetes, Postgres, Redis and open‑source monitoring tools, while retaining about 20 % of services (e.g., Stripe, OpenAI, some AWS components) in the cloud. Hoiberg highlights three primary reasons for the move. First, cost: monthly AWS bills of roughly $7,800 have dropped to about $200 for the Hetzner servers, a saving that scales as usage grows. Second, vendor lock‑in: by decoupling from AWS‑specific services like DynamoDB, Lambda and Fargate, he can avoid the risk of price hikes or service termination and even run workloads on anything from VPS providers to Raspberry Pis. Third, financial predictability for his “lifetime‑deal” customers—fixed infrastructure costs make it easier to honor perpetual licenses without eroding margins. He backs his claims with concrete examples, such as successfully running a product on three Raspberry Pis for two days and experimenting with MinIO for self‑hosted S3‑compatible storage. He also acknowledges the trade‑offs: the initial migration required a steep learning curve in Kubernetes, Docker and system administration, and some services (Cognito, CloudFront) remain on AWS due to maturity and security concerns. The broader implication is that mid‑stage SaaS businesses can achieve substantial savings and greater control by shifting to self‑hosted dedicated servers, provided they have—or are willing to develop—the operational expertise. Hoiberg advises hobby projects to stay on managed platforms, large mission‑critical firms to remain on hyperscalers, and “in‑between” companies to consider a hybrid approach that balances cost, performance and vendor independence.