Cloud vs dedicated server cost: a steady AWS workload on one server

When you compare cloud vs dedicated server cost for a steady app, AWS data transfer out, the egress line, decides most of the bill. An app server on AWS that sends 2 TB a month to the internet pays $171.00 for that traffic. Its m7i.xlarge instance, with 4 vCPU and 16 GiB of memory, costs $108.12 a month on a 1-year Savings Plan. The traffic line is about $63 bigger than the instance line, and a Savings Plan doesn't discount it.

DreamHost priced that server and two other steady setups on October 19, 2026, from AWS's public price lists for US East (N. Virginia). They're estimates for the setups described here, and your own instance types, region and traffic will move them.

Three steady AWS bills, priced

Steady means the same instances run all month and nothing scales out. All three run in about 16 GB of memory and under 480 GB of disk, the size of a Dedicated Standard server, so each row sits beside the same plan.

On the DreamHost side, the Dedicated Standard column shows the yearly-term price, with the full year charged at checkout and no charge for data out.

Each AWS bill counts the instances, gp3 disks at $0.08 per GB-month, snapshots at $0.05 per GB-month and one public IPv4 address at $3.65 a month, then data out. We assumed the snapshots hold half the disk, about the data on a half-full volume, since EBS charges snapshots for the data stored and saves only the blocks that changed since the last one. The two-server setup adds a NAT gateway so the database server can reach the internet for updates, at $37.85 a month with its Elastic IP address. We've left out tax, an AWS support plan and sign-up credits, and there's no load-balancing service in any of them.

Here's how we set up the AWS side, and where it could cost less:

• The Intel m7i costs less than AWS's AMD m7a at the same size ($0.2016 an hour on demand against $0.23184).
• The app and database talk inside one Availability Zone, where AWS doesn't charge for it. Split across two zones, the same traffic would cost $0.01 per GB in each direction.
• Each bill gets the free 100 GB of data out, as if it's the only workload in its AWS account.
• The Savings Plan column is the 1-year, no-upfront Compute Savings Plan. An EC2 Instance Savings Plan ties you to one instance family and costs less, $97.35 a month for the m7i.xlarge against $108.12, and a 3-year term cuts the instance line further. None of them touch data out, since Savings Plans apply to compute usage.
• An m7g.xlarge on a 1-year EC2 Instance Savings Plan is $0.108 an hour, which takes about $29 off each bill if your software runs on AWS's Graviton3 processors.

The AWS instances also have fewer cores. On EC2, each vCPU is one thread of a core, so 4 vCPU is 2 cores, against the 6-core CPU in Dedicated Standard. We matched the two on memory, which favors AWS. A c7i.2xlarge gets closer on CPU, with 8 vCPU (4 cores) and 16 GiB, and it costs $188.33 a month for compute alone on the Compute Savings Plan.

Data out is most of each bill

Before any traffic, the three bills run $138.02, $186.38 and $153.77 a month, within $50 of each other. Data out then makes up 55%, 70% and 92% of the Savings Plan totals.

To find your own line, look in Cost Explorer for the usage type DataTransfer-Out-Bytes, which is data out to the internet from US East (other regions add a prefix, such as USE2-). Average the last three months. After the free 100 GB, AWS charges:

• $81 for 1 TB
• $171 for 2 TB
• $441 for 5 TB
• $891 for 10 TB
• $1,742.70 for 20 TB

The 20 TB figure is 10,240 GB at $0.09 and 9,660 GB at $0.085, because AWS counts its first 10 TB tier as 10,240 GB. The Dedicated page gives the same volume as its example, about $1,750 a month in AWS egress with compute excluded. At 2 TB, data out alone ($171) passes the Standard plan's yearly-term renewal ($165/mo) as well as its first-year price, so the 2 TB point holds after the first year.

Here's every line of the two-server bill on the Savings Plan. On demand, the two instances cost $147.17 and the total is $666.42. The 30 GB through the NAT gateway, for OS updates and calls to outside APIs, is our assumption.

Where CloudFront plans fit

AWS now sells CloudFront flat-rate plans per distribution: Free, Pro at $15, Business at $200 and Premium at $1,000 a month. Each paid plan includes 50 TB of data transfer, and none of them bill overages. The request allowance differs: 10 million a month on Pro, 125 million on Business and 500 million on Premium. If you stay well over the allowance for months, AWS may adjust how your traffic is delivered. Transfer from an AWS origin to CloudFront is free on these plans. Free and Pro carry no uptime SLA, while Business and Premium do.

With the same 50 TB on every paid plan, the request count picks the plan. If our 2 TB app server averages about 100 KB a response (our assumption), it answers 20 million requests a month. That's past Pro's 10 million, so it needs Business at $200, and its bill rises to $338.02 from $309.02 sent direct. Pay-as-you-go CloudFront suits it better. It's $0.085 per GB from US edges plus $0.01 per 10,000 HTTPS requests, and AWS announced in 2021 that the first 1 TB and 10 million requests a month are free. That brings the same bill to $233.02.

If nearly all your data out is large cacheable files that fit a $15 Pro plan, the transfer line on the AWS bill shrinks to that plan's price and the two bills land close.

What one server doesn't do

A dedicated server is one machine in one data center. It keeps your data on two mirrored drives (RAID 1), so one drive failure won't stop it, and it sits on a redundant fiber network where another path takes over if one goes down. It doesn't spread across zones or add capacity on its own.

The AWS uptime figures are from its Compute SLA, and the scaling row is how the EC2 Auto Scaling docs describe it. Steady, as defined above, means the peak sits close to the average, so by our reasoning sizing for it costs little, and DreamHost's Help Center says you can change your Dedicated Server plan from the panel if it grows. If you keep a media library in S3, its data out still counts toward the same AWS transfer tiers.

Before you move

On EC2, AWS runs the hardware and the host, and the operating system on your instance and its updates are yours. A DreamHost Dedicated Server comes fully managed from day one, with DreamHost running the operating system and its updates, or you can run it yourself. On the managed setting, the routine admin time a self-run server takes (OS updates, the core server stack) moves to DreamHost; managed or unmanaged dedicated server lists what each setting leaves to you. If you're not sure a whole server is the right size, start with whether you've outgrown your VPS, or compare plans in which dedicated server to pick.

There are no EBS snapshots on a Dedicated Server; DreamHost's Help Center shows how to restore site files over SSH, and you'll want your own copy of the databases and files off the server too. Dedicated Server payments are nonrefundable under the Terms of Service, and the Help Center says a new server can take up to three business days to set up. Refund credits and backups on each setting are covered in managed or unmanaged dedicated server.

Before the last big copy, ask AWS Customer Support about the move itself. AWS's pricing page says it waives data transfer out for eligible customers who take all their data off AWS, or off one AWS service, so the final transfer may cost nothing.

AWS bill vs dedicated server FAQs