> And not a single one of them has anything close to the wide and growing offering that AWS presents.

And that's why it is sometimes worthwhile using AWS. But most people don't use any of the advanced features of AWS.

> But that bandwidth is usually capped in speed and is dedicated to only that instance. No provider like this can handle all of their clients using 80% of their allotted bandwidth

You are jumping to conclusions that I'm only talking about "all inclusive" server rental deals. That's not the case.

You can buy bandwidth at a committed information rate charged based on a 5 minute 95th percentile billing which will typically end up at ~10% of AWS cost with ease unless you have extremely high/lasting spikes in a vast number of data centres from a large number of providers.

Much less if you take advantage of peering or buy limited transit (e.g. if you're in the UK, and most of your traffic is within the UK, you can cut your cost drastically once you reach any kind of volume by getting peering agreements in place for most of your UK bandwidth use, pay a low cost for Europe-only transit, and pay a higher cost for a much lower amount of worldwide transit; it has a management overhead so it doesn't pay until your bandwidth bill starts growing, which is why most people will start off by taking "only" straight unrestricted transit at a higher cost per Mbps/Gbps)

You can also pay per GB/TB and end up paying far less than AWS.

E.g. at Hetzner, you pay per TB over a minimum limit, just like with AWS. For Hetzner, the current overage rate is €1.17 per TB. I have no reason to assume that they're losing on money on that - they'be be able to hand most of that off via peering agreements.

> I'd be interested to hear particulars of this. Obviously it is your edge case, but I find it hard to believe that somebody can cut their costs that much unless they were way over-provisioned on AWS or they are not really counting all of the costs. I have never seen a DC that didn't have more management overhead to run than a full cloud offering.

They moved EC2 instances to Hetzner instances of roughly same speed. That's all there was too it - Hetzner server prices are low, and their bandwidth prices are as mentioned about €1.17 per TB above a limit per instance that's large enough that they've yet to exceed them, and that's the thing that's making the biggest difference (I've actually in the past cut peoples AWS bills by putting boxes at Hetzner and elsewhere purely as caches in front of their AWS setups because of the huge bandwidth differential - for people who spend much on bandwidth, it can pay for the extra servers many times over)

My experience is that we had no problems meeting similar bandwidth levels per machine as they did at AWS. Management is roughly the same complexity. They ended up using "bare metal" dedicated servers (Hetzner also offers VPSs) so they have access to IPMI to manage reboots etc. as necessary, and Hetzners rescue system lets them reimage the servers at will, so after investing a few k on scripting server installs it's as automated as their AWS setup was. They pay a very minimal extra overhead in an encrypted VPN between instances (and with current setup would pay for bandwidth for that if they exceed the included bandwidth allotment), though you can avoid this with some extra complexity (you can pay Hetzner some small fee and get servers wired up to a private network).

The cost difference includes the per-hour costs paid to keep either service running - the latter setup has actually cost them less in time spent managing it.