Their issue is GitLab itself, not the runner. And sure, Gitlab is available in forms like a Docker image, but as someone who managed Gitlab for years... it's re

Their issue is GitLab itself, not the runner. And sure, Gitlab is available in forms like a Docker image, but as someone who managed Gitlab for years... it's reasonably high effort. Additionally, I would not trust Hetzner with anything that gets this much usage. They're very cheap, and they're very cheap for a reason. When buying colo for a busy application, it's not unusual for bandwidth to cost more than the power and rack. All in all I'd expect them to be looking at at least $2k a month or $24k a year for power/rack/bandwidth. This would be something like an average, there are lower rates available in markets with cheap connectivity but then if the equipment isn't local you end up spending more on smart hands. In many places the rate would be higher. Then up-front hardware purchase could easily be $50k and probably more. I wouldn't expect to see savings at all the first year, I'd expect it to cost a chunk more. Of course that's not quite fair, the hardware purchase amortizes over at least a few years, but when you're struggling to pay the bills that doesn't make you feel any better. Renting hardware is an option, but will still cost you more than colo on year for year for equivalent capacity. Dedicated servers from a reputable source start at a couple hundred a month and quickly go up from there. It sounds like their situation will require HA. I'm just waving my hands here based on my guess of how much usage they're seeing for the $75k they estimate in AWS spend, but I have a quote in my inbox right now from a reputable datacenter operator for $18k per year just for rack/power/x-connect, that's before bandwidth, which I'm going to be paying two different providers for for diversity (and this is still worse connectivity than AWS gets you). That's a full rack, which is a lot of room, but the power/xconnect/bandwidth part of that basically don't change as you go to partial racks so the savings are not really that big. Quality colocation costs real money, and a gitlab instance with that kind of usage shouldn't be running out of a bargain-basement provider.