Seneca Foundation’s Kubernetes cluster needed a long-term home, so I compared AWS and OVHcloud for running it. The 12-month numbers are from my report (Aug 30, 2026). The 10-year table extends them in a straight line at today’s prices.
The requirement
One production k3s node with 1 TB of block storage, a persistent IP, and mid-range compute: enough for multiple production-facing apps, each with its own environments. Provisioning is automated either way:
- Terraform builds the infrastructure. On AWS that’s a VPC, subnets, security groups, an EC2 instance and an EBS volume. On OVH it’s a dedicated server or VPS through the OVH provider, plus attached block storage and a reserved failover IP.
- Ansible configures the host: root login disabled, certificate-based SSH and 2FA, custom
ip rules for traffic through the persistent IP, k3s with its storage provisioner on the 1 TB volume, andnftables/ufwlocking down the Kubernetes API and NodePort ranges.
Compute at three tiers
| Tier | AWS | Monthly | OVH | Monthly |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small | t3.micro (2 vCPU, 1 GB) | $7.59 | VPS Starter (1 vCPU, 2 GB) | $4.20 |
| Medium | m5.large (2 vCPU, 8 GB) | $70.08 | Rise-1 (6 cores, 32 GB) | $65.00 |
| High-performance | c6g.2xlarge (8 vCPU, 16 GB) | $245.28 | Advance-3 (12 cores, 64 GB) | $145.00 |
At the medium tier the compute gap is modest. The real difference is everything around it.
Storage and networking decide it
| AWS (usage-based) | OVH (flat-rate) | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 TB block storage | ~$80/mo (gp3 at $0.08/GB) | included, or ~$10 to $20/mo on the smallest tier |
| Egress | ~$0.09/GB after the first 100 GB | included, unmetered |
| Budget | risk of “bill shock” as traffic grows | fixed monthly cost |
On AWS, 1 TB of storage costs more than an entire OVH server at the medium tier, and egress grows with traffic. For a cluster serving public apps, that’s a cost you can’t cap. I estimated $20/month of AWS networking to keep the comparison fair.
1-year total cost
| Tier | AWS / year | OVH / year | Savings with OVH |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small | $1,291.08 | $170.40 | $1,120.68 (87% less) |
| Medium | $2,040.96 | $780.00 | $1,260.96 (62% less) |
| High-performance | $4,143.36 | $1,740.00 | $2,403.36 (58% less) |
10 years at today’s prices
The same totals over a decade. This assumes prices never change, so read it as the shape of the gap, not a quote.
| Tier | AWS / 10 years | OVH / 10 years | Savings with OVH |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small | $12,910.80 | $1,704.00 | $11,206.80 |
| Medium | $20,409.60 | $7,800.00 | $12,609.60 |
| High-performance | $41,433.60 | $17,400.00 | $24,033.60 |
What I recommended, and why I trusted it
OVHcloud, at the medium tier or above. The small tiers on both providers are too tight on RAM and CPU for a stable production k3s node. The dedicated Rise and Advance servers also give isolated cores, so performance doesn’t degrade from noisy neighbours.
I wasn’t guessing about OVH. My own studio’s cluster runs on an OVH dedicated server for $52/month: 64 GB of RAM, 1 TB of storage and an extra IP. It hosts eight substantial projects with two environments each (the Tidan Games platform). That’s about $624 a year, or $6,240 over ten.
Where AWS still wins
AWS has the broader ecosystem: managed databases, IAM, and services you’d otherwise build yourself. Reserved Instances can also lower its compute price. For a single-node cluster with heavy storage and public traffic, the usage-based storage and egress pricing still outweighs that.
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