This is exactly what I'm doing as well.

The price difference between Hetzner and AWS is large enough that it could pay for 4x as much computational power (as much redundancy as you'd ever need), three full time system admins (not that you'd ever need them), and our office lease... with plenty of money left over!

And it's not like AWS is any easier to use than Hetzner - they both take just as much time to setup and Hetzner is at least as intuitive as AWS.

I'm always surprised when resource scarce startups are paying ridiculous amounts for AWS instances. It is a huge waste of money and I have a hard time telling if it is laziness, following the herd, or ignorance as to how expensive cloud hosting is.

My 39 euro Hetzner dedicated server provisoned quicker than AWS EC2. Not an apples to oranges, but if all you need is basic Linux Servers, it can be a good choice, if you can manage some basic stuff on your own, but ofc AWS is not EC2 only. My 39 euro server ks faster than most ec2 instances at a fraction of the cost.

Moved from Linode to a dedicated rental. Half the monthly cost for 3x the specs, and a night and day difference in the site's performance. High-quality hardware is deeply underappreciated. Would've cost me $1k/mo to get something equivalent on AWS.

Note: I did move back to Linode because the traffic all went away, and now I just run it on a fairly-small node there.

Cloud has a role, but mostly it just tricks you into leaking a lot of unnecessary cash with nickels and dimes, so you don't really realize how much you're spending.

My cloud cost is less than 5% of my bussiness costs using GCE. Would be foolish to move it to lower my costs 2%.

How is the experience going ? How is the latency for clients across the ocean ?