Hetzner Cloud crushes AWS on price — here’s what you actually lose
In July 2026, an 8 vCPU/16 GB server costs €15.99/month on Hetzner versus $248/month on AWS on-demand. The gap isn’t a promotion — it’s a cost structure hyperscalers cannot replicate.
June 15, 2026. Hetzner raises prices by 30–40 % on CX/CAX instances and more than doubles some CPX/CCX tiers. The CX43 — 8 vCPUs, 16 GB RAM, 160 GB NVMe — climbs to €15.99/month.
July 2026. A c5.2xlarge on AWS — same 8 vCPUs, 16 GB, EBS storage sold separately — still costs $0.34/hour in us-east-1. That’s $248.20/month on-demand.
Even after the price hike, Hetzner is 15 times cheaper. This ratio is not a pricing-table quirk. It is the direct result of two business models that have nothing in common.
The compute matchup: 8 vCPUs, 16 GB RAM, one monthly bill
Let’s compare like with like. A general-purpose server for web workloads, APIs, staging environments, or a medium-sized database — 8 vCPUs, 16 GB RAM, SSD storage.
| Specification | Hetzner CX43 | AWS c5.2xlarge |
|---|---|---|
| vCPUs | 8 (shared Intel/AMD) | 8 (Intel Xeon Platinum 8124M) |
| RAM | 16 GB | 16 GB |
| Storage | 160 GB NVMe included | EBS gp3 sold separately |
| Outbound traffic included | 20 TB | 100 GB, then $0.09/GB |
| Monthly on-demand price | €15.99 | $248.20 |
| Price per GB of RAM/month | ~€1.00 | ~$15.51 |
| Price ratio | ×1 | ×15.5 |
The c5.2xlarge is not an outlier. An m5.large (2 vCPUs, 8 GB) costs $70/month on AWS. The closest Hetzner equivalent — a CX33 (4 vCPUs, 8 GB, 80 GB NVMe) — costs €8.49/month. Twice the CPU for one-eighth the price.
AWS Reserved Instances do not close the gap. Even with a 3-year all-upfront commitment (the maximum discount, −62 %), the c5.2xlarge drops to $94/month — still 5.9 times the Hetzner price. And that commitment locks you into an instance family for 36 months; switching costs the difference.
What Hetzner does just as well — sometimes better
The standard argument against alternative clouds is the feature gap: “You’ll pay less, but you’ll have nothing.” In 2026, that argument no longer holds for the majority of workloads.
Block storage and object storage
Hetzner offers block storage volumes at €0.0572/GB/month (NVMe SSD, detachable, hot-resizable). AWS EBS gp3 costs $0.08/GB/month, plus provisioned IOPS beyond 3,000 ($0.005/IOPS-month) and throughput beyond 125 MB/s. For 500 GB with 10,000 IOPS, the Hetzner bill is €28.60/month. The AWS bill exceeds $75/month — before data transfer.
Hetzner’s S3-compatible Object Storage costs approximately €0.023/GB/month with 1 TB of outbound traffic included. AWS S3 Standard also costs $0.023/GB/month, but outbound traffic is billed at $0.09/GB after the first 100 GB free tier. Storing 5 TB and serving 2 TB/month costs roughly €135/month on Hetzner versus $115 + $171 in traffic = $286/month on AWS.
Private networking, firewalls, load balancers
Hetzner includes at no extra charge: private networks (vSwitch for isolated inter-server communication), stateful firewalls (inbound/outbound rules applicable across multiple servers), DDoS protection, and a full REST API with native Terraform and Ansible support.
Hetzner load balancers start at €5.39/month (10,000 connections, 5 services). An AWS ALB costs $0.0225/hour (~$16.43/month) plus $0.008/LCU-hour — a production ALB often exceeds $30/month in practice.
What’s still missing: a native CDN, managed DNS (Route 53 equivalent), and serverless functions (Lambda). For these, you’ll stay on AWS or supplement with Cloudflare.
The traffic trap: why AWS bills explode
AWS’s real cost is not compute. It’s data.
A web server generating 3 TB of outbound traffic per month pays nothing extra on Hetzner — it’s within the 20 TB included. On AWS, those 3 TB cost $0.09/GB × 2,900 GB = $261/month in traffic alone, on top of compute. Inbound traffic is free on both sides, but AWS inter-AZ traffic ($0.01/GB each direction) adds an invisible layer: an application talking to its database across two AZs can generate $50–200/month in internal traffic that no one notices until the first bill arrives.
Hetzner charges €1/TB for overage in Europe. AWS charges the equivalent of ~$90/TB. The ratio is 1 to 90.
What you actually lose
Pretending Hetzner replaces AWS for every use case would be dishonest. Three structural gaps remain.
The managed ecosystem. AWS RDS, ElastiCache, SQS, SNS, Lambda — these are not raw compute, they are software bricks operated for you. Hetzner offers managed PostgreSQL and MySQL (starting at ~€14/month) but no equivalent to DynamoDB, Kinesis, or Step Functions. A team that built its architecture around these services does not migrate to Hetzner by changing an endpoint — it rebuilds.
Global coverage. Hetzner operates 4 regions: Germany (Falkenstein, Nuremberg), Finland (Helsinki), United States (Ashburn, Hillsboro), and Singapore. AWS operates over 30. For an application served in Southeast Asia, Latin America, or Africa, Hetzner’s latency and redundancy are not at the same level. Hetzner multi-region is a 4-zone multi-region — not a 30-zone one.
Vertical compliance. Hetzner is ISO 27001 and C5-certified (German BSI), covering GDPR and part of European requirements. But it lacks the vertical certifications AWS stacks: HIPAA (US healthcare), PCI-DSS Level 1, FedRAMP, IRAP. A healthtech or fintech selling into the US market cannot leave AWS (or Azure, or GCP) on this criterion alone.
The verdict
Hetzner has killed the “cloud is expensive” argument for European SMBs. The price-to-performance ratio is so lopsided that the question is no longer “is Hetzner good enough?” but “do I actually need AWS?”
If you are a European startup or SMB deploying APIs, workers, databases, or staging environments on standard compute, the math is trivial. For the price of one m5.large on AWS ($70/month), you get two CX43s on Hetzner (€31.98/month) with enough left over for a load balancer and a 500 GB block volume — all for under €70/month. The gap pays a part-time developer’s salary.
If you are a scale-up that has already absorbed the AWS managed ecosystem — RDS, Lambda, SQS, CloudFront — your migration cost to Hetzner likely exceeds the compute savings. But you now have a public benchmark. The next time your AWS TAM offers you a 15 % discount on Reserved Instances, you’ll know the market price of bare compute is 15 times lower. That’s not a negotiation lever — it’s information.
If you are a large enterprise with multi-jurisdiction compliance requirements, Hetzner is not (yet) your primary cloud. But it is already your ideal secondary cloud for staging, disaster recovery, and non-sensitive workloads. At €15.99/month for 8 vCPUs, not using it costs more than using it.
References
- Hetzner Cloud Pricing Calculator, CostGoat, updated June 29, 2026.
- Hetzner Cloud — Product page, Hetzner, accessed July 28, 2026.
- Hetzner Cloud Pricing: Complete Breakdown in 2026, Kuberns, 2026.
- Amazon EC2 c5.2xlarge Pricing, CloudPrice, accessed July 28, 2026.
- Amazon EC2 Total Cost Calculator, CostGoat, updated April 19, 2026.
- Hetzner Object Storage, Hetzner, accessed July 28, 2026.
- Hetzner Price Adjustment — June 2026, Hetzner Docs.