Google Cloud (GCP) vs Hetzner

GCP and Hetzner represent two ends of the infrastructure spectrum. GCP prices their entry-level instances starting at $7.11/mo for a modest 1 GB of RAM and 10 GB of storage, scaling up to $230.00/mo for 16 GB of RAM and 200 GB of disk. Hetzner maintains a significantly more aggressive cost structure, with entry points at $7.09/mo providing 2 GB of RAM and 40 GB of storage, reaching up to $51.59/mo for a massive 32 GB of RAM and 360 GB of NVMe-backed storage. While GCP utilizes proprietary virtualization stacks, Hetzner runs their instances on high-performance AMD EPYC hardware, effectively delivering more vCPU cores—up to 16 vCPU—for a fraction of the cost found in the public cloud.

• Hetzner provides a flat 20000 GB of monthly egress, effectively eliminating overage anxiety, whereas GCP charges $0.09/GB for transfers once the base allocation is exhausted.
• Disk overages are cheaper on Hetzner at $0.06/GB compared to the $0.08/GB rate charged by GCP for persistent block storage.
• Memory density per dollar favors Hetzner heavily, as their $51.59/mo tier provides double the RAM of a GCP instance costing nearly five times as much.
• Hetzner includes 2 vCPU cores at the entry level, while GCP restricts base instances to a single 1 vCPU core.

GCP offers a global network presence that appeals to organizations requiring low-latency distribution across many international regions. However, for raw compute-heavy tasks that do not rely on a global proprietary network, Hetzner delivers superior hardware specifications and simplified billing by removing bandwidth overage risks entirely. The hardware performance on Hetzner’s dedicated NVMe storage tiers remains the standard for teams prioritizing raw throughput over the complex ecosystem features found in large public cloud environments.