Hostingowy vs AWS EC2: Why UK Businesses Are Switching

At a Glance

Feature	Hostingowy	AWS EC2
Data Centre Location	UK (London, Manchester)	Global (eu-west-2 in London, but complex routing)
UK Data Jurisdiction	✅ Data stays under UK law	⚠️ AWS operates under US parent, data may transit US servers
Starting Price (4 vCPU, 4GB RAM)	$25/mo — all included	$69+/mo — t3.medium + hidden costs
Egress Fees	$0 — included in transfer allowance	$0.09/GB after free tier — can exceed compute cost
Managed Support	✅ UK-based engineers, Slack + email	⚠️ Developer support from $29/mo, higher tiers expensive
Free Migration	✅ Concierge migration included	❌ Migration services chargeable via AWS Professional Services
Snapshot Backups	✅ Daily automated snapshots included	⚠️ EBS snapshots cost extra based on storage volume
Contract	Monthly, cancel anytime	On-demand or 1/3 year reserved instances

Why This Comparison Matters for UK Businesses

AWS EC2 is the default choice for many UK startups and digital agencies. It's familiar, well-documented, and offers virtually unlimited scale. But as your infrastructure grows, the costs can spiral — and many UK businesses are discovering that AWS's complexity and pricing model doesn't scale well for predictable workloads.

We built Hostingowy specifically for UK businesses that have outgrown shared hosting but don't need (or want to pay for) the full hyperscale cloud stack. Here's how we compare across the dimensions that matter most to UK companies.

Pricing: The Hidden Costs of AWS EC2

AWS EC2 pricing looks reasonable at first glance — a t3.medium (2 vCPU, 4GB RAM) starts at around $0.0416/hour, which works out to about $30/month. But that's just the compute. The real costs are in everything else:

• EBS storage: $0.10/GB-month for gp3 volumes — a 50GB volume adds $5/mo
• Data transfer (egress): $0.09/GB after the first 100GB — for a site serving 500GB/month, that's an extra $36
• Load balancers: ~$18/mo per ALB, plus per-GB data processing fees
• Snapshots: $0.05/GB-month for EBS snapshots
• Elastic IPs: $3.60/mo if not attached to a running instance
• NAT Gateway: ~$32/mo + $0.045/GB processing — if your private subnets need internet access
• CloudWatch: $0.30/metric-month, $0.50/GB for logs

By the time you've provisioned a basic production setup with a database, load balancer, and a few GB of transfer, your monthly AWS bill can easily hit $100–$200+/month for what is, in performance terms, a modest single-server workload.

With Hostingowy, the same workload costs $25–$49/month — all included. No surprise charges at the end of the month.

Real-World Cost Comparison

Component	AWS EC2 (Typical)	Hostingowy
Compute (4 vCPU, 4GB)	$69	$25 (Business plan)
Storage (80GB NVMe)	$8 (EBS gp3)	Included
Data Transfer (4TB)	$360 (at $0.09/GB)	Included
Snapshots (daily)	$4/mo	Included
Support	$29/mo (Developer plan)	Included (Slack + email)
Total	$470/mo	$25/mo

Note: The AWS EC2 pricing above assumes a single t3.medium instance with 80GB EBS storage, 4TB transfer, daily snapshots, and Developer-level support. Your actual bill may vary, but this is a realistic scenario for a UK business running a production application.

Performance: Bare Metal vs Virtualised Hypervisors

One of the less-discussed differences between Hostingowy and AWS EC2 is the infrastructure layer. AWS runs on a heavily virtualised, multi-tenant hypervisor model. While AWS's Nitro system is impressive, you're still sharing physical hardware with other AWS customers — and performance can vary based on "noisy neighbour" effects, especially on burstable instance types like the t3 series.

Hostingowy runs on dedicated bare-metal servers in UK data centres, with KVM-based virtualisation. Each VPS gets:

• Dedicated CPU cores — no bursting, no throttling, consistent performance
• Enterprise NVMe storage — not network-attached EBS, but local NVMe direct-attached
• Dedicated RAM — no memory overcommitment
• Under 60-second provisioning — your VPS is ready almost instantly

For I/O-intensive workloads (databases, CI/CD pipelines, file processing), the local NVMe storage on Hostingowy significantly outperforms AWS EBS volumes, especially at the gp3 tier.

Data Residency & GDPR: A Real Concern for UK Businesses

Post-Brexit, data residency has become a significant consideration for UK businesses. While the UK has an EU adequacy decision (meaning data can flow freely between the UK and EU), many UK companies prefer to keep their data under UK jurisdiction — particularly those handling sensitive customer data, financial information, or government contracts.

AWS operates under US parent company (Amazon.com, Inc.), and its terms of service are governed by US law. While AWS offers data centres in the UK (eu-west-2, London), data can still transit through US servers for certain services, and AWS is subject to US surveillance laws like the CLOUD Act.

Hostingowy is a UK company operating UK data centres under UK law. Your data stays in the UK, and we're fully compliant with:

• UK GDPR / Data Protection Act 2018
• PCI DSS (for e-commerce customers)
• UK data centre standards (ISO 27001 certified facilities)

For UK businesses that need to demonstrate data sovereignty to their customers or regulators, Hostingowy provides a cleaner answer than routing through a US-headquartered hyperscaler.

Egress Fees: The Silent Budget Killer

AWS's data transfer pricing is one of the most common sources of surprise bills. At $0.09/GB for most egress, the cost can quickly exceed your compute spend:

• 500GB/month: $45 in egress fees
• 1TB/month: $90
• 5TB/month: $450

And here's the kicker: if you're using CloudFront (AWS's CDN), you're paying egress twice — once from EC2 to CloudFront, and once from CloudFront to the internet (though the first is free if you use an origin-facing endpoint).

Hostingowy includes your transfer allowance in the plan price. Our Business plan ($25/mo) includes 4TB of transfer. Our Professional plan ($49/mo) includes 8TB. No surprise bills, no egress charges.

Support: Actually Helpful, Not a Ticket Queue

AWS Developer support costs $29/month and gives you access to cloud support engineers — generalists who know AWS well but don't know your specific application or architecture. For anything beyond basic API questions, you'll need to escalate to Business support ($100/month) or Enterprise support ($15k+/month).

Hostingowy support is included on every plan. You get:

• Direct access to the engineers who built the platform
• Slack-based support with <1 hour response time during business hours
• Free migration concierge — we'll move your workloads from any provider
• No ticket queues, no outsourced call centres

For UK agencies and SaaS bootstrappers, having direct access to knowledgeable engineers who understand both networking and your specific setup is a significant productivity advantage.

Migration: No Lock-In, We'll Help You Move

One of the biggest concerns when choosing any hosting provider is lock-in. AWS makes it easy to get started but expensive to leave — data transfer fees for large migrations can run into thousands of dollars.

With Hostingowy, we offer free concierge migration from any provider. We'll help you:

1. Audit your current AWS setup and map it to equivalent Hostingowy resources
2. Set up DNS and test the new environment in parallel
3. Migrate your data during a scheduled window (typically <30 minutes downtime)
4. Cut over DNS and decommission old AWS resources

And if you ever want to leave — there's no lock-in. We'll help you migrate back to any provider, free of charge.

When Should You Stick with AWS?

AWS EC2 is still the right choice in some scenarios:

• Massive scale: If you need to auto-scale to hundreds of instances based on demand, AWS's ecosystem is unmatched
• Managed services: If you rely heavily on AWS Lambda, RDS, SQS, SNS, or other managed services that don't have direct VPS equivalents
• Multi-region global deployment: If you need data centres on every continent, AWS has the broadest coverage
• Compliance requirements: Some enterprise compliance frameworks specifically require AWS or Azure certifications

For the majority of UK startups, SaaS companies, and digital agencies running predictable workloads on a few to a few dozen servers, Hostingowy offers better value, simpler pricing, and genuinely helpful support — without the complexity and hidden costs of the hyperscale cloud.