EU sovereignStorage & BackupHeadquarters: DE

Hetzner: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Hetzner is a hosting and cloud provider offering dedicated servers, cloud servers, web hosting and storage services. Its storage offering includes Object Storage, Storage Boxes and Storage Share. Object Storage is S3-compatible and keeps data in buckets on a Ceph cluster; according to the documentation it is mainly suited to write-once-read-many workloads such as automatic backups and sharing data through public URLs. Storage Boxes provide backup storage reachable from PCs, smartphones and tablets. The services are consumed as hosted offerings through the Hetzner Console and the S3 API.

Hetzner Online GmbH is headquartered in Gunzenhausen, Germany, and operates data centre parks in Falkenstein and Nuremberg (Germany) and Tuusula (Finland). Object Storage is available in Falkenstein, Nuremberg and Helsinki, so within the EU. The product is not open source. For organisations that want to keep data within the EU, it is relevant that both the company and the Object Storage locations are in Europe.

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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

Headquarters	DE (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty model	Vendor-hosted (EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting	EUVerified by hand
Open-source	NoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant	YesVendor-stated
Hosting signal	HETZNER-AS - Hetzner Online GmbH, DE (DE)Technically measured
Category	Storage & Backup
Type	Product
Website	hetzner.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 6,800 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

32 European Storage & Backup 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 Acronis, Atempo and Bacula Systems. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Hetzner?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Hetzner include Bacula Systems, Bareos and BorgBackup. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

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".

No public compliance evidence has been recorded for this vendor yet. Do you know its DPA or subprocessor list? Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Digital sovereignty in Storage & Backup

Storage & Backup: Business storage, backup solutions, object storage and data recovery. 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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