What cloud hosting actually costs a small business
Cloud pricing pages are accurate and almost useless, because they price components rather than workloads. Here is the same realistic workload priced across five providers, with the charges that catch people out called out explicitly.
| Provider | Monthly | What drives the number |
|---|---|---|
| Hetzner | $45 - $70 | Cheapest compute by a wide margin, generous transfer. Fewer managed services, EU-centric regions. |
| DigitalOcean | $70 - $110 | Predictable flat pricing, transfer bundled. Managed database costs more than self-hosting but removes real work. |
| AWS | $180 - $320 | Compute is competitive; egress and managed-service premiums are what move the total. |
| Azure | $180 - $310 | Similar shape to AWS. Cheaper if you already hold Microsoft licensing that can be applied. |
| Google Cloud | $170 - $300 | Competitive compute, sustained-use discounts apply automatically, egress still the swing factor. |
The charges that surprise people
- Data transfer OUT - inbound is usually free, outbound rarely is, and it scales with success
- Inter-zone traffic - moving data between availability zones is billed on the big three
- Managed database premiums - often 2 to 3 times the raw compute underneath
- Snapshots and backups accumulating quietly for years
- NAT gateways and load balancers billed hourly whether busy or idle
- Support plans, which are a percentage of spend on the big three
When the expensive option is genuinely worth it
- You need compliance attestations a smaller host cannot provide
- You need regions close to customers in several continents
- You need managed services that replace staff you would otherwise hire
- You are growing fast enough that re-architecting later costs more than paying now
When it is not
- A steady, predictable workload that never needs to scale suddenly
- A single-region business with no compliance obligations
- Any case where nobody on the team can actually operate the complexity you are buying
Common questions
Is AWS more expensive than DigitalOcean?
For the same specification, usually yes - often two to three times for a small workload, driven mainly by data transfer and managed service premiums. AWS buys breadth, regions and compliance depth that may or may not be worth that difference to you.
What is the single biggest cause of an unexpected cloud bill?
Data transfer out, followed by resources nobody turned off. Both are invisible on a pricing page and obvious on an invoice.
Should a small business use managed databases?
Usually yes. It costs more than self-hosting but removes patching, backup verification and failover - work that tends not to happen at all in a small team, which is worse than paying for it.
Affiliate disclosure. Some links on this page are affiliate links, which means we may earn a commission if you sign up. It does not change what we recommend or the order things appear in, and we only recommend providers we run workloads on ourselves.
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