Tired Of The AWS Bill?
AWS Alternative: Managed U.S. Dedicated Cloud Hosting With One Flat Bill
AWS is superb infrastructure and a poor fit for a small business that just needs a server to run its sites. You are the system administrator, there is no control panel, support with a response target is billed as a percentage of your bill, and the invoice arrives split across compute, storage, data transfer, IP addresses and support rather than as one number you can budget. LiberationTek Dedicated Cloud is the opposite trade: your own Intel cores, DDR5 memory and NVMe storage on hardware we own in the United States, with a cPanel/WHM licence, free migration and U.S.-based support, for one flat price from $65.95 a month — and we do not bill egress or overage at all. Prices checked September 12, 2026.
“I have had a great time working with the team at Liberation getting set up to migrate my servers over from DigitalOcean and AWS. And the best part is I know I am not going to be unexpectedly shut down because of some opinionated TOS nonsense.”
Kevin Gilleard · Google review
Why Small Businesses Move Off AWS
You Are The System Administrator
AWS rents you infrastructure, not a running server. Operating system updates, firewall rules, web server and PHP versions, mail configuration, monitoring and recovery are all yours. Liberation Dedicated Cloud is managed: we patch, monitor and maintain it, and you call a person when something is wrong.
Support Priced As A Percentage Of Your Bill
Basic support comes with every AWS account. Anything better starts at Business Support+, which Amazon prices as whichever is greater: $29 a month per account, or 9% of your monthly AWS charges up to $10,000. Support that scales with your spending is a strange thing to budget for. Ours is included, flat, on every plan.
No Control Panel In The Box
There is no cPanel on an AWS instance. You install and license it yourself — $29.99 a month from cPanel for a single account, $53.99 for thirty — and you keep it patched. Every Liberation Dedicated Cloud plan includes a cPanel/WHM licence and we maintain it at a stable version.
Data Transfer Is Metered
AWS gives every account 100 GB of data transfer out to the internet free each month across all services and regions, and bills per gigabyte after that — $0.09 per GB beyond a Lightsail plan’s allowance. A busy month, a big launch or a large download turns into an invoice. We do not bill egress or overage at all.
One Number You Can Budget
An AWS invoice arrives split across compute, storage, snapshots, data transfer, IP addresses and support, and it moves every month. A Liberation Dedicated Cloud plan is one flat monthly price with the control panel, the management and the migration already inside it.
Hardware We Own, In The U.S.
Your sites run on servers LiberationTek owns and operates in the United States, with their own Intel cores, DDR5 memory and NVMe storage rather than a share of someone else’s pool. We do not track, sell or share your data or your activity, and we are small enough that the people answering know your server.
LiberationTek Dedicated Cloud vs. AWS
A managed dedicated cloud server next to running your own on AWS. AWS figures come from Amazon’s published pricing pages, checked September 2026.
Feature | LiberationTek Dedicated Cloud | AWS |
|---|---|---|
Who administers the server | LiberationTek — managed as part of the plan | You. AWS rents infrastructure, not a running server |
Control panel | cPanel/WHM licence included on every plan | Not included. $29.99/mo from cPanel for one account, $53.99 for thirty |
Support included in the price | Yes, on every plan, from U.S.-based people | Basic support only |
Cost of faster support | Included — it does not change as you grow | Business Support+: the greater of $29/mo per account or 9% of monthly AWS charges up to $10K |
Data transfer | Not billed — no egress or overage charges | 100 GB a month free across all services, then per GB — $0.09/GB beyond a Lightsail allowance |
Storage on the entry plan | 250 GB NVMe SSD | 80 GB SSD on the $24 Lightsail bundle; EBS gp3 is $0.08 per GB-month on EC2 |
Dedicated resources | Your own Intel cores, DDR5 RAM and NVMe | Depends on the instance type you choose and configure |
Shape of the bill | One flat monthly price | Split across compute, storage, snapshots, transfer, IP addresses and support |
Website migration | Free — we move it for you | Self-service |
SSL | Free AutoSSL certificate, issued and renewed for you | You configure certificates yourself |
Site security | Advanced site security and web application firewall included | You select, configure and pay for the services you want |
Where the hardware lives | Servers LiberationTek owns and operates in the United States | AWS regions worldwide |
Who you talk to | U.S.-based people who know your server | Support portal; what you get depends on your plan |
Your data | Never tracked, sold or shared | Governed by AWS terms |
What A Small Business Server Actually Costs
The closest comparable setup on each side, at the entry level. Lightsail is AWS’s flat-rate product and gives the fairest like-for-like; on EC2 the same job is billed across several separate lines. cPanel licence pricing is cPanel’s published rate.
Monthly line item | LiberationTek Starter | The same job on AWS |
|---|---|---|
The server | $65.95 — 2 Intel cores, 4 GB DDR5, 250 GB NVMe | $24.00 — Lightsail 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 80 GB SSD |
cPanel/WHM licence | Included | $29.99 — cPanel Solo, one account |
Support with a response target | Included | $29.00 minimum — or 9% of your AWS bill, whichever is greater |
Someone administering the server | Included | Not sold — that is your job |
Website migration | Included | Do it yourself |
Data transfer over the allowance | Never billed | $0.09 per GB |
Monthly total | $65.95 | $82.99 and up |
First year | $791.40 | $995.88 and up |
What you keep | $204.48 in year one — and 250 GB NVMe instead of 80 GB | — |
What Customers Say After Switching
Real customer reviews. LiberationTek is rated 4.9 out of 5 on Google and 4.7 out of 5 on Trustpilot (September 2026).
Liberation Dedicated Cloud Plans
Plan | What you get | Price | Built for |
|---|---|---|---|
Starter | 2 Intel cores · 4 GB DDR5 · 250 GB NVMe · cPanel included | $65.95/month | A busy business site that has outgrown shared hosting |
Ramping Up | 4 Intel cores · 8 GB DDR5 · 500 GB NVMe · cPanel included | $115.95/month | Sites with high traffic spikes that need extra headroom |
Growth | 8 Intel cores · 16 GB DDR5 · 1 TB NVMe · cPanel included | $195.95/month | Heavy load sites, multiple applications, client hosting |
Move Off AWS In 4 Steps
1. Tell Us What You Are Running
Send your instance type, the sites, databases and services on it, and anything unusual in the stack. We size a Dedicated Cloud plan against it — or tell you honestly that a managed VPS or shared plan is the better fit.
2. We Move It For You
Give us access or a snapshot and we migrate sites, databases, users, cron jobs, SSL certificates and mail across. You do not spend a weekend rebuilding a LAMP stack by hand.
3. Test On A Temporary Address
Everything runs on the new server at a temporary URL while your AWS instance keeps serving live traffic. You review it properly before any visitor is affected.
4. Cut Over And Close The Account
We update DNS, issue SSL through AutoSSL and watch the first 48 hours. Then you terminate the instance, delete the volumes and snapshots, and the meter finally stops.
Get Started
By Transferring Your Website
Liberation can transfer your website content from most site builder platforms.
AWS Alternative FAQs
Often not, and the reason is not the compute price. AWS rents you infrastructure and expects you to run it: no control panel, no one patching the operating system, and support with a real response target billed as the greater of $29 a month or 9% of your AWS charges. If your team already has a DevOps practice, AWS is excellent and we will say so. If you want a server that is patched, monitored and supported so you can get on with the business, a managed dedicated cloud plan does that for one flat price.
Take the simplest version. A Lightsail bundle with 2 vCPUs, 4 GB of RAM and 80 GB of SSD is $24 a month. Add a cPanel Solo licence at $29.99 and the minimum Business Support+ charge at $29 and you are at $82.99 — and you are still the system administrator. LiberationTek’s Starter Dedicated Cloud plan is $65.95 with 2 Intel cores, 4 GB of DDR5 and 250 GB of NVMe, cPanel included, managed by us. On EC2 the same job is billed across compute, EBS storage at $0.08 per GB-month, data transfer and support separately. Prices checked September 12, 2026.
On AWS, every account gets 100 GB of data transfer out to the internet free each month, aggregated across all services and regions, and everything beyond that is billed per gigabyte — $0.09 per GB past a Lightsail plan’s allowance. That means a launch, a busy month or a large file download shows up on the bill. LiberationTek does not bill egress or overage on Dedicated Cloud plans at all.
No. An AWS instance gives you a bare operating system. You can install cPanel yourself, but the licence is bought separately from cPanel — $29.99 a month for a single account, $53.99 for up to thirty — and keeping it patched is your responsibility. Every LiberationTek Dedicated Cloud plan includes a cPanel/WHM licence and we maintain it.
Yes. Give us access to the instance or a snapshot and we move sites, databases, users, cron jobs, SSL certificates and mail for you. Everything is staged at a temporary address while your AWS instance keeps serving live traffic, so you can check it properly before cutting over. Once DNS has moved and we have watched the first 48 hours, you terminate the instance and delete the volumes and snapshots so the meter stops.
It gives your website or application its own Intel cores, DDR5 memory and NVMe storage on our high-availability cloud, rather than a share of resources pooled with other customers. It runs on servers LiberationTek owns and operates in the United States. Compared with a single bare-metal box it keeps the redundancy of a cloud platform; compared with AWS it comes managed, with a control panel and a flat price.
When you are genuinely using AWS as a platform rather than as a place to park a server — managed databases, queues, Lambda, autoscaling groups, multi-region failover, or a data pipeline feeding something else. Those are real capabilities and we do not replace them. If what you actually have is one or two instances running websites, and the bill and the sysadmin work have both grown quietly, that is the case we are built for.
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Dedicated Cloud plans · Fully managed VPS · Shared hosting · Transfer your website
Sources: Amazon Lightsail pricing, AWS Support plan pricing, Amazon EBS pricing, EC2 on-demand pricing and cPanel pricing, all checked September 12, 2026. LiberationTek prices are list prices on this site.