Migrating from AWS to European cloud: Contabo's guide to hidden costs and migration challenges

On 24 August 2026, Contabo published a guide on its blog for those evaluating moving workloads from AWS to European providers. The starting point is familiar to every sysadmin: AWS bills grow unpredictably not so much from compute, but from egress fees and the markup on managed services like RDS or EKS. Reserved instances, according to the guide, give an illusion of predictability that breaks the moment your usage pattern changes: you keep paying for committed capacity even when the actual load shifts elsewhere.

How difficult it is to migrate, service by service

The guide presents a difficulty table based on how "proprietary" or portable each AWS service is:

AWS Service	European alternative	Difficulty
EC2	Any VPS or cloud instance	Low
S3	S3-compatible object storage	Low
RDS (managed Postgres/MySQL)	Managed database (Scaleway, OVHcloud) or self-managed Postgres	Medium
EKS (managed Kubernetes)	Managed Kubernetes or self-managed K3s/Docker	Medium-High
Lambda / DynamoDB / EventBridge	No direct alternative	High

The message is clear: those who have built on VMs, containers and S3-compatible storage can migrate in a few weeks with parallel-run; those dependent on Lambda or DynamoDB are facing a re-architecture project, not a simple shift.

Provider comparison

Provider	Managed services	Declared trade-off
Scaleway	Kapsule (K8s), managed Postgres/MySQL, S3-compatible storage	Smaller overall catalogue than AWS
OVHcloud	Managed databases, VMware/Nutanix support, multi-AZ	More complex product range to navigate
Hetzner	Limited, mostly unmanaged compute and storage	Teams manage databases and orchestration directly
IONOS	Managed databases, enterprise/private cloud services	Tooling and developer experience lagging
DigitalOcean	Managed Kubernetes and databases	Not EU-domiciled by default
Contabo	None, compute and object storage self-managed only	No managed Kubernetes or database

With Contabo, every Cloud VPS plan includes unlimited inbound and outbound traffic, with port speeds from 200 Mbit/s to 1 Gbit/s and fair usage policy applied, with no separate egress billing like on AWS.

A practical checklist

The guide concludes with six steps: map which AWS services are actually used, separating portable layers from proprietary services; choose your target based on managed/self-managed criteria, not price alone; replicate data before touching production; run parallel-run by routing a quota of traffic; move DNS last with low TTL set in advance; decommission AWS resources only after a full billing cycle on your new infrastructure.

It should be noted that the guide is published by the same vendor that appears among the recommended options: the percentage savings figures remain illustrative estimates, not verified customer cases, and should be confirmed against each provider's official pricing before setting a migration budget.