Amazon CloudFront vs Hetzner Comparison

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Why choose Amazon CloudFront

• Has a free plan (Hetzner does not)
• Higher Scalability score (10/10 vs 6/10)
• Higher Analytics score (7/10 vs 4/10)
• Better fit for enterprise (8/10 vs 4/10)

Why choose Hetzner

• Higher Cost score (9/10 vs 6/10)
• Higher Ease of Use score (6/10 vs 5/10)
• Includes Dedicated Servers, which Amazon CloudFront lacks
• Includes Shared Hosting, which Amazon CloudFront lacks

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Amazon CloudFront

Pros

• The network is very large, with more than 750 PoPs plus over 1,140 PoPs embedded inside ISP networks.
• Data transfer from AWS origins such as S3 and EC2 to CloudFront costs nothing, which lowers costs for workloads hosted on AWS.
• Flat-rate plans start at $15 a month with no overage charges, which makes bills predictable.
• It has strong compliance coverage, including PCI-DSS Level 1, HIPAA, SOC, ISO and FedRAMP Moderate.
• Two tiers of edge compute are available: CloudFront Functions at $0.10 per million invocations and Lambda@Edge for heavier code.

Cons

• G2 and Capterra reviewers report complex configuration and a steep learning curve for people new to AWS.
• Capterra-network reviewers rate customer support poorly, around 3.4 out of 5.
• Flat-rate plans lack some features, such as real-time logs, dedicated IP SSL and continuous deployment, and going over the allowance reduces performance.
• Dedicated IP SSL at $600 a month and Anycast Static IPs at $3,000 a month are expensive extras.
• Users on AWS re:Post and GitHub report cache invalidations that occasionally hang for hours or time out during deploys.

Hetzner

Pros

• Compute is still cheaper than DigitalOcean, Linode or Vultr and several times cheaper than the hyperscalers, even after the 2026 price rises.
• Cloud servers are billed hourly with a monthly cap, and firewalls and private networks are included at no extra cost.
• Infrastructure can be automated through a REST API, a CLI, and integrations for Terraform, Ansible and Kubernetes.
• Hetzner owns its data centers in Germany and Finland, which suits teams that need EU data residency.
• Object storage includes 1 TB of storage and 1 TB of egress for a flat base price.

Cons

• Prices rose by about 30 to 37 percent in April 2026, the second increase in about 18 months.
• US cloud bandwidth allowances were cut sharply in December 2024.
• Reviewers often report strict identity checks that block or close new accounts.
• There is no 24/7 chat support, and some reviewers say support is slow to respond.
• Managed services are limited compared with the hyperscalers, so most of the stack is self-managed.