The hyperscalers are not the only game in town. For European workloads, Hetzner is genuinely competitive on quality and dramatically cheaper.
For most of the last decade, "use AWS" was the default. The cloud premium was worth paying for the managed services and the on-demand elasticity. By 2024 a counter-trend emerged: a wave of European builders moved core compute to Hetzner and saved 70-90%. Here is what they got right and what is different now.
Why now
Three things changed. Hetzner Cloud caught up to a basic AWS-equivalent feature set: VPC, firewalls, load balancers, snapshots, IPv6, an API. Tools like Coolify, Dokku, and Kamal made deployment to a bare-metal server almost as easy as deploying to Vercel. And cost pressure on engineering teams made the savings impossible to ignore.
What you give up
- Managed databases at hyperscaler quality. Hetzner has Postgres-as-a-service but it is younger and less feature-rich than RDS.
- Auto-scaling. You can build it, but it is manual.
- Multi-region with low latency between regions. Hetzner's regions are EU + US, period.
- The deep service catalog (managed Kafka, Elasticsearch, ML services). On Hetzner you self-host.
What you get
- EU-located data, GDPR-friendly, dramatically cheaper egress.
- Real CPU cores at real prices. A 16-core, 64GB box for ~€60/month.
- Bare-metal performance for databases, search, and ML inference.
- An ergonomic console and a clean REST API.
The architecture pattern that works
Most workloads we see migrate to Hetzner adopt the same shape: a few beefy VMs running Docker Compose or k0s, Postgres on a dedicated VM, S3-compatible object storage (Hetzner Object Storage or Backblaze), and Cloudflare in front for CDN, DDoS protection, and WAF. Total monthly cost for a serious app: under €500.
When AWS still wins
Multi-region with active-active failover. Compliance regimes that require specific certifications Hetzner does not have (FedRAMP, etc.). ML inference workloads using the latest GPU types. Existing teams with deep AWS skills where the engineering retraining cost exceeds the cloud savings.
The reseller angle
Several European cloud providers, ourselves included, are building reseller offerings on top of Hetzner. The customer gets a managed experience, we get the operational margin. It is the same model AWS executed two decades ago, applied locally.