Hetzner vs Neon DB

• Hetzner provides a massive 20000 GB egress allowance, while Neon restricts users to a baseline of 5 GB, making Neon far more expensive for data-heavy applications.
• Storage overages at Hetzner are priced at $0.06/GB, whereas Neon charges a significantly higher $0.35/GB for exceeding their smaller storage caps.
• Hetzner’s bandwidth overage is punitive at $1.19/GB, contrasting sharply with Neon’s more reasonable $0.10/GB rate for extra network transfer.
• Neon scales memory up to 224 GB for specialized Postgres workloads, while Hetzner tops out at 32 GB of RAM per instance.

Hetzner operates as a traditional IaaS provider, delivering raw virtual machines that rely on AMD EPYC processors and high-performance NVMe storage. Because they provide a flat, high-volume bandwidth allowance, they are the standard choice for hosting web servers or self-managed database clusters where you pay a predictable monthly fee between $7.09 and $51.59. You are responsible for the entire software stack, meaning you carry the burden of configuring Postgres or other services yourself.

Neon functions as a specialized serverless Postgres backend. It is built for developers who want to avoid the maintenance of underlying operating systems or database tuning. While the price range of $0.00 to $69.00 allows for a free tier entry point, the storage and egress cost structure is optimized for small, stateful data rather than massive file transfers. If your application requires intensive read-heavy traffic or massive data egress, the 5 GB limit on Neon will trigger unexpected costs very quickly.

Choosing between these two depends on whether you need a general-purpose compute environment with massive bandwidth headroom or a specialized, managed database layer that handles memory scaling for complex queries automatically. Hetzner handles the hardware layer for general workloads, whereas Neon abstracts the database maintenance at the cost of higher storage and transfer premiums.