Amazon CloudFront vs Hetzner Cloud Comparison

A

Why choose Amazon CloudFront

• Has a free plan (Hetzner Cloud does not)
• Higher Scalability score (10/10 vs 6/10)
• Higher Analytics score (7/10 vs 4/10)

H

Why choose Hetzner Cloud

• Higher Cost score (8/10 vs 6/10)
• Higher Ease of Use score (7/10 vs 5/10)
• Includes Dedicated Servers, which Amazon CloudFront lacks

A

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.

H

Hetzner Cloud

Pros

• EU servers include 20 TB of traffic, and extra traffic costs only €1 per TB.
• Hourly billing capped at a monthly price, with no contracts.
• A full API and CLI plus Terraform and Ansible integrations make automation straightforward.
• Stateful firewalls and private networks come at no extra cost.
• Still cheaper per spec than DigitalOcean in independent 2026 comparisons.

Cons

• Prices rose twice in 2026, with CPX and CCX new orders up by as much as about 176%.
• Cost-Optimized types are listed as unavailable, and provisioning was limited for new customers from June 2026.
• Many users report account verification failures and suspensions with little explanation.
• No managed database, serverless or managed Kubernetes products.
• US and Singapore servers include far less traffic than EU servers.