If you’re shopping for S3-compatible object storage in Europe, a few names come up quickly — Hetzner, Wasabi, Cloudflare R2, and the hyperscalers’ EU regions. They’re all reasonable options, and the right one depends less on brand than on how you use storage. Here’s an honest way to compare, and where a smaller managed provider fits.
The main options at a glance
- Hetzner Object Storage — inexpensive, EU-based, S3-compatible. A newer offering with a narrower feature set; a solid low-cost choice if you mainly need buckets and don’t need advanced features or hands-on support.
- Wasabi — flat, cheap storage with a no-egress model, available in EU regions. Great for backups and archives; fewer advanced features than a hyperscaler.
- Cloudflare R2 — zero egress, tightly integrated with Cloudflare’s edge. Best when you’re already serving through Cloudflare.
- AWS S3 / GCS / Azure (EU regions) — the deepest feature sets and EU data centers, but with egress fees, per-request pricing and data governed by the vendor’s home jurisdiction.
- Managed European providers — S3-compatible storage kept in the EU with no egress fees and human support; the middle ground between DIY-cheap and hyperscaler-complex.
How to actually choose between them
Don’t compare on storage price alone. Score each on the factors that bite:
- Egress. Read-heavy? A no-egress provider (Wasabi, R2, or a managed EU provider) usually wins over a per-GB-egress hyperscaler.
- Data residency & jurisdiction. “EU region” isn’t always the same as “EU company under EU law.” If jurisdiction matters for your compliance, confirm both.
- Feature depth. Need multipart, versioning, lifecycle, presigned URLs? Test them — support varies between providers.
- Support. Do you get a human, or a forum? For business-critical data this is often the deciding factor.
- Exit cost. All of these speak S3, so switching should be cheap — verify there’s no egress penalty on the way out.
Where Internetport fits
We built Internetport’s object storage as a European alternative that combines the things people like about the options above: S3-compatible (so your existing tools and any migration just work), no egress fees (like Wasabi and R2), hosted in our own EU data center under GDPR, and backed by real human support rather than only a forum. There’s a free 10 GB tier, so the fairest test is simple — point your tools at us and at whatever you’re considering, and compare on your real workload.
For the full evaluation framework, see our guide to choosing an object storage provider, or the four categories of object storage vendors to place each option.