EC2 is a 200-service menu wrapped around an identity-bound, US-jurisdiction billing rail. NordBastion is plain compute — KYC-free, paid in crypto, pinned to one of four Nordic constitutional jurisdictions — with no egress fees and no surprise invoice.
Plain compute (KVM-virtualised VPS, snapshots, root SSH) without the AWS identity stack — no IAM-verified payer, no re-verification emails, no card on file.
Flat $5.90/mo for 2 vCPU, 4 GB, 120 GB NVMe and unmetered bandwidth — no EBS line item, no $0.09/GB egress, no NAT-gateway-by-the-hour.
Nordic constitutional jurisdiction — Sweden, Finland, Norway or Iceland — outside the US CLOUD Act perimeter, with a monthly warrant canary.
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AWS EC2
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| KYC | None — email + password only | Implicit via card issuer; AWS may suspend pending re-verification |
| Billing | Crypto prepaid — BTC, XMR, ETH, LTC, USDT, USDC + more | Credit card postpaid; complex multi-line monthly invoice |
| Jurisdiction | Nordic constitutional (SE / FI / NO / IS) | United States — CLOUD Act, NSLs with gag orders |
| Entry tier | $5.90 / mo · 2 vCPU · 4 GB · 120 GB NVMe | t4g.nano · ~$3.06 / mo · 2 vCPU · 0.5 GB · no storage (EBS extra) |
| Equivalent tier | $5.90 / mo · Sentinel · 2 vCPU · 4 GB · 120 GB NVMe incl. | t4g.small · ~$15 / mo · 2 vCPU · 2 GB · EBS at $0.08/GB-month extra |
| vCPU policy | Pinned, reserved | t-family = burstable credits; m/c-family = dedicated |
| Storage | Local NVMe included in tier | EBS network block · $0.08–$0.125 / GB-month + IOPS |
| Egress | Unmetered, 1–10 Gbps uplink by tier | $0.09 / GB after the first 100 GB / mo |
| Regions | 4 Nordic bastions · STO, HEL, OSL, RKV | 36 global AWS regions |
| DDoS mitigation | Always-on, included | Shield Standard included; Shield Advanced from $3,000 / mo |
| Warrant canary | Yes — monthly, PGP-signed | No |
| Managed services | No — infrastructure only by doctrine | RDS, S3, Lambda, IAM, Cognito, CloudFront, 200+ services |
AWS prices and policies reflect publicly listed on-demand values in early 2026 and may have changed since.
No identity-bound account, no $0.09/GB egress, no surprise NAT-gateway charge. Flat per-month price with everything included. If your AWS bill keeps drifting upward and your workload is mostly compute, the migration pays for itself in the first invoice.
RDS, S3, Lambda, IAM, KMS, Cognito, SQS, SNS, CloudFront, Route 53, 200+ services. NordBastion is deliberately infrastructure-only — by doctrine, not by absence of engineering. If your workload is a glue of AWS-managed services, NordBastion is the wrong replacement for that workload.
36 global regions across six continents. NordBastion runs four Nordic bastions on purpose — jurisdictional focus is the whole point of the product. If your latency target is Mumbai, São Paulo or Sydney, NordBastion is wrong for you today.
Snapshot the EC2 root volume, then aws ec2 create-instance-export-task to push a raw image into an S3 bucket. Generate a short-lived pre-signed URL.
Create the NordBastion account (email + password), top up a prepaid balance in Bitcoin or Monero, no card required.
Pick the Nordic bastion of your choice, order the equivalent NordBastion tier (the spec table above maps EC2 sizes directly) and supply the pre-signed S3 URL as the custom image source.
Lower the TTL on the affected A/AAAA records 24 h before the move. At cut-over, swap the A record to the NordBastion IPv4 — propagation typically completes in minutes.
Terminate the EC2 instance and its EBS volumes, empty the staging S3 bucket. Final AWS invoice closes at the end of the month — confirm no orphaned NAT gateways or Elastic IPs are still billing.
For most teams the right play is not "leave AWS entirely". It is to recognise that an EC2 instance is fungible compute — there is no good privacy reason to keep it on a US identity-bound platform when the same shape of compute is available KYC-free, flat-priced, and with no egress charge under constitutional Nordic protection.
Move the compute first. If you depend on RDS, S3 or Lambda, keep those on AWS — there is no managed-services equivalent on NordBastion, by doctrine. As your stack moves from “AWS-everywhere” to “infrastructure-I-own”, the bridge shortens; some teams complete the move in a quarter, others run a hybrid indefinitely.
NordBastion will not be everything AWS is. It will be plain compute, flat-priced, KYC-free, pinned in one of four Nordic legal regimes with a published canary, and that is exactly the part you came here for.
The questions teams actually ask before moving a workload away from AWS EC2.
EC2 is unbeatable as a giant menu of managed services for engineering teams paid to assemble them. It is also a US-jurisdiction, identity-bound platform: the account is tied to a verified payment method, the billing rail is opaque enough that small instances regularly produce surprise four-figure invoices, and bandwidth out of the AWS edge is priced as a profit centre. For workloads where any one of those — US data-path, identity linkage, runaway billing, $0.09/GB egress — is the problem, EC2 is the wrong default. NordBastion is the opposite shape: flat, prepaid, KYC-free, Nordic.
At any tier where you also factor in EBS and egress, yes — by a wide margin. A NordBastion Sentinel at $5.90/mo ships 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 120 GB NVMe and unmetered bandwidth. The cheapest comparable EC2 instance is a t4g.nano at $3.06/mo (2 vCPU, 0.5 GB RAM, no storage), and a t4g.small at roughly $15/mo (2 vCPU, 2 GB, no storage) — to which you must add EBS at ~$0.08/GB-month and egress at $0.09/GB after 100 GB. A real-world EC2 bill for the same workload routinely lands 4–8× higher.
Yes. NordBastion bills exclusively in cryptocurrency — Bitcoin, Monero, Ethereum, Litecoin, USDT, USDC and others. You top up a prepaid balance, the cost of running servers is drawn from it. No card on file, no AWS-style "please re-verify your identity" emails, no PSP that has done KYC on you.
Snapshot the EC2 root volume to EBS, export to an S3 bucket as a raw VMDK/RAW image (vmimport / aws ec2 create-instance-export-task), download it locally, then order an equivalent NordBastion VPS in the Nordic bastion of your choice and request a custom-image install. Re-point DNS, terminate the EC2 instance. Total wall-clock for a small instance: about 45 minutes, most of it the export download.
Yes, and it is honest to name it: the AWS managed-services menu. RDS, S3, Lambda, IAM, SQS, SNS, CloudFront, Route 53, KMS, Cognito — none of these have NordBastion equivalents. NordBastion is deliberately infrastructure-only: VPS and dedicated servers, snapshots, networking, DNS, panel. If your workload is fundamentally a glue of AWS-managed services, NordBastion is not the right replacement. If your workload is compute that happens to sit on EC2, the move is straightforward.
AWS is a US-incorporated provider subject to the CLOUD Act and the broader US legal compulsion stack — including National Security Letters with gag orders. "Region: eu-west-1" does not change the parent jurisdiction. NordBastion is operated under one of four Nordic constitutional regimes — Sweden, Finland, Norway or Iceland — chosen at provisioning. Different legal floors apply; we publish a monthly warrant canary and a rolling transparency report.
No. Bandwidth is unmetered on NordBastion VPS, with a 1–10 Gbps uplink scaled by tier. The AWS comparison is brutal: $0.09/GB after the first 100 GB on EC2, which for a modest 5 TB/month workload is $441 in egress alone. Most NordBastion customers cite egress as the single line-item that justified the move.
Terraform and Ansible: yes — NordBastion exposes a REST API v1 with first-class server / snapshot / SSH-key / network resources, plus a Terraform provider in development and SDKs in Python, TypeScript, Go and Rust. The CLI is `nb` instead of `aws`. The IaC mental model is the same; what disappears is the 200-service API surface, which for a compute workload you were not using anyway.
Same editorial rules — facts only, dated, no disparagement. Each page is the honest migration story for that source host.
The developer-friendly cloud.
New-York-founded, KYC by card, 15 global regions; $4/mo entry droplet.
The veteran independent, acquired.
Founded 2003, acquired by Akamai 2022; 11 regions, $5/mo entry, card-only.
Bare-metal + global VPS.
32 regions, hourly billing, crypto accepted but full KYC on signup.
The European low-cost giant.
Germany / Finland / US, EU corporate KYC, dedicated from €39, CX22 VPS from €3.79.
The French dedicated-server giant.
Roubaix-headquartered, identity required by AML/CRBF, VPS from €3.50.
