Two years after OneUptime, a monitoring and observability platform, made the bold switch from Amazon Web Services to bare-metal infrastructure, the company is reflecting on a journey that saved them hundreds of thousands annually while reshaping their operational playbook. In a recent post on their blog, OneUptime details how this migration, initially driven by soaring cloud costs, has evolved into a testament to self-hosted resilience amid growing industry scrutiny of cloud dependencies.

The original move in 2023 slashed their expenses by $230,000 per year, as outlined in an earlier OneUptime blog entry, by leveraging tools like Docker, Kubernetes, and Ceph to manage bare-metal servers without the overhead of AWS’s managed services. Fast-forward to 2025, and the firm reports sustained savings, but with nuances: hardware refreshes and unexpected maintenance have tempered the initial windfall, though overall costs remain 60% lower than their AWS era.

Navigating the Realities of Hardware Management in a Post-Cloud World

Industry insiders might recall the buzz on forums like Hacker News and Reddit when OneUptime first shared their story, prompting debates about the feasibility of de-clouding for mid-sized tech firms. Addressing those questions in their latest update, published on OneUptime’s site, the team reveals that while bare metal offers unparalleled control—allowing custom optimizations that AWS’s abstractions often obscure—it demands a steeper learning curve in areas like networking and failover.

Performance gains have been a highlight, with OneUptime noting latency reductions of up to 40% for their core services, a metric echoed in discussions on Hacker News where users praised the raw power of dedicated hardware. Yet, the transition wasn’t without hiccups; early outages from misconfigured Ceph clusters tested their resolve, underscoring the need for robust in-house expertise that cloud providers typically handle.

Unpacking Cost Savings Versus Operational Trade-Offs

Delving deeper, OneUptime’s two-year retrospective highlights a shift in priorities: what began as a cost-cutting exercise has morphed into a strategic hedge against cloud outages, especially after high-profile AWS disruptions like the US-East-1 incident in October 2025, as reported by Last Week in AWS. By decentralizing their infrastructure, they’ve avoided the “blast radius” of regional failures that crippled competitors still tethered to Virginia-based data centers.

Comparisons with peers, such as Dukaan’s similar migration that averted $80,000 monthly bills according to Analytics India Magazine, reinforce OneUptime’s path. However, they caution that bare metal isn’t a panacea—scaling requires proactive hardware procurement, and energy costs have risen 15% amid global supply chain strains.

Lessons for Tech Leaders Eyeing Cloud Exits

For executives contemplating similar moves, OneUptime emphasizes hybrid approaches: retaining AWS for burst capacity while running core workloads on-premises. This mirrors sentiments in a Medium article by David Lee, who escaped “cloud pricing hell” through bare metal but stressed the joy of regained autonomy.

Ultimately, OneUptime’s experience, detailed across their blog and community feedback on Reddit’s r/sysadmin, illustrates a maturing trend where cost efficiency meets operational sovereignty. As cloud giants like AWS evolve—offering bare-metal instances themselves, per AWS re:Post—the line between hosted and self-managed blurs, but for innovators like OneUptime, the bare-metal bet continues to pay dividends in control and savings.