Alternative to Amazon S3: Hetzner offers object storage

With "Object Storage", the internet service provider Hetzner is now offering object storage as part of its product portfolio. The storage solution is compatible with Amazon S3 and is designed to offer GDPR-compliant data handling. Customers can book object storage from one terabyte in the Falkenstein, Nuremberg and Helsinki data centers. In addition to a basic price, billing is based on usage.

Hetzner storage cheaper than Amazon S3

Hetzner charges a monthly net price of 4.99 euros per terabyte. This price includes an outgoing data volume of 1 TB; additional traffic costs one euro per terabyte per month. Incoming and internal data traffic within the EU-Central network zone as well as calls via the S3 interface are included without limitation. For comparison: Amazon charges around 23 euros per month for 1 TB of S3 object storage in a German data center.

If the storage and traffic volumes used exceed the booked quota, Hetzner charges for the additional usage on an hourly basis. The charge is 0.0067 euros per terabyte and hour. Each object in Hetzner's storage can be up to 5 TB in size. There is no minimum size for objects, but smaller objects are always billed at 64 kilobytes. 50 million objects are allowed per bucket as long as the total size of 100 TB is not exceeded. Users can create a total of 100 buckets.

Hetzner recommends access via S3-compatible tools

With the Cloud Console, Hetzner offers a web interface for rudimentary administration tasks. There, buckets can be moved between projects, provided with a protection label and S3 access data can be generated. The S3 interface is intended for all other tasks, allowing customers to use compatible tools to access the actions and data types available in S3 as standard. Such programs include MinIO Client, AWS CLI or S3cmd. Hetzner recommends using these tools, but also allows direct access to the S3 API. Users can create a maximum of 200 S3 credentials across all projects.

Object storage structures the uploaded data in objects. In addition to the actual content, the objects have a unique key for identification, rights attributes and metadata. In addition to system-defined information, such as file size, users can define their own metadata. Hetzner allows up to 8 kilobytes of metadata per object. Metadata helps users to manage and search through large amounts of data. Interested parties can find the offer on the Hetzner website.

(sfe)