Rising costs and complexity in cloud platforms make many businesses rethink their server infrastructure. For many years at Lasoft we were firm believers in choosing AWS; our internal projects were hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the industry-leading cloud platform, but we found our AWS bills climbing uncomfortably high for the resources we actually used.

After careful consideration, we made a strategic decision to migrate our projects from AWS to Hetzner, a European cloud provider known for its affordability. The result? We achieved significant cost savings, increased control, and a leaner infrastructure without compromising performance.

We always share on our blog about positive or negative experiences our team has had to help other businesses navigate the competitive software development market. Let’s explain why we moved to Hetzner and why we encourage our clients to consider doing the same. We will cover the basics of AWS, Google Cloud, and Hetzner, the benefits and potential risks of switching, concrete budget wins, and how Hetzner compares to other cloud solutions (with a comparison table).

Understanding Competition in Cloud Computing Market

Before diving into the benefits and comparisons, let’s start with a brief overview of each platform and market environment.

What is AWS (Amazon Web Services)?

AWS (Amazon Web Services) is among the top 10 world’s chosen cloud computing platforms, according to the Stack Overflow Survey 2025. Launched by Amazon in 2006, AWS has become an industry-leading platform with over 200 services spanning compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, and machine learning. It appears that AWS provides virtually everything you might need to run applications at any scale: virtual servers (EC2 instances), managed databases (RDS), serverless functions (Lambda), content delivery (CloudFront), and other enterprise tools. This broad range of services makes AWS the “golden winner” in cloud computing, supporting SMBs and Fortune 500 companies alike.

Docker Admired

50.4

Docker Desired

63.6

AWS Admired

29.5

AWS Desired

51.9

Kubernetes Admired

27.9

Kubernetes Desired

58

npm Admired

26.8

npm Desired

45

Pip Admired

19.5

Pip Desired

45

Vite Admired

18.3

Vite Desired

61.1

Microsoft Azure Admired

17

Microsoft Azure Desired

49.6

Google Cloud Admired

16.7

Google Cloud Desired

46.1

Cloudflare Admired

16

Cloudflare Desired

57.5

Terraform Admired

15.7

Terraform Desired

51.8

One of AWS’s key advantages is the option to scale and offer a global reach. AWS operates a large number of data center regions, allowing businesses to deploy applications close to users. Its infrastructure allows you to spin up new servers in minutes and shut them down when not needed, only paying for what you use. This on-demand flexibility is ideal for businesses with variable or unpredictable traffic. AWS also offers many advanced capabilities: security controls (e.g. IAM for identity management), high availability across multiple “availability zones” in each region, and integrated services.

However, this variety comes with a price, as AWS’s pricing model is often complex and expensive. It charges separately for compute, storage, and data transfer, often with tiered and variable rates. For example, outbound data (bandwidth) incurs extra fees on AWS – up to about $0.09 per GB, which can stack up for high-traffic and managed services that add their own costs. While AWS can be cost-effective for short-term spikes or very heavy workloads, its pay-per-use pricing can become unpredictable and difficult to budget. Many companies are surprised by large bills due to this complexity and hidden “cost traps” (like charges for IOPS, API calls, or data egress). In short, AWS offers unmatched capabilities, but if you don’t absolutely need all of them, you might find yourself overpaying for capacity and features. This realization led us to look at alternatives for steady, predictable workloads.

Source: getdeploying

What is Google Cloud?

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers a range of infrastructure and platform services, including storage, networking, machine learning, and more. As with Google Search, Gmail, and YouTube, GCP runs on the same global infrastructure that gives it a strong reputation for speed, scalability, and security.

It includes tools for data analytics and machine learning, such as BigQuery, Vertex AI, and TensorFlow, which are useful for applications that handle large amounts of data. Google Cloud offers a robust set of serverless technologies that enable developers to build and deploy enterprise applications without managing server software or infrastructure.

Google Cloud is competitive on pricing, but it’s not always the cheapest. It’s between AWS and Azure in terms of cost, but some data analytics services can be cheaper. One of the things that makes GCP stand out is its discounts. For example, these discounts automatically lower the price of resources the longer you use them. But like other hyperscale providers, billing can be complex and unpredictable when you don’t control your workloads.

Ultimately, Google Cloud is best for firms that want to leverage AI/ML solutions and analytical tools within the Google Workspace ecosystem.  Yet, infrastructure that is sensitive to costs may find GCP’s pricing and complexity too much to handle compared to leaner suppliers like Hetzner.

Source: getdeploying

What is Hetzner?

Hetzner is a well-known European web hosting and cloud provider based in Germany. Founded in 1997, Hetzner has grown a reputation for affordable, high-performance hosting solutions. The company operates primarily out of Germany and Finland for its European cloud, which means data is kept in the EU (a big plus for GDPR compliance). In recent years, Hetzner has also expanded with cloud regions in the USA and Asia (e.g. Ashburn, Virginia, and Singapore), although its global footprint is still far smaller than AWS. Unlike AWS, which offers hundreds of managed services, Hetzner focuses on the fundamentals of infrastructure:

• cloud servers (virtual private servers),
• dedicated physical servers,
• storage solutions,
• networking,
• managed services (managed databases in beta).

Hetzner’s key advantage is low-cost performance, with an emphasis on simplicity. The company uses hardware (fast CPUs, NVMe SSD storage, etc.) while keeping prices significantly lower than major “privilege-class” clouds. Let’s examine our comparison table to consider the pros and cons of the cloud platforms listed above.

Why We Moved from AWS to Hetzner: Key Benefits

Migrating from AWS to Hetzner was not a decision we took lightly. AWS was serving our needs, but we noticed several reasons to consider an alternative. The primary driver was cost savings, but there were other benefits too. Here are the key advantages we found in moving to Hetzner, which might resonate with many businesses facing pricing disappointment from big providers:

• Dramatically Lower Costs: This is the headline benefit. We found that by shifting our workloads to Hetzner, we could run the same infrastructure for significantly less money. We’re not alone in this discovery, many companies report saving on the order of 50% to even 90% by switching from AWS to Hetzner. Source: youcombinator.
  In simple terms, Hetzner offers significantly lower, more predictable pricing for compute, storage, and bandwidth than AWS. For example, a cloud server with 4 vCPUs and 16 GB of RAM costs approximately €11.07 per month on Hetzner, while an equivalent AWS instance (t3.xlarge) costs around $248.20 per month, excluding additional charges for storage and bandwidth.

• Predictable and Transparent Pricing: Hetzner is more cost-effective, with billing that is predictable. You won’t get enormous bills or complex pricing calculators here. Many AWS users have been shocked by unexpectedly large charges due to a service they forgot to turn off or an unnoticed usage spike. With Hetzner, pricing is simple: you pay a fixed monthly price for your VMware configuration size, a fixed price for any extra storage or add-ons, and that’s it.

• Excellent Performance: A common concern is that a lower-cost service may deliver lower performance or reliability. We were pleasantly surprised to find that this is not the case with Hetzner. In fact, Hetzner’s infrastructure performance is on par with or better than AWS for our use cases.

• Simplicity and Control: AWS’s vast ecosystem can introduce complexity. There are multiple ways to do anything, countless managed services, and a web of interdependent configurations. For a lean team or a common project, such tasks can become challenging and unnecessary. Hetzner offers simplicity. We’re essentially building on standard building blocks rather than specialized AWS-only services. Moreover, because we control our technology stack, we experience less vendor lock-in. If we ever needed to move to another provider or back on-premise, it would be easier now that we use open solutions.

In summary, our move to Hetzner has yielded major benefits: cost savings, predictable billing, great performance, simplified infrastructure, and maintained compliance/security.

Risks and Considerations: Is Hetzner Right for Everyone?

While we are very positive about our migration to Hetzner, it’s important to acknowledge that this approach isn’t for any solution. There are scenarios where sticking with AWS or another major cloud might make sense.

• Fewer Managed Services Means You Manage More Yourself: AWS’s strength is its extensive managed services ecosystem. If your architecture heavily relies on AWS-specific services, for example, Lambda functions, DynamoDB, managed Kafka, Athena, etc., migrating to Hetzner systems is not the right solution for you. Moving to Hetzner often means replacing managed services with self-managed or third-party alternatives.

• Limited Global Data Center Coverage: AWS has a vast global network of data centers across many regions (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, South America, etc.), which is useful if you need to host services close to users worldwide or require multi-region redundancy. Hetzner historically has been centered in Europe (Germany and Finland data centers). We recommend evaluating your geographic business needs: if you absolutely need a data center in South America or Australia, Hetzner won’t have one (at least at the time of writing). In our case, most of our clients target Europe or North America, so Hetzner’s locations were sufficient.

• Support and Service Level Agreements: AWS offers enterprise-grade support plans (at additional cost) with 24/7 phone support and real-time monitoring, dedicated technical account managers, and very high uptime SLAs for certain services. Hetzner, by contrast, keeps costs low in part by offering a more basic support model. Hetzner’s customer support is via email/ticket (and in our experience, they are responsive and helpful), but there isn’t a huge support engineering team holding your hand as AWS might for its largest customers.

When It Might Not Be a Fit: To sum up the above, there are certain situations where Hetzner might not be the best:

• If you absolutely need a cloud provider’s advanced managed services (AI platforms, proprietary databases, etc.) and can’t substitute them.
• If you require presence in a niche region that Hetzner doesn’t serve, or ultra-low-latency globally, only a cloud provider like AWS or GCP with its network can provide it.
• If you don’t have any DevOps capacity and don’t plan to acquire any, fully managed platforms (or hiring a managed service provider) are safer.

If you require an enterprise support contract or compliance assurances that only a large provider can offer, consider this option.

Bottom Line

Hetzner offers enormous advantages in cost and control but demands a bit more self-reliance. And if you partner with an experienced team (like us) for the migration and management, many of the perceived risks (like managing services or ensuring uptime) can be handled expertly, allowing you to reap the benefits without the headaches.

At Lasoft, moving our internal projects from AWS to Hetzner has been a game-changer in terms of cost efficiency and control over our infrastructure. We believe many companies, especially small to mid-sized ones or those operating in Europe, can get similar benefits and better resource utilization.

Ready to save costs on your server infrastructure and boost your ROI? Let’s have a conversation about migrating to Hetzner and how Lasoft can make it a success for you.

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