Why We Run Client Workloads on Bare Metal Instead of AWS

Every workload we ship runs on servers we own: a 3-node Proxmox cluster with Ceph storage, an RTX 3090 for GPU work, and a WireGuard mesh tying it together. This isn't an aesthetic preference. It's the result of doing the math.

The cloud bill is a percentage of your success

Hyperscaler pricing scales with you — per-vCPU, per-GB storage, per-GB egress. A SaaS platform doing $10k/month in revenue on AWS easily carries a $1,500–3,000 monthly infrastructure bill, and it grows faster than revenue does. The same workload on our cluster is a fixed cost measured in the low hundreds. The hardware is already paid for; your margin improves as you grow instead of shrinking.

We see this pattern constantly: a client's MVP is cheap in month one, then they add customers and the bill triples while the code hasn't changed. Owning the metal deletes that curve entirely.

Latency you can actually budget

Inter-node latency on our LAN sits under 1.2 milliseconds — consistently, not on average. When your API's p99 is under 8ms, it's because there's no noisy neighbor, no hypervisor lottery, no shared-rack roulette. The performance you benchmark in staging is the performance you keep in production. On shared cloud tenancy, "the same instance type" can mean materially different hardware under you.

Data sovereignty is a feature clients pay for

More than once, a client has chosen us specifically because their data lives on disks in a rack we physically control — not spread across a provider's regions behind a settings page. For businesses with EU residency requirements, healthcare or financial data, or genuinely sensitive IP, "we know exactly which drive it's on" is a sentence a hyperscaler cannot say.

The honest part — when the cloud still wins

Bare metal isn't universal. If your traffic is violently spiky — a product launch that might do 100x for 48 hours — elastic capacity is what it's for. If you need a managed service with no analogue (planet-scale DynamoDB, CloudFront's edge network), rent it. Our answer is hybrid by default: owned metal for the steady state, cloud for the burst or the truly specialized. Most workloads are 95% steady state.

What this means if you hire us

Your application gets built and run by the same team, on hardware that team owns. No three-vendor blame loops. Flat monthly cost. And if you ever want to leave, you get your data on a drive — not a 60-day export saga. That's the pitch. The meter stops here.