No agency, no account managers, no junior doing the work a brochure promised a senior would. The person who reads your bill is the person who designs the migration and runs the servers. Here's why that's an advantage — and where I'm honest about the limits.
When you hire a firm, your problem gets passed down a chain — sales promises it, a manager scopes it, a junior builds it, and the senior you were sold appears only when something breaks. With me, there's no chain. I read your cloud bill, I design the target, I do the migration, and I run it afterwards. Nothing is lost in translation because there's no translation.
I'm not a reseller and not an affiliate — I take no commission from OVH, Hetzner, Cloudflare, or anyone. I'm not paid more when you use more. I make money when your infrastructure gets cheaper and stays boring. That's why I'll tell you when not to migrate, and why I price the cost of running things honestly instead of selling you a "near-zero cost" fantasy.
A bigger firm's incentive is a bigger engagement. Mine is a smaller bill you stop thinking about.
One engineer is a real single point of failure, and you should ask about it. So here's the honest answer — the whole setup is built so you are never dependent on me:
The irony: a self-hosted, standard-OSS setup you own is less locked-in than a cloud account wired to one vendor's proprietary services. Independence from me is the same independence I'm selling you from AWS.
I use good tools where they earn their place. Cloudflare's free tier, for example, is the best free DDoS and global-network protection you can get, and I'll often put it in front of your origin. But I'll say plainly what most consultants won't:
Cloudflare is one of the largest single points of failure on the internet. It sits in front of a huge share of the web, and when it has a bad day, an enormous number of sites go down with it — through no fault of their own. Convenient, yes. But being dependent on it is the very centralization risk you're leaving AWS to escape.
So I design for it: your origin works without Cloudflare, you can fail away from it, and nothing critical assumes it's there. It's a layer you benefit from, not a vendor you're hostage to. The whole point of going distributed is simple — the fewer giant shared dependencies your business shares a fate with, the more resilient you are when one of them stumbles. That principle applies to AWS, to Cloudflare, and yes, to me.
The more independent businesses run their own infrastructure, the more they can back each other up. The natural next step — once enough like-minded companies are doing this — is a small, trusted mesh where each one contributes a little spare capacity so the group depends less on any single giant provider. That's the direction. For now the win is concrete and immediate: your own anchor, honest failover, a predictable bill, and no shared fate with one hyperscaler.
I'm Ami Heines, a senior infrastructure, systems, and applied-cryptography engineer. I don't just recommend self-hosting — I run production services this way myself: mail, storage, DNS, and live applications on servers I own, behind dynamic DNS, in the real world with real uptime. I've felt every sharp edge this work has, which is exactly why I can tell you which ones are worth it and which ones aren't.