Leave the Cloud¶

Modern infrastructure is massively overcomplicated and expensive. Not because it has to be — because the people selling it need it to be. They create a problem that didn't exist before, that you never asked about, and then charge you to solve it.

Over the past decade, the cloud vendors have done an extraordinary job of making their complexity feel inevitable. Kubernetes for container orchestration. RDS for managed databases. ElastiCache for Redis. CloudFront for your CDN. A managed service for every layer of your stack, each one abstracting away something you could run yourself for a fraction of the cost, each one adding another line to an invoice that grows in ways that are genuinely difficult to predict or control.

The result is that most companies — startups, scale-ups, legacy businesses trying to modernise — are running infrastructure far more complex than their actual requirements justify, and paying far more than they need to. Not because anyone made a bad decision, but because the default path leads there, and nobody stopped to question it.

My name is Roman Zaiev. I've spent 15 years building production systems at a scale most companies will never approach. I've seen how much money gets burned daily for literally nothing just to stay within the boundaries of an existing setup. I've seen how ridiculously complex modern DevOps has become, even for one-time tasks that should take hours, not weeks. I've seen enough from different angles to reach one simple conclusion: I will never go the same way for my own products.

Trusting clouds to run our infrastructure, we trapped ourselves in a vendor-locked world with unpredictable monthly bills — charged extras for everything from load spikes to traffic, with cloud architecture leaking so deeply into our own applications that escape starts to feel impossible.

There must be a different way. Something simpler, more elegant, something that silently works and doesn't cost a fortune. It exists — it was there all along. We've just been ignoring it for years.

Our biggest infrastructure win at Hypha wasn't just choosing bare metal over cloud — that's only part of the story. We also don't use Linux, Docker, or Kubernetes. Instead, we chose FreeBSD: a system that pioneered jails, the original practical implementation of what we now call containers, offering more capability at far lower operational and complexity cost than anything the modern stack has to offer.

Now I help others take the same path.

Time to talk¶

If your cloud bill has started to feel like a subscription you can't cancel, you're probably ready for this conversation. That tends to happen at a particular moment in a company's life — early on, managed services genuinely save time and the cost is easy to justify against engineering hours. Then the product stabilises, the team grows, and suddenly you're paying for things you never use.

It's also common to inherit infrastructure you didn't design. A previous team made decisions that made sense at the time, accumulated managed services along the way, and left behind something expensive and opaque. Reducing that bill is now someone's problem, and the challenge isn't technical — it's knowing what to replace it with.

Then there are teams who already know what they want. They know enough to know that self-hosted bare-metal infrastructure is simpler and cheaper at their scale, but haven't had the time or the right person to build it properly — with automation, tested backups, monitoring, a deployment process that doesn't require heroics, and documentation that survives beyond the person who wrote it.

If any of this describes your situation, the conversation is worth having.

The offer¶

Full details on services and pricing →

The numbers¶

A typical small production stack on AWS — an application server, managed Postgres, Redis, a load balancer, S3 for storage — runs to £300–1,500 per month. Add meaningful egress traffic and it climbs further: AWS charges per gigabyte out, and it adds up faster than most teams expect.

The equivalent on two bare-metal servers runs to £100–200 per month, with unmetered traffic included as standard. For companies with significant egress — video, file storage, data-heavy APIs — the bandwidth saving alone often exceeds the entire server bill.

If you're currently paying £2,000 per month, a migration typically reduces that to £150–250. The one-off cost of audit and implementation pays for itself within the first two to three months. Every month after that is direct saving.

If the numbers don't work out that way for your situation, I'll tell you in the audit rather than take your money.

Fixed prices. No surprises.