EU Sovereignty Score
EU sovereignCloud IaaSHeadquarters: DE

Hetzner: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Hetzner is a hosting company offering cloud servers, dedicated servers, storage and managed hosting. The cloud range includes shared-resource and dedicated-vCPU plans; the dedicated range spans several server lines, including a server auction with refurbished hardware. Storage products include S3-compatible Object Storage and Storage Box for backups, and the company also provides web hosting, domain registration and colocation. It is aimed at developers, small and large businesses and hosting resellers, and is delivered as infrastructure that customers order and manage online.

Hetzner is a privately held German GmbH headquartered in Gunzenhausen, Bavaria, founded in 1997. Its data centre parks are in Nuremberg, Falkenstein (Germany) and Helsinki (Finland). Cloud servers are also available in the United States and Singapore, so the chosen location determines where data is held. The services are not open source. For a European organisation this means a provider under German and EU law; selecting a German or Finnish location keeps data within the EU.

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Sovereignty score
71 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign
  • Jurisdiction SOV-2100
    Headquartered in the EU: European law applies
  • Data residency SOV-3100
    EU-only hosting
  • Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-360
    Key management with a European vendor
  • Freedom from lock-in SOV-640
    Closed source: switching requires data migration
  • Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-655
    Closed source, runtime with the vendor

SOV codes: the matching objective in the European Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework. Official source

How the score is calculated

Facts and evidence

Last checked October 4, 2026
HeadquartersDE (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty modelVendor-hosted (EU)Verified by hand
Data hostingEUVerified by hand
Open-sourceNoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliantYesVendor-stated
Compliance documents2 published, see belowVendor-stated
Hosting signalHETZNER-AS - Hetzner Online GmbH, DE (DE)Technically measured
CategoryCloud IaaS
TypeProduct
Websitehetzner.com ↗

The hosting signal shows the network that serves the vendor's website, often a CDN, and not necessarily where the service or your data is hosted. How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Hetzner

The European alternatives to Hetzner come from our knowledge base of over 6,200 vendors. We only list vendors headquartered in the EU or the EEA; fully European-owned vendors rank before vendors with a foreign owner. For each alternative you see the country, the open-source status and a short description.

Score per alternative: 0 = high exposure, 100 = sovereign

84 European Cloud IaaS vendors are in the catalogue. View the whole category · Submit an alternative · View category on the map

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Why digital sovereignty matters with Hetzner

Hetzner is headquartered in DE and therefore falls under European law: the GDPR, NIS2 and the Data Act. No foreign legislation can compel access to your data.

Data is hosted exclusively in the EU, so Hetzner scores best on data residency.

Hetzner is closed source and hosted by the vendor. The encryption keys and the runtime sit with the vendor and switching requires data migration. Ask about bring-your-own-key, export options and open standards.

What this means for your organisation depends on your whole stack and context. The free assessment weighs Hetzner together with your other vendors and gives a total score, a heatmap and the main risk drivers.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best European alternative to Hetzner?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Hetzner include 1984 Hosting, acens and Aiven. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Hetzner?

Our list of EU alternatives to Hetzner is mostly commercial options. Browse the category on the map for open-source choices.

Is Hetzner GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

Hetzner is headquartered in DE (EU) and hosts data in EU. That makes Hetzner an EU-sovereign choice in its own right; the EU alternatives on this page are comparable European tools.

Details and sources

Verified by handHeadquarters, owner, hosting locations and licence have been checked by us against public sources. Free of charge and for every vendor, not a paid label. Nothing in this knowledge base is taken over automatically. Last checked on October 4, 2026.

Sources

Public sources used in the latest check of this record.

Compliance evidence

The links below point to the vendor's own public documents. We only record what we found: a missing link means "not found publicly", not "not compliant".

Subprocessor list
hetzner.com/legal/terms-and-conditions/
EU hosting documented
hetzner.com/cloud

Provenance of the links above:Vendor-stated

Links checked on September 21, 2026.

Digital sovereignty in Cloud IaaS

Cloud IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service — virtual machines, storage, networking. In this category the choice of vendor determines who has legal access to your data, where that data lives and how easily you can switch later.

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8 European alternatives to Hetzner — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score