[stefanoco]

Totally agree with oriettaxx: nothing beats the supervision of an experienced professional. Automated tools are much like AWS... when automation fails, cost start rising again! Our experience is exactly the same as per your suggestions: we eventually switched to a set of properly configured (by a highly skilled and not so expensive pro) bare metal servers at a well known EU data center, and a few additional VPCs for commodity services that we might want to change more frequently. Was a new life both for money and peace of mind. Each time a receive a bunch of emails from AWS for the billing of a very small service still hosted there my heart starts beating fast. Because they like writing looong messages and duplicates, with plenty of details about your service and bill, and many thanks and everything so difficult to understand. I'm not blaming AWS of course: it's a legit business model, I don't particularly like. Your mileage may vary... but not so much actually unless you're in a highly variable type of business, with real need for constant change of configuration or resources.