Hetzner Over Big Cloud

Hosting small to medium-sized Umbraco and custom .NET applications on a tight budget can be challenging. The big cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) are often the default choice—“nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM,” as the saying goes, updated now to cloud. However, bigger isn’t always better for every use case. After over a decade of hosting .NET applications on Hetzner, it’s clear that this German provider offers unique advantages. In this post, we’ll highlight five key reasons why Hetzner can be a better choice than AWS, Azure, or GCP for your small or mid-sized .NET apps, focusing on cost savings, performance, and data privacy, along with scalability and technical control.

1. Cost Savings: Big Performance on a Small Budget

One of the most compelling reasons to choose Hetzner is the significant cost savings. Hetzner's pricing is straightforward and significantly more affordable than the big three cloud providers:

• Lower Monthly Bills: For a moderately sized .NET web application, it's not uncommon to spend around €200/month on Azure or AWS for the necessary VM, storage, and bandwidth. In contrast, the same app can run on Hetzner for as little as €20–€40/month – roughly 5 to 10 times cheaper. This means substantial savings annually, especially important for small businesses and startups.
• Affordable Bandwidth: Cloud providers often charge eye-watering rates for data egress (outbound data transfer). In fact, outbound traffic on Azure can be 100× more expensive than on Hetzner. Hetzner includes generous traffic allowances and low overage fees, so your hosting bill won't skyrocket due to a spike in users or data downloads.
• No Hidden "Enterprise" Charges: With AWS/Azure, certain features like load balancers or additional IP addresses often incur extra costs. Hetzner's pricing is refreshingly transparent – while you might pay a small fee for add-ons like extra IPs or a load balancer, the base costs of compute and storage remain low. There's no need for complex savings plans or long-term contracts to get a reasonable price.

Bottom line: If budget is a primary concern, Hetzner lets you achieve the performance you need at a fraction of the cost. You can reinvest the savings into your business rather than burning it on cloud bills. For small and medium applications, every euro matters, and Hetzner's cost efficiency is a game-changer.

2. Performance: Low Latency and High-Speed Infrastructure

Cost aside, Hetzner also delivers where it counts: performance. Hetzner’s infrastructure provides excellent speed and responsiveness:

• Low Latency for Europe: In EU area Hetzner’s primary data centers are in Germany and Finland. If your users are in Europe, hosting in these locations means minimal latency ensuring snappy load times for your customers.
• High-Speed Network & Hardware: Hetzner is known for using modern, high-performance hardware. Their servers typically come with fast NVMe SSD storage, ample RAM, and reliable Intel/AMD CPUs. The network connectivity is excellent (often gigabit speeds or higher), which means your .NET applications can handle requests quickly and serve content without bottlenecks. Many users report that apps feel faster on Hetzner compared to equivalently priced instances on big cloud platforms.
• Efficient Resource Usage: With Hetzner, you often get dedicated resources (especially with their Cloud VPS or dedicated servers offerings). There’s less overhead from multi-tenant “platform” services. You have the freedom to optimize your server environment for .NET or Umbraco – enabling features or performance tweaks at the OS level that might not be possible on a managed platform-as-a-service. This efficiency can lead to better throughput and reliability for your application.

In short, Hetzner provides the speed and horsepower needed to run your sites and APIs smoothly. Users in your target region enjoy quick responses, and you’re not sacrificing performance despite paying less. For small and medium apps, you get a responsive experience without the enterprise price tag.

3. Data Privacy: GDPR Compliance and Trust by Design

Data privacy and sovereignty have become critical considerations, especially for European businesses. Here, Hetzner's identity as a German company gives it a significant edge over U.S.-based cloud providers:

• Strict GDPR Adherence: As a company based in Germany, Hetzner is built from the ground up to comply with strict European Union GDPR regulations. Customer data is stored in Europe under robust privacy laws, and Hetzner's policies reflect the high standards of EU data protection. In practical terms, this means you and your users can have greater confidence that personal data handled by your application is treated lawfully and carefully.
• EU Data Sovereignty: Hosting on AWS, Azure, or GCP – even in their EU regions – still means trusting companies headquartered in the U.S. There are concerns (especially after rulings like Schrems II) about U.S. authorities potentially accessing data under laws like the CLOUD Act. With Hetzner, those worries are minimized. Your data is on European soil, managed by a European entity, adding an extra layer of assurance that foreign government access or surveillance is less of a risk.
• Privacy Culture: Beyond just legal compliance, Hetzner's culture values privacy. It's in their DNA as a German tech company to prioritize user data protection at every level – from physical security in their data centers to transparent terms of service. For businesses that handle sensitive user information, this focus on privacy and security can be a decisive factor. You're not just complying with privacy laws; you're choosing a host that actively champions them.

Choosing Hetzner means you're taking data privacy seriously. You can confidently tell your clients or users that their data is stored securely in Europe, under some of the world's strongest privacy regulations. In an era of heightened privacy awareness, this is a significant trust advantage over the big U.S. clouds.

4. Scalability & Flexibility: Grow on Your Own Terms

A common concern is whether a smaller provider like Hetzner can handle growth and scale. The assumption is that "if we become the next Facebook, we'd need the big cloud." While planning for success is great, paying for massive scale before you need it isn't. Here's why Hetzner offers the scalability and flexibility most small/medium apps require:

• Scale as You Need To: With Hetzner, you can start with a single modest server and seamlessly upgrade or add more servers as your traffic grows. Hetzner's Cloud Console lets you spin up new instances in minutes. Need more RAM or CPU for your VM? You can often resize to a larger instance or add resources on the fly just like with Big cloud. For many web applications, this on-demand scaling is more than sufficient to handle growth.
• No Upfront Over-Provisioning: Big cloud platforms often entice you to architect for hypothetical scale from day one – which can lead to paying for far more capacity than you use. In contrast, with Hetzner you can avoid over-provisioning. You're not locked into expensive multi-year reserved instances or high-tier services just in case of a traffic surge. This means lower costs now, and you only spend more when your business truly expands.
• Migration is Always an Option: Let's say you do hit it big and need ultra-large-scale services or global load balancing across continents – you can always integrate cloud provider services later or migrate parts of your workload. As the original saying goes, having "problems" like too much traffic is a good problem! But until you reach that point, why burn budget on the off-chance? You might find that Hetzner can take you quite far; and even if one day you transition to AWS/Azure for specific needs, scaling up or moving over isn't a huge technical challenge, it's just a matter of cost and planning. In the meantime, you've saved a lot of money and maintained control.

For most small and medium .NET and Umbraco applications, Hetzner's scalability is more than adequate. You gain the flexibility to grow at your own pace. Rather than paying a premium now "just in case" of future growth, you invest gradually as your user base expands. This approach is often a smarter strategy for businesses that need to watch costs while still being prepared for success.

5. Technical Control & Setup: Full Control for Optimized Environments

Developers and system administrators often appreciate the full control that Hetzner provides. Unlike many managed services on AWS/Azure where you’re abstracted away from the server, Hetzner gives you the keys to the kingdom:

• Root Access & Custom Configuration: When you deploy a server on Hetzner (be it a cloud VM or a dedicated server), you get full administrator/root access. You decide the OS (Linux or Windows), configure firewall rules, install exactly the software you need, and tune the environment specifically for your .NET application or Umbraco site. This level of control means you can optimize performance and security to a degree not possible on restricted platforms. For example, you could enable specific IIS optimizations for an Umbraco CMS or configure custom caching mechanisms at the server level – it’s up to you.
• Freedom from Vendor Lock-In: With the big providers, you might end up relying on proprietary services (like Azure App Services, AWS RDS, or GCP-specific APIs) that make migrating out more complex. In contrast, a Hetzner server is a standard environment – you’re running your own instance of Windows/IIS or Linux/.NET runtime, using open-source or self-managed tools. This keeps your architecture portable and avoids being stuck with one vendor’s ecosystem.
• Better Debugging & Monitoring: Full server control also means you have complete visibility into your system. You can inspect logs without restriction, adjust system settings, and use any monitoring tools you prefer. If something goes wrong, you’re not waiting on cloud support or digging through abstracted logs – you can directly access and fix it. For a developer or DevOps engineer, this can drastically reduce the time to troubleshoot issues and improve reliability.
• Flexibility in Setup: Need a specific version of the .NET framework or a custom library installed at the OS level? Want to run a secondary service (like a Redis cache or a custom image processing service) alongside your web app on the same machine? With Hetzner, that’s entirely your call. This flexibility lets you tailor the server to your application’s needs, rather than fitting your app into a one-size-fits-all PaaS box.

For those who want to squeeze out every bit of performance or customize their hosting environment, Hetzner is ideal. You have the technical freedom to build and run your application your way. This level of control empowers developers to create highly optimized and stable environments for their .NET applications, which can be a huge advantage for complex or resource-intensive apps.

Conclusion

When it comes to hosting small and medium-sized Umbraco or custom .NET applications, Hetzner offers a compelling mix of affordability, performance, and peace of mind. You’ll save on costs without sacrificing speed or reliability. Your data will be hosted under strict European privacy standards, easing compliance worries. And you retain the flexibility and control to scale and configure your environment as you see fit.

While AWS, Azure, and GCP have their strengths and are sometimes the right choice for very large or specialized projects, they often come with complexity and costs that smaller projects don’t need to bear. Hetzner proves that you can get enterprise-grade hosting quality on a startup budget. Before defaulting to the big names for your next .NET project, consider these five reasons and give Hetzner a look – it might just be the better fit for your needs.