When a Swiss fintech scale-up contacted us earlier this year, the situation was stark: their AWS bill exceeded CHF 8,000 per month for a web application with a database, a few microservices and a staging environment. For a 25-person company, it had become unsustainable.
Six months later, the same application runs on Hidora Cloud. The monthly bill: approximately CHF 1,600. Performance is identical, even better in some areas. And the data is now hosted in Switzerland.
Here's how this migration unfolded, and why a growing number of Swiss companies are leaving hyperscalers.
The AWS convenience trap
The story is classic and all too familiar. The company started on AWS five years ago, when the technical team had two developers. AWS was the obvious choice: abundant documentation, managed services, automatic scaling. The early days were straightforward and the bill reasonable, a few hundred francs per month.
But over the years, complexity accumulated. An RDS instance here, ElastiCache there, load balancers, CloudFront, Lambda functions for one-off tasks, an ECS cluster for microservices. Each addition seemed logical at the time. Nobody had an overview of total costs.
The wake-up call came when the CFO asked for a detailed cloud bill breakdown. The analysis revealed several problems:
- Over-provisioned resources. EC2 instances ran at an average of 15% CPU utilization but were sized for peak loads that only occurred a few hours per week.
- Unused services. Three development environments had been left running after the developers who used them had left the company.
- Expensive data transfers. Communication between AWS services in different availability zones generated significant transfer fees, a cost that's often invisible.
- No optimization. No reserved instances, no savings plans. Everything was billed at on-demand rates, the most expensive option.
Evaluating alternatives
The technical team first attempted to optimize within AWS. They right-sized instances, activated savings plans, removed unused resources. Result: the bill dropped from CHF 8,000 to CHF 6,500. Better, but not enough.
That's when they started looking beyond hyperscalers. Two additional factors accelerated the thinking:
-
Data sovereignty. Their main banking client had begun requiring guarantees about data location. AWS Zurich existed, but the legal question remained complex: data on AWS remains subject to the US Cloud Act, even when hosted in Switzerland.
-
Operational complexity. Managing AWS infrastructure required a DevOps engineer nearly full-time. For a 25-person company, this was disproportionate. The team wanted to refocus on product development.
The migration to Hidora
After an initial free audit with the Hidora team, the migration plan was established within a week. The target architecture was significantly simpler than the AWS setup, without sacrificing resilience.
Weeks 1-2: Environment replication. Hidora infrastructure was configured to replicate the existing architecture: application servers, PostgreSQL database, Redis cache, reverse proxy. The key difference: on Hidora, vertical and horizontal scaling is native and automatic, without requiring a constellation of AWS services.
Week 3: Data migration. Databases were migrated via a real-time replication process. For 48 hours, both environments ran in parallel to validate data consistency.
Week 4: Testing and validation. Load tests were run to confirm that the Hidora infrastructure matched AWS performance. Results met expectations: equivalent response times, even better in some cases thanks to reduced network latency (data staying in Switzerland, closer to end users).
Week 5: Production switchover. The DNS switch was performed on a Saturday evening. Actual downtime: less than 5 minutes. The Hidora team provided 24/7 monitoring for the first week post-migration.
The economic impact
The numbers speak for themselves:
| Item | AWS (before) | Hidora (after) | Savings |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compute | CHF 3,200 | CHF 680 | -79% |
| Database | CHF 1,800 | CHF 420 | -77% |
| Network / CDN | CHF 1,400 | CHF 180 | -87% |
| Staging / Dev | CHF 1,200 | CHF 240 | -80% |
| Misc (monitoring, logs) | CHF 400 | Included | -100% |
| Monthly total | CHF 8,000 | CHF 1,520 | -81% |
Over a year, the savings exceed CHF 77,000. That's the equivalent of a junior developer's salary. For a 25-person company, reinvesting this amount in product development has a direct impact on competitiveness.
Why such a price difference?
The question deserves to be asked. How can Hidora deliver the same performance at one-fifth the cost?
Several factors explain the gap:
No "hyperscaler tax." AWS charges a significant premium for its brand, global ecosystem and managed services. For a Swiss company that doesn't need 30 global regions and 200 different services, this premium is unjustified.
Right-sized infrastructure. Hidora dimensions infrastructure based on the client's actual needs, not predefined instance categories. Granular scaling eliminates systematic waste.
No hidden transfer fees. With Hidora, data transfers between services are included. On AWS, every gigabyte crossing an availability zone boundary is billed.
Integrated services. Monitoring, automatic backups, SSL and support are included in the base price. On AWS, each additional layer is a separate paid service.
Beyond costs: sovereignty regained
Cost reduction was the initial trigger, but the benefits go well beyond.
The company can now guarantee its clients that their financial data is hosted exclusively in Switzerland, in data centers subject to Swiss law. This guarantee unlocked two major contracts with financial institutions that categorically refused AWS for regulatory reasons.
Hidora's ISO 27001 certification also simplifies compliance audits. Rather than having to explain AWS's complex architecture and Cloud Act implications, the company can present a clear and understandable framework to its auditors.
Operational simplicity
The last benefit, often underestimated, is the simplification of day-to-day management. The DevOps engineer who spent 60% of their time managing AWS infrastructure now dedicates 80% of their time to product development. Infrastructure management is shared with the Hidora team, which handles monitoring, security updates, backups and performance optimization.
For Swiss companies that recognize themselves in this situation (a runaway AWS bill, unanswered sovereignty questions, disproportionate operational complexity), migration to a local cloud platform deserves serious consideration. The savings are real, measurable, and immediate.
