EU Sovereignty Score
EU sovereignWeb HostingHeadquarters: DE

Hetzner Webhosting: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Hetzner Webhosting is the shared web hosting offering of the German company Hetzner Online GmbH. The plans include unlimited mailboxes, MariaDB, Postgres and Redis databases, a one-click WordPress installer, Varnish caching, cron jobs and support for PHP and CGI. Management is done through the konsoleH control panel. Hetzner also lists daily backups, virus scans and SSL encryption. It is a commercial product; the software is not open source.

Hetzner Online was founded in 1997 by Martin Hetzner, who serves as its managing director, and is headquartered in Gunzenhausen, Bavaria. According to Hetzner, the web hosting runs on servers in its own data centres in Nuremberg, Germany, which are powered entirely by renewable energy. The sources consulted name no parent company outside the EU. For a European organisation this means the data remains in the EU under German and European law.

See the 8 European alternatives ↓Assess your stack with Hetzner Webhosting pre-selected
MastodonLinkedInBlueskyXEmail
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 9, 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
Web Hosting
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 Webhosting

The European alternatives to Hetzner Webhosting 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

75 European Web Hosting vendors are in the catalogue. View the whole category · Submit an alternative · View category on the map

Is Hetzner Webhosting one of many dependencies?

Score your whole stack in about three minutes. Free, no account needed.

Assess your stack →View a sample report (opens in a new tab)

Why digital sovereignty matters with Hetzner Webhosting

Hetzner Webhosting 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 Webhosting scores best on data residency.

Hetzner Webhosting 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 Webhosting 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 Webhosting?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Hetzner Webhosting include Alfahosting, ALL-INKL.COM and Antagonist. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Hetzner Webhosting?

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

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

Hetzner Webhosting is headquartered in DE (EU) and hosts data in EU. That makes Hetzner Webhosting 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 9, 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 Web Hosting

Web Hosting: Web hosting providers — shared hosting, managed hosting, domain registration. 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.

Also in this category

See all →
Open in the alternatives dashboardMissing a vendor? Submit itAre you this vendor? You can also become a sponsor on the Web Hosting page — with no effect on your score
8 European alternatives to Hetzner Webhosting — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score