you could rent about 45 Xeon Gold 24-core servers on Hetzner.
Hi Boris, The $7k was affected by a one-time charge on AWS Cloudfront that will be reduced in future quarters. Much of the current billing now is CI. Hetzner is a great hosting company. We have an account there, and this is an interesting idea. Still, analyzing the number (45 servers), cut that by 50% or more, since the expected billing amount is less. And it's going towards other costs also. Let's say 23 Hetzner servers. The CI jobs we're hosting burst up to 500 simultaneous jobs. Is it enough? The solution is autoscaling (on AWS). I explored autoscaling on Hetzner also. The problem is that you want to create a disk image (an AMI) with all the preinstalled CI software, and be able to quickly launch and destroy the instances, using the custom AMI. However, Hetzner allows that to happen on a restricted number of officially provided AMIs, and then when it comes to a customized image, that must be transferred across their network. It was taking more than 10 minutes. Not an acceptable delay. A CI job should be launching instances in 1-2 minutes. I confirmed the delay issue with their tech support. No fix. Nevertheless, in spite of that, I do occasionally think the same thought as you: "Let's launch 100 dedicated machines on Hetzner". Maybe at some point, yes.