Microsoft Azure vs Hetzner

Microsoft Azure is strongest for enterprises. Hetzner is strongest for budget-conscious developers. Here's how they stack up on price, uptime, and support.

Feature	Microsoft Azure	Hetzner
Starting price	$0.01/mo	$0.6/mo
Best for	Enterprises Windows/.NET workloads Hybrid cloud Regulated industries	Budget-conscious developers EU-based workloads Self-hosters High-performance dedicated servers
Stated uptime SLA	99.99%	99.9%
Storage	SSD	NVME
Regions	60	6
Managed Kubernetes	Yes	No
Support channels	Ticket, Phone (paid plans), Docs, Community forum	Ticket, Docs, Community forum
Compliance	SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, FedRAMP, GDPR, PCI DSS	GDPR, ISO 27001
Hidden costs to watch for	Windows Server VMs carry a license surcharge on top of the Linux compute rate Outbound bandwidth billed above 100 GB/month pooled free tier, tiered by volume Premium SSD/Ultra Disk IOPS and throughput billed separately from disk capacity Blob Storage Cool/Cold/Archive tiers bill a minimum 128 KiB per object and impose early-deletion penalties (90/180 day minimums) Archive tier retrieval fees are notably high ($6.50/10,000 read ops) AKS Standard tier control plane fee ($0.10/hr per cluster) on top of node VM costs	Setup fees on dedicated servers (e.g. AX42/AX102 setup fee raised from 39 EUR to 79 EUR in 2026; AX162-R/S setup fee raised from 79 EUR to 159 EUR) Traffic overage billed per GB beyond included pool (20 TB EU, as little as 0.5-1 TB in USA/Singapore regions for some lines) CPX and CCX cloud lines saw very large price increases in the 15 June 2026 adjustment (CCX +2.1x to +2.73x, CPX +2.4x to +2.75x monthly in EU); CX and CAX rose a smaller ~1.3x-1.4x Load Balancer and Volume prices separately increased ~36-39% in an April 2026 adjustment VAT excluded from all listed prices
Last reviewed	2026-07-18	2026-07-18