alt Hacker NewsI’m formulating plans to switch from AWS to Hetzner. Amazon gets you by charging high prices (sometimes 20x more than competitors) and forcing you to make long-term commitments in order to get the prices to somewhere more reasonable. Then they make it exorbitantly expensive to migrate your data anywhere else. It’s a very customer-hostile approach that I’m tired of at this point.
Amazon might think that they’re locking people in with the egress fees. But they’re also locking people out. As soon as you switch one part to a competitor, the high egress forces you to switch over everything.
It’s going to be complicated to switch, but it’s made easier by the fact that I didn’t fall into the trap of building my platform on Amazon-specific services.
This used to be true, but GCP forced their hand in January of 2024 with https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/networking/eliminatin...
AWS matched a few months later:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/free-data-transfer-out-to-i...
I'm not trying to convince you to stay (I work for neither anymore!), just wanted to note that you can technically request a waiver. I'm not sure how this works in practice though. Like, if you want to leave Athena and move to something on-premise is that enough to have just that workload? Maybe!
Edit: I also didn't follow this at the time, but the AWS wording suggests that the "EU Data Act" is also involved.