This is the widest price gap in mainstream cloud. Hetzner sells raw compute close to cost from its own European data centres; AWS sells a platform. Comparing them on price alone misses the point, but so does ignoring a gap this large.
Quick comparison
| AWS | Hetzner | |
|---|---|---|
| Price per core | Premium | Market leading |
| Service catalogue | Enormous | Infrastructure essentials only |
| Regions | Global | Germany, Finland, plus limited others |
| Egress | Metered, can be significant | Generous allowance included |
| Dedicated hardware | Limited, expensive | Core product, including an auction |
| Account verification | Standard | Strict, manual review common |
| Accounts here | 20 configurations from $20 | 3 configurations from $50 |
What Hetzner does not have
Being clear about this first, because it decides the comparison for many teams:
- No managed data warehouse.
- No managed machine learning platform.
- A limited managed database offering.
- Far fewer regions, with none in South America or Africa.
- A much smaller third-party ecosystem.
If your product depends on any of those, AWS wins and price is irrelevant.
What Hetzner does have
- Cost. Several times more CPU and RAM per unit of spend than equivalent AWS instances.
- Dedicated root servers, including an auction of used hardware that is among the cheapest compute available anywhere. See Hetzner cloud vs dedicated.
- Generous bandwidth, which matters enormously for content delivery. See egress costs.
- European jurisdiction, if that is a requirement.
The realistic pattern
Many teams do not choose one. They run stateless application servers, batch processing and non-production environments on Hetzner, and keep specific managed services on AWS where the alternative is building it themselves.
That split captures most of the saving without giving up the capabilities that justify AWS pricing. It costs operational complexity, so make it deliberate.
Account access
Hetzner’s identity verification is notably strict and manual review is common, particularly for international customers. That is a consequence of pricing that depends on keeping abuse low.
Our Hetzner listings cover 5 server, 10 server and open port 25 configurations from $50. AWS listings cover 20 configurations from $20. The tiers describe different things: concurrent server count on Hetzner, vCPU ceilings and credits on AWS.
Operational differences to plan for
- Failure handling. AWS abstracts hardware failure. On Hetzner dedicated hardware it is yours to plan for, with RAID, backups off the machine and designed redundancy.
- Automation. Hetzner has a clean API but a smaller ecosystem of modules and tooling around it.
- Support expectations. Set them accordingly at this price point.
Which should you choose
- Need managed analytics or ML? AWS.
- Need global regions? AWS.
- Running steady compute in Europe on a budget? Hetzner, decisively.
- Bandwidth-heavy delivery? Hetzner.
- Want both? Split by workload, deliberately.
Common questions
Is Hetzner reliable enough for production?
Yes, and a large amount of European production runs on it. Design for failure as on any single provider.
Why is it so much cheaper?
Own data centres, a narrow catalogue, and no premium for services you are not buying.
Can I use Hetzner for a global audience?
With a CDN in front, for static content, yes. For low-latency dynamic requests worldwide, the region footprint is a real constraint.