Hetzner vs AWS vs GCP: which cloud to choose for your business

Three different philosophies

Hetzner is about price and simplicity: powerful hardware for little money, European data centers. AWS and GCP are about breadth of managed services and global scale: hundreds of ready services, but pricier and more complex.

Price: Hetzner is in a league of its own

By vCPU and RAM cost, Hetzner is often several times cheaper than AWS/GCP for comparable resources. For a business running its own apps or a Kubernetes cluster, that's direct monthly savings. AWS/GCP only "catch up" when you critically need their managed services.

Managed services: AWS/GCP win here

Need a managed database (RDS/Cloud SQL), managed Kubernetes (EKS/GKE), queues, analytics, ML — AWS and GCP provide these out of the box. On Hetzner you stand these up and operate them yourself (or with a DevOps team). It's a trade-off: flexibility and price vs turnkey convenience.

Location and latency

For an audience in Europe, Hetzner's European data centers (Germany, Finland) deliver low latency. AWS/GCP also have European regions, but at a premium. If your users are mostly in the EU — Hetzner wins on both price and latency.

When to choose what

• Startup / limited budget / own stack → Hetzner (most resources per dollar).
• Need managed services, global scale, enterprise requirements → AWS or GCP.
• Hybrid: main load on Hetzner for price + specific managed services on AWS/GCP.

How to get migration right

The key is not to "lift and shift as-is" but to design for the new cloud: right-sizing, autoscaling, Infrastructure as Code, a zero-downtime plan. Then the move delivers both savings and reliability. This is exactly where a DevOps team pays off fastest.