Hetzner vs AWS vs Netcup: Hosting Comparison for Austrian SMEs

Three hosts, three worlds. Hetzner, AWS and Netcup are the most common candidates for SME hosting in the DACH region. The price and feature differences are larger than many assume — this comparison is based on the publicly available offerings (as of April 2026).

The three at a glance

Hetzner: German company since 1997, data centers in Nuremberg, Falkenstein, Helsinki, Ashburn and Hillsboro. Price-performance is considered a benchmark. AWS:Amazon's cloud, globally available, the largest service catalog on the market, but significantly more expensive. Netcup: German host from Karlsruhe with data centers in Nuremberg and Vienna, very cheap, solid hardware, smaller service range.

Price comparison: entry-level plan per provider

As a reference I take the smallest production-viable instance from each provider (2–4 vCPU, 4–8 GB RAM). Prices from the official price list in April 2026:

• Hetzner Cloud CPX22: 2 vCPU (Shared AMD EPYC), 4 GB RAM, 80 GB NVMe SSD, 20 TB traffic included — €7.99/month (net, monthly price cap on hourly billing).
• Netcup Root Server RS 1000 G12: 4 dedicated cores (AMD EPYC 9645), 8 GB DDR5 ECC RAM, 256 GB NVMe SSD, unlimited traffic — from €8.74/month (12-month contract, incl. VAT).
• AWS EC2 t3.medium (Frankfurt): 2 vCPU (burstable), 4 GB RAM — compute $0.0447/hour (≈ $32.63/month at 730h) + EBS gp3 80 GB (≈ €7.51/month at €0.09394/GB). Total approx. €35–40/month excluding egress.

Watch out for AWS data transfer: after the 100 GB/month free allowance, outbound traffic costs $0.09/GB. 1 TB of egress adds ~$84/month, 10 TB already ~$891/month. Hetzner's CPX22 includes 20 TB of traffic, and Netcup states unlimited traffic (fair-use clause).

Hetzner: strong all-round package for SMEs

Hetzner Cloud's CPX plans use AMD EPYC (Genoa) processors on shared vCPUs, with NVMe storage and a mature REST API. The interface is cleanly structured, support is available in German and English. The GDPR data processing agreement is stored in the customer portal and can be retrieved with one click.

Well suited for classic web workloads: websites, shops, APIs, smaller databases, container setups with Docker or k3s. Upgrades to larger plans via reboot; snapshots and backups are available as paid add-ons.

AWS: when you actually need the service catalog

AWS plays to its strengths when you need managed services you don't want to run yourself: RDS for managed databases (incl. Multi-AZ), Lambda for event-driven workloads, S3 with documented 11-9s durability (99.999999999%). The global edge reach via CloudFront is unmatched.

The flip side: costs scale non-linearly. Egress traffic, NAT gateway hours and managed database instances in particular can inflate a project quickly. For pure website/shop workloads AWS is usually more expensive than Hetzner — without the SME actually benefiting from the extra services.

Netcup: the price-performance specialist

Netcup offers root servers with comparatively a lot of hardware per euro: the RS 1000 G12 provides dedicated CPU cores (AMD EPYC 9645), DDR5 ECC RAM and NVMe storage — specifications that only appear in higher-tier Hetzner plans. Locations Nuremberg and Vienna are ideal for DACH projects.

Caveats: the customer portal feels older than Hetzner's, the API is less comfortable to work with, and most product tariffs come as 12-month contracts. For short-lived workloads or dynamic scaling Hetzner's hourly billing is more flexible.

Performance and locations

For users in DACH, all three providers have latency-friendly European data centers (Nuremberg, Falkenstein, Vienna, Frankfurt each within ~20 ms round-trip). Real latency depends more on the end user's ISP and peering than on the host itself.

GDPR and data sovereignty

Hetzner and Netcup are German companies with EU data centers — GDPR data processing agreements are standard, no CLOUD Act exposure. AWS does offer EU regions (Frankfurt, Dublin, Stockholm, Milan, Paris, Zurich) but remains a US corporation. For sensitive data categories (health, HR, financial data) an explicit legal review is recommended — especially in light of the Schrems rulings and the current EU-US Data Privacy Framework.

Migration and vendor lock-in

A classic Linux stack (Nginx, PostgreSQL, Node.js, Docker) usually moves between Hetzner and Netcup within hours. AWS migrations depend heavily on how deep you've gone into proprietary services: SQS, DynamoDB, Cognito and Lambda can mean multi-month rewrites. If you want to avoid lock-in, stick to standard Linux services.

Recommendation by use case

Hetzner: default choice for SME websites, shops and APIs. Hourly billing, solid API, modern hardware.

Netcup: when you want more hardware per euro and a 12-month contract is acceptable — e.g. long-running database servers or staging systems.

AWS: when specific managed services are needed (RDS Multi-AZ, Lambda, SageMaker, EventBridge) or global edge reach matters.

No host fits every case. But for classic SME web projects, the price gap between European hosts and AWS is large enough that a detailed TCO check is worth the effort.