Teams come to us after patterns that repeat.

The AWS default. Teams pick AWS because it's the safe choice, then discover they're paying $2,000/month for infrastructure that would cost $200 on Hetzner. The "enterprise" choice becomes a tax on runway that never justified itself.

Managed service dependency. Everything on RDS, ElastiCache, managed Elasticsearch. Convenient until the bill arrives. Teams forget that PostgreSQL on a dedicated server is still PostgreSQL — and often faster than the managed version throttled to stay within budget.

No infrastructure knowledge. Teams use hyperscalers specifically to avoid understanding servers. This works until it doesn't — until the bill spikes, performance degrades, or something breaks and nobody knows why. Hetzner requires knowing what you're running. That knowledge pays dividends everywhere.

Premature multi-region. Servers in five regions for an application with users in two countries. Complexity and cost for theoretical scale that never materializes. We right-size first; distribute when traffic justifies it.