For a comparable server in Germany, Hetzner Cloud costs about half of what AWS lists in Frankfurt, before any data leaves the server. Once traffic leaves, the gap gets wider. That is the short answer. The rest of this page shows the list prices behind it, what they leave out, and when AWS is still the better choice for a small company.
We run our own product, asoft-desk, on Hetzner Cloud, so this is a choice we have made with our own money. We are a Hetzner customer, not a partner, and we get nothing from them for this article.
The comparison. Three servers, list prices
We picked three sizes a company of 5 to 50 people actually uses: a small internal application, a business application with steady load, and a larger system with a database on the same server. For each one we took the closest match by vCPU and memory.
How the numbers were built:
- Hetzner: the monthly price cap from hetzner.com, location eu-central (Nuremberg and Helsinki for these three plans). The price includes a public IPv4 address, the NVMe disk and 20 TB of included traffic.
- AWS: on-demand Linux prices for EU (Frankfurt), eu-central-1, from AWS’s public price list. AWS bills by the hour, so we multiplied by 730 hours, an average month. We added a public IPv4 address ($0.005 per hour) and a gp3 disk the same size as Hetzner’s ($0.0952 per GB per month).
- All prices exclude VAT. USD is converted at the European Central Bank reference rate of 19 October 2026: 1 EUR = 1.1225 USD.
| Server | Hetzner Cloud | AWS, Frankfurt | AWS in EUR |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 vCPU, 4 GB, 80 GB disk | CPX22: €19.99/month | t3.medium $35.04 + IPv4 $3.65 + disk $7.62 = $46.31/month | €41.25 |
| 2 dedicated vCPU, 8 GB, 80 GB disk | CCX13: €43.49/month | m7i.large $88.15 + IPv4 $3.65 + disk $7.62 = $99.41/month | €88.56 |
| 4 dedicated vCPU, 16 GB, 160 GB disk | CCX23: €86.49/month | m7i.xlarge $176.30 + IPv4 $3.65 + disk $15.23 = $195.18/month | €173.88 |
Verified on 20 October 2026. We re-check these prices every six months. Sources: hetzner.com/cloud/regular-performance, hetzner.com/cloud/general-purpose, aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand (price list published 15 October 2026), ECB reference rates.
In all three rows, AWS on demand comes to roughly twice the Hetzner price.
Traffic. Where the gap widens
Outgoing traffic is the line most small companies forget. On Hetzner, cloud servers in the EU include at least 20 TB of traffic a month, and each additional TB costs €1.00. On AWS in Frankfurt, data sent to the internet costs $0.09 per GB for the first 10 TB a month, after the free allowance AWS applies across its services.
For an application that sends 1 TB a month to its users (1,024 GB), that is $92.16 on AWS, about €82, on top of the server. On Hetzner the same terabyte sits inside the 20 TB the server already has. For a file-heavy portal or a video archive this line can cost more than the server itself.
Beyond the table. Five costs to add
List prices are a fair start, not the whole bill. Five things change the picture:
- The CPU is not the same kind. CPX22 is a shared vCPU; t3.medium is burstable and runs on CPU credits. For an internal tool with light load both are fine. For constant load, compare the dedicated rows.
- AWS sells discounts for commitment. Savings Plans and reserved instances lower the price if you commit for one or three years. We compared on-demand prices because that is what a company pays when it starts.
- The cheapest Hetzner plan was not available. Hetzner lists a Cost-Optimized plan from €5.99 a month, but on 20 October 2026 its page showed it as currently not available. We left it out of the table.
- Backups cost extra on both sides. Hetzner sells server backups as an add-on, priced by server size, and a 1 TB Storage Box for €3.20 a month. On AWS, snapshots and AWS Backup are billed separately too.
- Your time is not on either bill. A server on Hetzner is yours to run: updates, monitoring, backups, security. Several AWS services take part of that work off you, for a price.
Why we run asoft-desk on Hetzner. Our own choice
asoft-desk, our own product, runs on a Hetzner Cloud server in Germany. So do our GitLab, our internal automation and our monitoring; the list is public on our subprocessors page. We create every server with Terraform and configure it with Ansible, so a server can be rebuilt from code in the same location, with the same settings.
We chose Hetzner for three reasons. The data stays in Germany, with a provider headquartered there. The price is predictable: a monthly cap per server, with traffic that does not turn into a surprise. And what we need from a provider is plain servers, private networks, firewalls and storage, which Hetzner offers with an API that Terraform and Ansible already support.
What we gave up: managed services. When we need a database or monitoring, we run it ourselves, on our own servers.
Today we also run a client’s application on Hetzner Cloud. The same setup, provisioned with Terraform and configured with Ansible, is what we build and run for clients, where contracted: see custom software and maintenance and support.
Hetzner is not always right. Four cases
- Your application depends on managed services. On the Hetzner Cloud pages the building blocks are servers, networks, firewalls, load balancers, block storage and object storage. If your application relies on a managed database with automatic failover, managed queues, serverless functions or a managed Kubernetes control plane, check what Hetzner offers before you plan a move. On AWS these are standard services, and rebuilding them yourself has a cost.
- Your users are far from Hetzner’s locations. Hetzner Cloud runs in Germany, Finland, the USA (Ashburn and Hillsboro) and Singapore. If your users are in South America, Africa or Australia, a provider with a region close to them gives lower latency.
- Your auditor asks for a specific attestation. Hetzner names ISO/IEC 27001 certification for its German and Finnish data centre parks, and the BSI C5 attestation. If your sector or a client contract asks for a certificate outside that list, check the provider’s list before you choose.
- You already live inside AWS. Startup credits, a team that knows AWS well, or a system tied to many AWS services can outweigh the price difference. Moving costs work, and the saving has to pay for it.
Questions. Short answers
Is Hetzner GDPR-compliant?
Hetzner Online GmbH is headquartered in Germany and states that it hosts in line with the GDPR. Compliance for your application also depends on how you run it: where the data sits, who has access, and the data processing agreement you sign with the provider.
Can I move from AWS to Hetzner without downtime?
Usually with a short planned window, not with none. The servers are built on Hetzner while the application keeps running on AWS. The data is copied and kept in sync, then DNS is switched. How short the window is depends on the database and on how much data changes during the move.
What does Hetzner not offer?
Hetzner’s product pages list cloud servers, dedicated servers, networks, load balancers, block and object storage, backup storage and managed servers, among others. Compare that list with the services your application uses today; whatever is missing from it, you run yourself or keep elsewhere.
Who manages the server afterwards?
You, or the company you work with. Hetzner runs the hardware, the network and the data centre; updates, monitoring, backups and security on the server are the customer’s job. We run our own servers this way. For a client’s system, what we look after is agreed after the assessment; see maintenance and support. We are a custom software development company in Romania.
Tell us how it should work. We build the rest.