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Comment by dabinat | Hacker News Reader

I’m formulating plans to switch from AWS to Hetzner. Amazon gets you by charging high prices (sometimes 20x more than competitors) and forcing you to make long-term commitments in order to get the prices to somewhere more reasonable. Then they make it exorbitantly expensive to migrate your data anywhere else. It’s a very customer-hostile approach that I’m tired of at this point.

Amazon might think that they’re locking people in with the egress fees. But they’re also locking people out. As soon as you switch one part to a competitor, the high egress forces you to switch over everything.

It’s going to be complicated to switch, but it’s made easier by the fact that I didn’t fall into the trap of building my platform on Amazon-specific services.

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This used to be true, but GCP forced their hand in January of 2024 with https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/networking/eliminatin...

AWS matched a few months later:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/free-data-transfer-out-to-i...

I'm not trying to convince you to stay (I work for neither anymore!), just wanted to note that you can technically request a waiver. I'm not sure how this works in practice though. Like, if you want to leave Athena and move to something on-premise is that enough to have just that workload? Maybe!

Edit: I also didn't follow this at the time, but the AWS wording suggests that the "EU Data Act" is also involved.

AWS DTO is a complete lie.

This doesn't actually work as advertised. I attempted free data egress from AWS in December. It took them 31 days to respond to my initial ticket. At which point they gave me a multi-page questionnaire to determine eligibility and they also told me I could not begin DTO until 60 days had passed from approval of the questionnaire.

By the time I was allowed "free egress" my cumulative S3 storage charges over the prior 100 days would have roughly matched the cost of egress if I just did so originally.

I'm in the US so the EU Data Act protections don't apply.

Have you tried to use the DTO? I did. They make you fill in a form saying you'll migrate all services (despite the blog post saying that isn't necessary), and then they take up to 12 weeks to make a decision. In my case they rejected it on a formality after 2 weeks and said to try again (the timer starts again).

So in my case that would have been 14 weeks plus the time to migrate away. The egress costs are equivalent to around 17 weeks storage cost. So you save around 1c/gb if they don't find some reason to reject it.

If you're in the EU and subject to the law, it might be easier to just transfer the data out and then sue them to get your money back.

I did transfer out and pay. How do I sue and how likely is it they close the account out of revenge and I lose the ~50GB that still needs to be there

The EU Data Act forbids cloud switching charges, that's why they made these changes (while presenting them as if they cared about customers being charged for switching away):

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/factpages/data-act-...

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