Hetzner vs AWS for EU startups: an honest comparison

Hetzner wins on raw price: a server with the same vCPU and memory costs a fraction of the AWS on-demand price, and EU cloud servers include 20 TB of outbound traffic where AWS charges per gigabyte. AWS wins on everything you would otherwise build and operate yourself: managed databases, identity, queues, multi-AZ failover, and a much longer list of compliance reports. For most EU startups the real question is how much operations work your team can absorb.

All prices below were checked on 29 October 2026 on the providers' official pages, exclude VAT, and are on-demand list prices. Hetzner raised prices twice in 2026, so check again before you decide.

Hetzner vs AWS at a glance

The table compares the things that decide the choice in practice, not every product line.

Compute and egress: where Hetzner's price gap comes from

For a steady, always-on server the list price gap is large, and for traffic-heavy workloads it gets much larger.

A like-for-like example: 4 vCPUs and 16 GB of memory. Hetzner's CCX23 with dedicated vCPUs lists at €86.49 a month with 160 GB of NVMe and 20 TB of traffic included. An m7g.xlarge in AWS Frankfurt lists at $0.1955 an hour, roughly $143 for a full month, before EBS storage and before any traffic. The same capacity on Fargate (ARM, Frankfurt) is $0.03725 per vCPU-hour plus $0.00409 per GB-hour, about $157 a month. AWS narrows the gap with Savings Plans and Graviton, but not to Hetzner's level on list price.

Traffic is where the models really differ. Serving 5 TB a month to the internet from Frankfurt costs about $441 on AWS (4,900 billable GB at $0.09). On Hetzner the same 5 TB fits inside a single server's included 20 TB. If your product serves video, large downloads, map tiles, backups or anything else that leaves the data centre in bulk, this line alone can decide the question. On AWS, also watch the per-GB fees inside your VPC; we explain the most common one in the hidden cost of the AWS NAT gateway.

Managed services: what you build yourself on Hetzner

On Hetzner you get good infrastructure primitives and very little above them. Everything AWS sells as a managed service, you run.

• Databases. No managed Postgres or MySQL. You run Postgres on a server or in Kubernetes (for example with an operator such as CloudNativePG), and you own replication, backups, point-in-time recovery, upgrades and failover. On AWS, RDS gives you Multi-AZ failover and automated backups with a few settings.
• Kubernetes. No managed control plane. Hetzner maintains a cloud controller manager and CSI driver, and tools like k3s, Talos or third-party platforms fill the gap. You upgrade the control plane and etcd yourself.
• Identity and audit. Hetzner has projects, member roles and API tokens, but no policy language like IAM and nothing as granular as CloudTrail for auditing every API call. For teams that need least-privilege access and an audit trail, this is often the deciding gap.
• Queues, events, secrets, email. You run RabbitMQ, NATS or Redis, Vault or SOPS, and use an external email provider. All well understood, all yours to patch and monitor.

None of this is hard for an experienced team. It is, however, time and on-call load that does not ship product.

EU data residency and GDPR

Both providers can keep your data in the EU. The difference is the legal entity behind them.

Hetzner is a German company running its own data centres in Germany and Finland, which keeps the whole chain under EU law and makes data-protection reviews simpler. AWS lets you pin data to EU regions, signs a data processing addendum and publishes extensive documentation, but it is a US company. Some customers' legal teams raise US access laws such as the CLOUD Act, and AWS has responded with the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. For most B2B SaaS, choosing an EU region on AWS plus a sound DPA is enough; for public sector or health customers, a European provider can shorten procurement. GDPR compliance itself still depends on what you do with the data, including what lands in your logs, which we cover in GDPR-friendly logging in EU regions.

Reliability, SLAs and certifications

AWS gives you more ways to be highly available; Hetzner gives you fewer, cheaper building blocks and leaves the design to you.

The AWS EC2 SLA is 99.99% at region level when you run across two or more Availability Zones, and 99.5% for a single instance. Hetzner's cloud SLA is 99.9%. Hetzner has several locations (Falkenstein, Nuremberg, Helsinki), so you can spread across sites, but there is no managed service that fails over a database for you.

On certifications, Hetzner holds ISO/IEC 27001 and, as announced in 2026, a BSI C5 Type 2 attestation covering its cloud and dedicated servers, which matters for German regulated sectors. AWS publishes SOC 2 reports, ISO certifications, C5 and many others. If your customers send security questionnaires asking for the provider's SOC 2 report, AWS answers that out of the box. Hetzner's C5 report may satisfy some of those customers, but not all of them.

When Hetzner wins

• Steady, predictable workloads that run all month, where elasticity adds little and a flat price is easy to plan.
• Egress-heavy products: media, downloads, APIs serving large payloads, CDN origins.
• A small team that is comfortable with operations and already runs Postgres, Kubernetes and monitoring well.
• Kubernetes on bare metal using Hetzner dedicated servers, when you need a lot of CPU or memory per euro and accept running the cluster yourself.
• CI runners, staging and batch jobs, where a failure costs time rather than customers.

When AWS wins

• You do not have, or do not want, a dedicated person for databases and infrastructure.
• You sell to enterprises, finance or health, and need SOC 2-style evidence, fine-grained IAM and audit trails quickly.
• Traffic is spiky or unpredictable, and auto scaling or serverless saves real money.
• You need managed building blocks such as queues, event buses, managed Kafka, data warehousing or AI services.
• You have AWS credits from an accelerator, which often cover the first year or two of infrastructure.

If you are also weighing Google Cloud and Azure, our AWS vs GCP vs Azure comparison for startups covers that decision.

Hybrid patterns that work

You don't have to choose one provider for everything. These are the splits we see working:

• Core on AWS, bulk traffic on Hetzner. Databases, identity and the application stay on AWS; a Hetzner server or object storage serves large files or acts as a CDN origin, so the expensive egress never leaves AWS.
• Production on AWS, everything else on Hetzner. CI runners, preview environments and internal tools on cheap servers.
• Production on Hetzner, backups elsewhere. Encrypted database backups shipped to a second provider, so a provider-level incident does not take your data with it.

Two rules for any hybrid setup: traffic leaving AWS is billed at AWS egress rates, so design data flows to avoid heavy cross-provider chatter; and keep both sides in Terraform so the split stays understandable.

Choosing a provider is one of those decisions that is cheap to get right early and expensive to change later. If you would like someone to model your actual workload on both providers, or to plan the move between them, that is work we do through our cloud migration service and, for the wider architecture choices, as a fractional CTO.

Frequently asked questions

Is Hetzner cheaper than AWS?

On list price, yes, by a wide margin. A 4 vCPU, 16 GB Hetzner CCX23 costs €86.49 a month with 20 TB of traffic included, while a comparable m7g.xlarge in AWS Frankfurt is about $143 a month before storage and traffic (prices checked October 2026). The total cost gap shrinks once you count the time to run databases and failover yourself.

Is Hetzner GDPR compliant?

Hetzner is a German company with EU data centres in Germany and Finland, offers a data processing agreement, and holds ISO/IEC 27001 and a BSI C5 Type 2 attestation. That makes it a solid base for GDPR, but compliance still depends on how you process data: access control, logging, retention and your own contracts with customers.

Does Hetzner have managed databases or managed Kubernetes?

No. As of October 2026, Hetzner Cloud offers servers, volumes, load balancers, private networks, firewalls and object storage, but no managed Postgres and no managed Kubernetes control plane. You run them yourself, for example Postgres with an operator and Kubernetes with k3s or Talos, using Hetzner's cloud controller manager and CSI driver.

How much does AWS charge for egress compared to Hetzner?

From AWS Frankfurt, data transfer out to the internet costs $0.09 per GB for the first 10 TB a month after a 100 GB free allowance. Hetzner EU cloud servers include 20 TB of outbound traffic each and charge €1.00 per additional TB. For 5 TB a month, that is about $441 on AWS versus nothing extra on Hetzner.