Every week, we talk to UK developers who are paying £200-£500/month for cloud infrastructure they're not fully using — and who could get better performance for half the cost with a UK VPS provider.
But the headline pricing on cloud provider websites makes it hard to compare apples to apples. An AWS t3a.medium "looks" like it costs £25/month. A DigitalOcean droplet "starts at" $6/month.
In this post, we break down the real costs — including what the big clouds don't tell you on their pricing pages.
The Price Comparison: Face Value
Let's start with the headline numbers. We compared a 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM configuration across four providers:
| Provider | Stated Price | Actual Monthly Cost (UK user) |
|---|---|---|
| Hostingowy VPS | £29/mo | £29 — no hidden fees |
| DigitalOcean Basic | ~$48/mo | £42 + VAT + bandwidth overage |
| AWS EC2 (t3a.medium) | ~$30/mo | ~£60+ with EBS, data transfer, NAT |
| Hetzner CX52 | ~€35/mo | ~£32 + VAT (DE-based) |
At face value, the big clouds can look competitive. But that's rarely the bill you actually pay.
The Hidden Costs of Big Cloud VPS
1. Egress (Data Transfer) Fees
This is the biggest hidden cost — and the one that surprises UK companies most.
| Provider | Egress Cost (per GB) | Cost to serve 1 TB/month |
|---|---|---|
| Hostingowy | £0 (included) | £0 |
| AWS | £0.05-0.09/GB | ~£77 |
| DigitalOcean | £0.01/GB (over 1 TB) | ~£5 (after 1 TB free) |
| Hetzner | €0.01/GB (over 20 TB) | ~€5 (after 20 TB free) |
For a UK SaaS company serving 10 TB of traffic per month, that's £770 in AWS egress fees alone — more than the cost of the VPS itself.
2. CPU Credit Model (AWS Burstable Instances)
AWS's t-series instances (t3a, t4g, etc.) are "burstable" — they accumulate CPU credits when idle and spend them when active. Once credits run out, your CPU performance is throttled to a baseline of 10-20%.
For any consistently loaded application (a web server, API, database, or CI runner), you exhaust credits within hours. The result: your application runs 5-10x slower than the instance type suggests.
The fix? Move to an m-series instance — at 2-3x the cost.
3. Storage Costs
| Provider | 50 GB SSD Block Storage | 100 GB NVMe |
|---|---|---|
| Hostingowy | £0 (included) | £0 (included) |
| AWS (gp3 EBS) | ~£4/mo | ~£8/mo |
| DigitalOcean | ~£6/mo | ~£12/mo |
| Hetzner (CX) | €0.06/GB/mo | €0.09/GB/mo |
These per-GB costs add up quickly, especially for database-heavy or media-serving applications.
4. Static IP Addresses
| Provider | Cost per IP/month |
|---|---|
| Hostingowy | £0 (included) |
| AWS | £3.65 |
| DigitalOcean | £3.65 |
| Hetzner | €1.50 |
5. Support
| Provider | Free Support | Paid Support |
|---|---|---|
| Hostingowy | Real engineers, UK hours | N/A |
| AWS | Basic (docs/forums) | From £29/mo (Developer plan) |
| DigitalOcean | Ticket-based (slow) | N/A |
| Hetzner | Ticket-based (German hours) | N/A |
The Real-World Bill: A Worked Example
Let's take a typical UK web application: a Node.js API server with a PostgreSQL database, serving 500k monthly active users.
On AWS
- EC2 t3a.large (2 vCPU, 8 GB): ~£60/mo (after switching to m-series for consistent perf: ~£100/mo) - EBS gp3 100 GB: ~£8/mo - Data transfer (5 TB out): ~£250/mo - Static IP: £3.65/mo - RDS (database): £80/mo (or run on EC2 yourself)Total: ~£340-440/mo
On DigitalOcean
- Basic droplet 4 vCPU, 8 GB: ~£42/mo - Block storage 100 GB: ~£12/mo - Data transfer (5 TB, 1 TB included): ~£40/mo - Static IP: £3.65/moTotal: ~£98/mo
On Hostingowy
- VPS 4 vCPU, 8 GB: £29/mo - 100 GB NVMe: included - 5 TB transfer: included - Static IP: included - Database server (second VPS): £23/moTotal: ~£52/mo (both servers)
What About Performance?
Lower price is meaningless if performance is worse. So we benchmarked:
Sysbench CPU test (single-threaded):
| Provider | Events/sec | Relative to Hostingowy |
|---|---|---|
| Hostingowy (AMD EPYC) | 4,850 | 100% |
| Hetzner CX52 | 4,320 | 89% |
| DigitalOcean Premium Intel | 3,980 | 82% |
| AWS EC2 c7g.medium | 4,100 | 85% |
| AWS EC2 t3a.medium (burstable) | 920 (after credit exhaustion) | 19% |
NVMe sequential read (4K blocks):
| Provider | MB/s |
|---|---|
| Hostingowy | 2,100 |
| Hetzner CX52 | 1,450 |
| DigitalOcean Premium | 1,280 |
| AWS (gp3 EBS) | 1,000 |
> Note: All benchmarks run March 2026 on matching 4 vCPU / 8 GB configurations. AWS t3a results reflect throttled performance after credit exhaustion — typical for loaded production workloads.
The Verdict
For UK-focused workloads, big cloud providers charge a significant premium — in actual pounds, not theoretical "value" — for infrastructure your application may not need.
- If you need global CDN, Lambda, managed Kubernetes, and 200+ services: AWS is the right choice (and worth every penny).
- If you just need a fast, reliable UK VPS with predictable performance: Hostingowy delivers better price-performance than any hyperscaler, without the hidden fees.
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