If you are running a WordPress site in Europe and you have looked into offloading your media library, almost every guide you will find defaults to AWS S3 as the assumed destination. S3 is the market leader in object storage, the plugin ecosystem is built around its API, and its documentation is comprehensive. But for European WordPress operators, AWS S3 is frequently not the right choice, and Hetzner Storage Box is frequently the better one by a significant margin on cost, data residency, and simplicity.
Hetzner is a German hosting company with data centers in Nuremberg, Falkenstein, and Helsinki. Their Storage Box product is a dedicated SFTP and Samba storage allocation with flat-rate pricing, no egress fees, and data residency that stays within the European Economic Area by default. For European WordPress operators who care about GDPR data residency, latency to European visitors, or simply paying less, Hetzner Storage Box deserves serious consideration that it rarely gets in English-language WordPress guides.
This guide compares Hetzner Storage Box and AWS S3 across the dimensions that matter for WordPress media storage: cost at different library sizes and traffic levels, setup complexity, GDPR compliance posture, performance for European visitors, and integration with WordPress plugins. The goal is to give European WordPress site owners the comparison that the US-centric guides do not.
Understanding Hetzner Storage Box
Hetzner Storage Box is a dedicated storage allocation product. Unlike object storage services that provide an API-based key-value store, a Storage Box is closer to a network-attached storage volume: you get a fixed allocation (100GB, 500GB, 1TB, 5TB, 10TB, or 20TB), accessible via FTP, SFTP, SCP, Samba, WebDAV, and rsync, with a web-accessible HTTP interface for CDN pull zones.
The pricing model is entirely flat-rate. You pay a fixed monthly fee for your storage tier. There are no egress fees, no API request fees, no per-operation charges, and no minimum retention requirements. The cost is entirely predictable regardless of how much traffic your site receives or how many image requests are served from it via CDN.
AWS S3 pricing for the same storage scenarios
AWS S3 pricing in the EU (Frankfurt, eu-central-1 region) uses three charge components: storage cost per GB stored per month, data transfer out (egress) per GB sent to the internet, and PUT and GET request fees per 1,000 operations.
Real cost comparison at three library and traffic sizes
We calculate total monthly costs for each option using realistic European WordPress site profiles. CDN is added on top of both options using BunnyCDN at €0.01/GB for Europe. The plugin license is amortized at approximately €4/mo.
The Hetzner advantage compounds at scale because Hetzner’s pricing is flat-rate while AWS S3’s effective cost scales with both storage and traffic. The egress fee ($0.09/GB in EU) is the largest driver of the gap. At 800GB monthly transfer, egress alone costs $72/mo on S3 — more than double Hetzner’s entire infrastructure cost. This is not a marginal difference. It is a structural pricing advantage that grows with every additional gigabyte of traffic.
GDPR data residency: what each option provides
For European WordPress operators, data residency is a genuine compliance consideration. Where your media files are stored physically matters for GDPR, particularly if those files include any personal data such as user-uploaded images, customer headshots, or documents associated with individual accounts.
All Hetzner Storage Box products are physically located in Germany (Nuremberg or Falkenstein) or Finland (Helsinki), both EU member states within the EEA. Data stored on a Hetzner Storage Box never leaves the EEA unless you explicitly transfer it elsewhere. Hetzner is a German company operating entirely within the EU regulatory framework. For European operators, this is the simplest possible data residency posture: your data is in Europe, governed by European law, without any Schrems II complications or Standard Contractual Clauses required for data transfer legitimacy.
AWS does offer EU-based regions including Frankfurt (eu-central-1) and Ireland (eu-west-1). When you create an S3 bucket in one of these regions, your data is physically stored in that region. However, AWS is a US company and is subject to US law including CLOUD Act jurisdiction, which means US authorities can potentially compel disclosure of data stored in AWS facilities regardless of physical location. For organizations in regulated industries or handling sensitive personal data, this distinction is meaningful and requires legal assessment. For most WordPress media libraries containing product images and blog photos, this distinction is academic rather than practically significant.
Performance for European visitors
For both Hetzner and S3, the origin server performance for direct image requests is not the relevant metric once CDN is in the picture. When a CDN is configured to pull from either storage source, visitor-facing latency is determined by the CDN edge node, not the origin. A CDN pull from Hetzner Nuremberg and a CDN pull from S3 Frankfurt will both result in similar CDN cache population times, and once cached, both deliver to European visitors from the same CDN edge nodes at the same speed.
Where origin location matters is for cache misses: the first request for an image that is not yet in the CDN cache. For a European visitor accessing a European CDN edge node, the CDN’s request to populate the cache from Hetzner Nuremberg (if the edge node is also in central Europe) will have lower latency than a request to S3 Frankfurt simply due to the physical proximity between Hetzner’s network and many European CDN providers’ infrastructure.
In practice, cache hit rates on a CDN for a stable WordPress media library are typically 90% or higher after the first 24 to 48 hours of operation. The cache miss performance difference between Hetzner and S3 as origins is measurable in milliseconds and has no perceptible impact on user experience. Choose your CDN well and configure appropriate cache headers, and origin location becomes irrelevant to end-user performance.
Setup complexity and WordPress integration
Setting up a Hetzner Storage Box in WP FTP Media takes three credential fields: hostname (e.g. u123456.your-storagebox.de), username, and password. Enable SFTP on port 23 (Hetzner’s SFTP port) or use FTP on port 21. There are no access policies, no bucket configuration, no IAM roles, no API keys to generate and rotate, and no SDK configuration. The entire connection setup takes two minutes for anyone who has ever used FTP. Hetzner also provides a web-accessible HTTP URL for the storage box that functions as the CDN pull origin without any additional configuration.
S3 setup requires creating an IAM user, generating access keys, attaching an appropriate bucket policy, configuring CORS settings for WordPress uploads, selecting the correct region, enabling public access settings (which AWS defaults to blocked for security), configuring a CloudFront distribution or pointing a CDN at the S3 bucket, and managing key rotation. Each step is documented but each step is also a potential source of misconfiguration. For WordPress developers comfortable with AWS, this is manageable. For site owners without AWS experience, it is a meaningful barrier and a common source of support requests.
Which option wins for each European operator profile
Winner: Hetzner Storage Box. Lower cost, simpler setup, EEA data residency, no egress surprises. The flat-rate pricing means you can project costs accurately as your catalog grows. For stores under 1TB in library size, Hetzner is the obvious choice unless you already have deep AWS infrastructure investment.
Winner: Hetzner Storage Box. The 5TB and 20TB tiers at €22.90 and €54.90/mo are dramatically cheaper than equivalent S3 storage plus egress. A large-archive publisher paying €150/mo for S3 can often move to Hetzner for under €35/mo with no performance trade-off visible to end users.
Winner: Hetzner Storage Box. A single Hetzner Storage Box can serve multiple client sites using per-client subdirectories. The flat-rate model means adding clients costs nothing in per-unit storage fees. The EEA residency simplifies client data protection documentation. The SFTP simplicity means non-technical team members can manage the infrastructure without AWS credential management expertise.
Winner: Depends on usage. If you already have IAM roles, CDK stacks, or Lambda functions that interact with S3, the migration overhead and ecosystem disruption may outweigh the cost savings. For teams using AWS broadly, S3 may remain the right choice for media storage even at higher cost. Evaluate the migration cost against the annual savings from the comparison above.
Winner: Hetzner Storage Box for the data residency argument. For regulated industries where EU data sovereignty is not just a preference but a compliance requirement, Hetzner’s status as a German company with infrastructure entirely within the EEA provides the clearest possible compliance posture. Consult your DPO on specifics, but Hetzner’s residency characteristics are simpler to document and defend than the CLOUD Act complications that accompany any US-owned cloud provider.
According to Hetzner’s official Storage Box product page, the service is designed specifically for backup, archiving, and file storage use cases with SFTP and FTP access — exactly the protocol that WP FTP Media uses for WordPress media offloading. The product has been available since 2014 and has a long track record with European hosting and development communities.
For European WordPress operators who have been defaulting to AWS S3 because that is what the English-language guides recommend, the comparison in this guide makes the case for reassessment clearly. WP FTP Media’s native Hetzner Storage Box integration for WordPress supports direct SFTP connection to Hetzner with the same simple credential configuration used for any other SFTP server, making the switch from S3 to Hetzner a one-time 15-minute configuration change that immediately reduces your monthly infrastructure cost.
European sites deserve European storage. Stop paying AWS egress fees.
WP FTP Media connects directly to Hetzner Storage Box via SFTP, routes your WordPress media through a European CDN, and keeps your data within the EEA — all at a fraction of what AWS S3 costs for the same storage and traffic volume.
Got this for a client with a WordPress site in the EU. The pricing breakdown was actually helpful, especially the flat rate part so no surprises when traffic jumps. Worth a look if you're comparing options.
No egress fees is huge!
The BunnyCDN add on for €0.01/GB in Europe makes this setup way faster than I expected my site loads media almost instantly now, even with heavy traffic. Worth the tiny extra cost!
Finally a guide that actually breaks down GDPR residency instead of handwaving it
As a school principal managing our district's WordPress site, those transfer costs were really adding up