No.
Getting the Politics Out of the Way #
Back in 2022 and most recently in 2025, I’d assessed whether AWS for ‘home’ labbing was better than where the heart is.
Since I wrote the most recent iteration of that in May 2025, a lot has changed in the world. America got its honorary TOWIE star back, the UK has been a bit crap as always, and both can now unite over its respective version of Saturday Night Live.
What might be more relevant in this context is the effect of geopolitics on cloud prices. For a short example, here’s what the current AWS EC2 prices are in the mec1-az2 AZ:
Unfortunately, the 0 doesn’t mean free. The mec1-az2 Availability Zone got struck by Iran in response to the USA’s military campaign.
This aspect doesn’t really affect European or American hosting prices in isolation, but the Strait of Hormuz closure does affect prices a lot. Many datacentres have resorted to diesel generators in order to meet the power demands that the local grid can’t.
Clouds can inflate, but can they burst? #
The title of this section was mostly a play on my last article on the matter, but it has accidentally posed itself as a real question. The answer, unfortunately, is yes. In April 2026, many British Azure customers were told that there just isn’t any more capacity in its UK datacentres. Seriously… just none. Not ‘you can have capacity for an exorbitant fee’ like the rest do. They’ve got nothing left!
All of the above means that the pricing has become quite interesting to say the least. Here was 2025:
2025: #
And here’s 2026:
2026: #
So despite missiles being in vogue as of late, prices haven’t jumped up much yet. You’ve got AWS trading market share for profit as it has consistently since at least 2021, but every other provider has pretty much stayed the same?
There’s a big asterisk around OVH’s offering though. Its old ‘Compute optimized’ machine with the same specs had jumped to an eye-watering £28.76 a month, and this new machine is labelled ‘Discovery’. With it only being recommended by OVH for sandbox or dev environments, I’m not sure how confident I feel putting the lower price on this graph. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt though.
So, does this inflation apply to British electricity prices?
Not yet. This is the one commodity we can expect to increase drastically if the Iran conflict doesn’t end quickly. For now though, all looks rosy.
Memories of memory prices #
This is the part that can’t really be ignored, and really does dissuade people from self-hosting entirely. I was bragging in my last article about the fact that I’d bought an R740xd with 768GB DDR4 for just over 3 and a half grand. Each stick of 128GB DDR4 LRDIMM was about £150 at the time. Now for that exact same stick, it’s £575. I’d have to pay not far off the full price of my server just a year and a half ago just to re-buy the same amount of RAM. Looking at the data for more… normal amounts of RAM is eye-watering:
DDR4 #
It’s pretty bad alright. Over a 3x increase in a year all because Boris Johnson’s favourite word got out. The used prices of RAM have increased quite a lot too. In my specific example, it was close to a 4x increase, but in most cases it’s not quite that bad. So what about DDR5?
DDR5 #
Unobtanium. One specific example of Crucial Pro’s historical pricing shows it pretty drastically. At its lowest, it was at a measly £66.99. Now it’s on an illegal ‘sale’ for £349.99.
DRAM price increases have hurt pretty much every other part’s pricing too. CPU’s, GPU’s, motherboards and SSD’s have all seen increases. Even spinning rust! What this means is that spending £1000 on a server will get you less memory, a slightly worse CPU and a bit less storage compared to last year.
To Conclude #
Is AWS better than on-prem for self-hosting? No!
Is any other hosting provider better than on-prem for self-hosting? Maybe?
Last time, it was dependant on budget, compute needs and your overall living situation. This time it’s memory prices. My personal opinion, ignoring your own specific circumstances, is to spin up a cheap VM on whichever hosting provider you prefer, and to then move to on-prem when prices are more normal.