Hostingowy vs AWS EC2 (2025)

UK Bare Metal vs Cloud Giants — who actually delivers better value for UK businesses?

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Executive Summary

If you're a UK-based business running workloads on AWS EC2, you're likely overpaying by 40-60% compared to equivalent bare metal or VPS hosting. AWS's convenience comes at a premium — complex pricing, egress fees, and compute markup add up fast.

Hostingowy offers dedicated bare metal and KVM-based VPS hosting from European data centres with transparent pricing, no hidden fees, and real engineers on support.

Feature Comparison

Feature Hostingowy AWS EC2
Data Centres 🇪🇺 EU-based (Poland) Global (eu-west-2 in London)
Pricing Model Simple, transparent monthly Complex (on-demand, reserved, spot, hidden egress)
VPS Starting Price $5/mo (1 CPU, 1GB RAM, 25GB NVMe) $8.50/mo (t3a.nano + 20GB gp3)
Dedicated Server From $99/mo (dedicated CPU, NVMe) From ~$250/mo (bare metal instances)
Egress/Transfer Fees Included (unlimited on dedicated) $0.09/GB after 100GB free
Storage ZFS + NVMe (2-3x effective via compression) EBS gp3 ($0.08/GB/mo)
CPU Performance Dedicated cores (no noisy neighbours) Shared (burstable t-series)
Support Real engineers (UK-based, reply in minutes) Ticket-based (Developer plan: $29/mo + per-case billing)
Managed WordPress $100/mo (fully managed, staging + CDN) DIY or WP Engine ($35-200/mo + AWS infra)
Free Migration Yes — we do the work Self-service or paid partner
Monitoring Free Prometheus/Grafana included CloudWatch (extra cost)
Contract Monthly (no lock-in) 1-3 year reserved for best pricing

Pricing Comparison: Real-World Scenarios

Workload Hostingowy AWS EC2 Savings
Small web app (2 CPU, 4GB RAM, 100GB storage) $25/mo (VPS) ~$55/mo (t3a.medium + gp3) 55%
Medium database (4 CPU, 16GB RAM, 200GB NVMe) $80/mo (VPS) ~$180/mo (t3a.xlarge + gp3) 56%
High-traffic app (8 CPU, 32GB RAM, 500GB NVMe) $200/mo (dedicated) ~$450/mo (m6i.2xlarge + gp3 + data transfer) 56%
Managed WordPress (50 sites) $500/mo (10 × WordPress plan) ~$1,200/mo (EC2 + RDS + CloudFront) 58%

* AWS pricing estimated using eu-west-2 (London) with on-demand rates + 1TB egress. Your actual savings may vary — get a free assessment.

✅ Why Choose Hostingowy

  • 🇪🇺 European data centres — GDPR compliance guaranteed
  • 💰 Transparent pricing — no surprise bills
  • 🆓 Free migration — we handle the move
  • 🔧 Real UK engineers on support (not chatbots)
  • 📊 Free monitoring stack (Prometheus + Grafana)
  • ⚡ Bare metal = consistent performance
  • 🔐 ZFS encryption + snapshots included
  • 📈 20% affiliate recurring commissions

⚠️ Why You Might Still Choose AWS

  • 🌍 Global infrastructure (200+ services)
  • 🔌 Managed services (Lambda, RDS, SQS, etc.)
  • 📐 Auto-scaling at massive scale
  • 🔒 Compliance certifications (more extensive)
  • 🤝 Enterprise procurement (existing AWS deals)
  • 🛠️ Infrastructure-as-code (CloudFormation, CDK)

When Should You Migrate from AWS to Hostingowy?

You're a good candidate if:

  • Your workloads are predictable (not highly elastic)
  • You're UK-based and want data sovereignty
  • Your monthly AWS bill exceeds $500
  • You're not using many managed services (Lambda, SQS, etc.)
  • You want simpler billing

We offer a free migration assessment — our engineers analyze your current setup and provide a detailed cost comparison. Most businesses save 40-60% by switching.

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