Amazon Web Services vs Hetzner

At a Glance

Let's scope this honestly. Amazon Web Services is a platform: managed databases, serverless functions, AI services, queues, CDNs, and a global footprint of 39 regions. Hetzner sells compute, storage, load balancers, and Kubernetes from its own German and Finnish data centres — it competes with AWS's infrastructure core, not its full catalogue. The real question developers type into Google is narrower than "which cloud is better". It is whether the workloads that only need servers, disks, and bandwidth justify hyperscaler invoices, and what a German provider under EU law changes about the answer.

Price-Performance on Comparable Compute

Start with a like-for-like pair, checked in August 2026. Hetzner's entry shared-vCPU instance, the CX23, gives you 2 vCPUs, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB NVMe storage, and 20 TB of traffic for EUR 5.49/month in Germany or Finland. The nearest AWS equivalent is a t3.medium — also 2 vCPUs and 4 GB — which costs $0.048/hour on-demand in Frankfurt, about $35 for a full month. That is roughly six times the price, and it excludes the block storage volume and outbound traffic that Hetzner bundles in.

ARM tells the same story. A Hetzner CAX11 (2 Ampere vCPUs, 4 GB) is EUR 5.99/month; AWS's Graviton-based t4g.medium runs $0.0384/hour in Frankfurt, around $28/month before storage and egress. Reserved instances and savings plans narrow the gap, but only in exchange for one- or three-year commitments that fixed Hetzner pricing never asks for.

One caveat belongs here. Hetzner raised its prices on 15 June 2026 — the CX23 went from EUR 3.99 to EUR 5.49, and dedicated-vCPU plans rose much more sharply. Even after that adjustment, the multiple against on-demand EC2 remains wide on the shared-vCPU plans most projects actually run.

Edge: Hetzner. On raw compute per euro, verified against both vendors' current price lists, AWS is not close.

Service Breadth and Managed Everything

Here the comparison inverts completely, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. AWS offers managed relational databases, DynamoDB, Lambda, SQS, ElastiCache, CloudFront, Bedrock, and hundreds of other services; even its new sovereign region opened with more than 90 of them. Need a managed Postgres with point-in-time recovery, an event bus, and a machine-learning endpoint by Friday? On AWS that is configuration; at Hetzner it is a hiring plan.

Hetzner's catalogue stops at infrastructure: cloud and dedicated servers, block and S3-compatible object storage, load balancers, firewalls, private networks, DNS, and a managed Kubernetes service whose control plane costs nothing. There are no managed databases, no serverless runtime, and no AI services. Every layer above the operating system is yours to install, patch, back up, and monitor. Plenty of teams run Postgres and Redis themselves happily. Teams that cannot, or whose architecture leans on a dozen AWS primitives, will find no equivalents here.

Edge: AWS, by a distance. Hetzner does not attempt this fight, and buyers should not pretend it does.

Egress and Billing Predictability

Bandwidth is where AWS bills diverge hardest from expectations. After a free monthly allowance of 100 GB, data transfer out to the internet from EU regions costs $0.09/GB for the first 10 TB — just over $92 per terabyte. Every Hetzner cloud server in Europe includes 20 TB of outbound traffic, and overage costs EUR 1/TB. Pushing that included 20 TB out of Frankfurt on EC2 would cost roughly $1,800 a month, more than 300 times the price of the server that ships it free on Hetzner.

Predictability compounds the difference. A Hetzner server has a published monthly cap; the bill cannot exceed it, and hourly billing applies only if you delete the machine early. An AWS bill is the sum of instance hours, EBS volumes, snapshots, IOPS, NAT gateway hours, cross-AZ traffic, API requests, and egress — a structure so intricate that cost-management tooling is its own product category. For media delivery, backups, API backends, or anything traffic-heavy, the egress line alone can decide the platform.

Edge: Hetzner. Included traffic and capped monthly bills against metered everything is not a subtle contrast.

Sovereignty and Jurisdiction

Hetzner's compliance position needs one sentence. It is a bootstrapped German GmbH that owns its data centres in Nuremberg, Falkenstein, and Helsinki, holds ISO 27001 certification, and answers to no non-EU parent — GDPR applies, the US CLOUD Act does not.

AWS requires several paragraphs, which is itself the point. Standard AWS operates six regions in EU member states (Frankfurt, Ireland, Paris, Stockholm, Milan, Spain), so EU data residency is easy to configure. Jurisdiction is harder: Amazon is a US company, and the CLOUD Act can compel providers under US jurisdiction to disclose data they control wherever it is stored. AWS's answer arrived on 15 January 2026, when the AWS European Sovereign Cloud went live in Brandenburg, Germany. That environment is physically and logically separate, operated by German-incorporated subsidiaries with EU-resident staff, and launched with 90+ services behind a EUR 7.8 billion investment. It is a serious engineering and governance effort, and for regulated buyers who need AWS services it deserves evaluation. Ultimate ownership still sits with Amazon in Seattle, and whether the structure would withstand a determined US legal demand is a question courts have not yet answered.

Edge: Hetzner. A German company under German law needs no sovereignty architecture, because it has nothing to insulate.

Scale, Reach, and Ecosystem

Global reach favours AWS without argument: 39 regions and 123 availability zones against Hetzner's data centres in Germany and Finland plus cloud locations in the United States and Singapore. Multi-continent latency requirements, formal compliance attestations by the dozen, enterprise support contracts, a vast marketplace, and the largest hiring pool in cloud computing all sit on the AWS side. So does tooling gravity — most infrastructure content, certifications, and third-party integrations assume AWS first.

Hetzner's ecosystem is smaller but real. The hcloud API, an official Terraform provider, a CLI, and integrations with Ansible, Pulumi, and Packer cover infrastructure-as-code well, and its developer community is unusually active for a provider its size. Support, however, is ticket-based; there are no account managers or 24/7 phone escalation. Organisations that buy support contracts as insurance will notice.

Edge: AWS for global scale, certifications, and ecosystem depth. Hetzner covers the essentials for European-focused teams and no more.

When to Choose AWS

Choose AWS when your architecture depends on managed services — RDS, Lambda, SQS, managed AI — or when users span continents and single-digit-millisecond regional latency matters. Enterprises with long compliance checklists, dedicated cloud teams, and negotiated discounts get genuine value from the catalogue and the certifications. Startups burning AWS credits, teams whose engineers are AWS-certified, and organisations that treat infrastructure staffing as the scarcer resource than infrastructure budget all fit the platform. If sovereignty requirements point European but the service dependency remains, the European Sovereign Cloud is the version of AWS built for that conversation.

AWS is the right pick when breadth, managed operations, and global reach are the requirement — and the bill is a line item you actively manage.

When to Choose Hetzner

Choose Hetzner when your stack fits on servers, storage, and Kubernetes, and you want the lowest verified price in European cloud hosting with bills you can predict to the cent. Traffic-heavy workloads are the clearest case: 20 TB included per server against $0.09/GB makes some architectures viable on Hetzner that are simply uneconomic on EC2. It suits self-managed teams, Kubernetes users who like a free control plane, and any organisation whose data protection officer prefers a German provider with no US parent over a transfer-and-jurisdiction analysis. Dedicated servers and the Server Auction extend the value case further for sustained workloads.

Hetzner is the right pick when infrastructure cost, egress economics, and clean EU jurisdiction outrank managed-service convenience — and your team runs its own databases without flinching.

The Verdict

These two providers are not substitutes; they overlap on a core and diverge everywhere else. AWS has earned its default status — no other platform matches its service catalogue, global infrastructure, or ecosystem. The January 2026 launch of its European Sovereign Cloud shows it takes European jurisdiction concerns seriously rather than rhetorically.

Awkwardly for AWS, a large share of the industry's workload only ever uses the core it shares with Hetzner. For those workloads, the comparison is lopsided the other way: roughly six times cheaper compute, bundled traffic where AWS meters at $0.09/GB, and capped monthly bills. The German owner-operator behind them needs no special-purpose subsidiary to tell a sovereignty story. Even after Hetzner's June 2026 price increases, the economics did not meaningfully converge.

For European teams running compute-shaped workloads, Hetzner is the stronger choice in 2026 and the money saved is transformative at any scale. AWS remains the platform for managed-service architectures, global reach, and enterprises that need its certifications. Many mature setups use both — Hetzner for steady compute and traffic, AWS for the services nothing else provides. The wider field of European AWS alternatives and our ranked EU cloud hosting roundup cover the middle ground.

FAQ

Is Hetzner cheaper than AWS?

Substantially, on comparable infrastructure. As of August 2026, Hetzner's CX23 (2 vCPU, 4 GB, 40 GB NVMe, 20 TB traffic) costs EUR 5.49/month, while a t3.medium in AWS Frankfurt costs about $35/month on-demand before storage and egress. Bandwidth widens the gap further: AWS charges $0.09/GB after 100 GB free, roughly 90 times Hetzner's EUR 1/TB overage rate.

Can Hetzner replace AWS?

Only if your architecture uses AWS as an infrastructure provider rather than a platform. Hetzner covers servers, block and object storage, load balancers, networking, and managed Kubernetes very well. It has no managed databases, no serverless runtime, and no AI services, so stacks built on RDS, Lambda, or SQS would need to self-host equivalents or stay put.

Is AWS GDPR compliant?

AWS can be used in a GDPR-compliant way and offers six regions in EU member states for data residency. The structural caveat is jurisdiction: Amazon is a US company within reach of the CLOUD Act wherever data sits. Its answer, the AWS European Sovereign Cloud launched in Brandenburg in January 2026, is operated by EU-incorporated subsidiaries — though ultimate ownership remains American. Hetzner, as a German company on its own EU infrastructure, avoids the question entirely.

Does AWS still have a free tier?

Not the old one. Accounts created since 15 July 2025 no longer get the 12-month free tier. New users instead receive up to $200 in credits ($100 at sign-up, $100 for onboarding tasks) on a free plan lasting at most six months, plus 30+ always-free services. Hetzner offers no free tier — its entry server simply costs EUR 5.49/month.

What is the AWS European Sovereign Cloud?

It is a physically and logically separate AWS environment whose first region opened in Brandenburg, Germany on 15 January 2026, backed by a planned EUR 7.8 billion investment. At launch it offered more than 90 services, run by German-incorporated Amazon subsidiaries staffed by EU residents, with sovereign identity and billing systems. The design addresses operational autonomy and data residency; whether it neutralises US legal reach over an American-owned parent remains legally untested.