Leaving AWS for dedicated servers: what it costs and what you give up

As of 2026-10-17 07:09 UTC, the cheapest in-stock dedicated server with 16+ cores and 64 GB+ RAM is the Dual E5-2620 v4 / 64GB / 500GB SSD / 1Gbps / 1Gbps Commit from Psychz Networks at €28.26/mo in Amsterdam. Next: the 2x Xeon E5-2660 / 64GB / 1x2TB HDD from OneProvider at €45.59/mo in Seattle. 3,269 matching servers are in stock across all providers (prices excl. VAT).

For steady workloads, a dedicated server gives you several times more cores, RAM and disk per euro than the big clouds, and bandwidth is usually included instead of billed per GB. That gap is why teams with predictable load keep moving app servers, databases and background workers off AWS.

What moves well

• Databases that are large, busy and always on. NVMe and lots of RAM are cheap on dedicated hardware.
• App servers and background workers with steady traffic.
• CI runners, crawlers and batch jobs that use a lot of CPU and bandwidth.
• Egress-heavy services (media, downloads, APIs). Cloud egress fees disappear on unmetered ports.

What you give up

• Instant scaling. New dedicated servers take minutes to days to deliver. Keep some headroom, or keep bursty parts in the cloud.
• Managed services. RDS, S3, SQS and IAM become things you run or buy separately. Budget for backups, monitoring and patching.
• Hardware failure handling. Disks fail. Use RAID, replicas and off-site backups, and know how your provider handles hardware swaps.

Typical targets

These are the kinds of machines teams move to. Compare them with what you pay for similar instances today.

Plan the whole setup

Describe your roles (for example 3 app servers, 2 database servers, 1 worker) in the deployment planner. It picks in-stock servers per role and spreads them across providers or datacenters, so one outage does not take everything down.