AWS RDS vs Hetzner

AWS RDS and Hetzner represent two entirely different philosophies for database hosting. AWS RDS keeps entry costs between $11.68 and $116.07/mo, providing a very tight 1 GB to 8 GB of RAM. In contrast, Hetzner offers significantly more hardware for your money, with pricing ranging from $7.09 to $51.59/mo while delivering between 2 GB and 32 GB of RAM. While AWS locks you into a restrictive 100 GB egress window, Hetzner includes a massive 20000 GB of bandwidth, making the latter far better suited for data-heavy applications that frequently move large result sets.

• Hetzner’s storage overage rate is $0.06/GB, which is half the $0.12/GB charged by AWS RDS.
• AWS RDS charges a modest $0.09/GB for bandwidth overages, whereas Hetzner penalizes excessive egress at a steep $1.19/GB.
• Hetzner provides up to 360 GB of disk storage in its higher tiers, while AWS RDS typically requires separate provisioned storage volumes that add complexity to your monthly billing.
• Memory density on Hetzner’s AMD EPYC-based dedicated instances far exceeds the standard RDS tier, allowing for larger buffer pools without hitting the price ceiling seen on AWS.

Choosing between these two comes down to where you expect your costs to originate. If your application is egress-heavy, the AWS $0.09/GB rate is a safety net against the massive $1.19/GB penalty found at Hetzner. However, for compute-bound workloads needing high RAM to cache large indexes, Hetzner provides significantly more headroom per dollar. AWS RDS remains the standard for teams that need built-in point-in-time recovery and automated patching, while Hetzner is the pragmatic choice for those who prefer bare-metal performance and don't mind managing their own database maintenance scripts.