Cloud costs too high? With our WZ-IT migration framework, customers save on average 60-90% of their monthly AWS costs - without any loss of performance. 👉 See the cloud exit assessment.
Many of our customers come to us with exactly this problem: AWS bills that explode month after month. EC2 (compute) and RDS (databases) in particular are almost always among the biggest cost drivers.
Here is an example from one of our customers:
Table of Contents
- Our approach: WZ-IT migration framework
- Example: 85% savings for an e-commerce company
- Advantages of our approach
- As of October 2026: what has changed since
- Conclusion
Our approach: WZ-IT migration framework
Instead of blindly downsizing instances, we take a structured approach:
🔎 1. Analysis & Mapping
We check existing AWS resources (EC2, RDS, storage, network) and map them to dedicated resources with European providers. Result: Workloads can often be mapped 1:1 at only a fraction of the cost.
🔄 2. Planning new infrastructure
- Resources are consolidated and optimally tailored.
- Reserved excess capacity is eliminated.
- Network and storage costs are minimized through local alternatives.
📦 3. Perform migration
Often even a lift-and-shift is possible: The existing application is transferred with minimal adjustments. For more complex architectures (e.g. RDS with replication), we use tried-and-tested procedures to reduce downtime to a minimum.
Example: 85% savings for an e-commerce company
One customer (who we are unfortunately not allowed to name & whose costs we have shown above in the screenshot from the AWS Billing Dashboard) was paying over $2,500 per month for EC2 & RDS alone. After migrating to dedicated resources with a European provider: 👉 Cost reduction to ~$380 per month.
Side effect: The new infrastructure is not only cheaper, but also faster (dedicated CPU/RAM vs. shared AWS resources).
However, costs do not have to explode to benefit from our approach. In a very recent case, we reduced the costs to a third for a customer whose invoice looked like this:
Advantages of our approach
✅ Up to 90% less costs (demonstrably achieved with customers) ✅ GDPR-compliant - data remains in Europe ✅ More performance & control through dedicated hardware ✅ No more vendor lock-in - full flexibility
As of October 2026: what has changed since
- Switching charges are going away. The EU Data Act (Regulation (EU) 2023/2854) has applied since 12 September 2025. Until 12 January 2027 cloud providers may only charge cost-based switching fees, after that none at all (Art. 29). AWS has waived data transfer out fees for customers moving away since March 2024, on request via support (AWS News Blog).
- Hetzner has become more expensive. Since 15 June 2026, newly ordered Hetzner servers with dedicated vCPUs (CPX, CCX) cost roughly 113 to 176 percent more depending on the model (Hetzner Docs). The savings above come from projects before this change. We therefore recalculate targets per workload today, including dedicated root servers and other European providers. Details in our analysis of the Hetzner price increase.
- Planning the exit is covered in our guide to a cloud exit strategy for SMEs.
Conclusion
AWS, Azure and GCP have their raison d'être - but for many companies they are oversized and unnecessarily expensive if primarily EC2 & RDS are used.
With our Migration Framework, we show you how you can massively reduce your cloud costs and invest your budget in marketing, employees or innovation instead.
👉 See the cloud exit assessment
Would you like to find out more? At WZ-IT we take over consulting, analysis, migration and operation of your infrastructure - away from AWS towards cost-efficient, European alternatives.
