Storagebox vs Hetzner Storage Box vs Amazon S3: Which Gives You the Most Storage Per Euro?

Storing terabytes of data shouldn't require a spreadsheet to predict your monthly bill. Yet if you've ever priced out backup storage, you've probably compared three very different animals: a classic storage server from a provider like Hetzner, object storage like Amazon S3, and something in between — like our own HostBrr Storageboxes.

In this post we compare all three on the metric that actually matters for bulk storage: the real cost per terabyte per month, including the transfer fees that most comparisons conveniently leave out. We'll also explain why a Storagebox deliberately does not speak the S3 API — and why, for most backup and archival workloads, that's a feature rather than a limitation.

TL;DR — the comparison at a glance

* Competitor pricing as published at the time of writing (July 2026): Hetzner BX11 excl. VAT; Amazon S3 Standard first-50-TB tier in us-east-1 at $0.023/GB/month, internet egress at $0.09/GB. Always check the providers' own pricing pages for current rates.

What is a HostBrr Storagebox?

A Storagebox is a high-capacity hosting environment built on enterprise HDDs in RAID-60, accelerated by an NVMe cache layer. That architecture is exactly why the price per terabyte is so low: mechanical drives for bulk capacity, flash where it counts for speed, and 10 Gbps connectivity for fast transfers in and out.

Unlike a bare storage target, every Storagebox also includes a full hosting stack: the DirectAdmin control panel, LiteSpeed web server, PHP, email, and the Softaculous one-click installer. You can push backups to it over SSH, FTP, FTPS, or rSync — and host a website or a personal cloud app like Nextcloud on the same box.

Price per terabyte: the numbers

Here is the current HostBrr Storagebox lineup and what each plan works out to per terabyte:

The pattern is simple: the more you store, the cheaper each terabyte gets, bottoming out at €2.00 per TB per month on the 16 TB plan. Every plan includes transfer equal to five times its storage, so there is never a surprise line item for downloading your own data.

Storagebox vs Hetzner Storage Box

Hetzner's Storage Box is the closest comparison, and credit where it's due: it's a solid, well-priced product with broad protocol support (SFTP, Samba, WebDAV, rsync, BorgBackup and more) and unlimited traffic. If all you need is a raw storage target in Germany or Finland, it does the job.

The differences show up in what you get for the money:

• Price per TB: Hetzner's entry BX11 gives you 1 TB for €3.20/month (excl. VAT). A HostBrr 1 TB Storagebox is €2.50/month — about 22% less — and drops to €2.00/TB as you scale up.
• It's storage plus hosting: a Hetzner Storage Box is storage only — no control panel, no web hosting, no email. A Storagebox includes DirectAdmin, LiteSpeed, PHP, and Softaculous, so the same box that holds your backups can also serve a website or sync app.
• Locations: Hetzner offers Germany and Finland. HostBrr offers Germany and the USA at identical pricing — useful if your users or servers are on the other side of the Atlantic.
• Connectivity: Storageboxes come with 10 Gbps connectivity, and there is no 10-concurrent-connections cap like on Hetzner's boxes.

Hetzner does offer a couple of things we don't: Samba/CIFS mounting and built-in snapshot scheduling. If those are hard requirements for you, it's the honest recommendation. For everyone else, the Storagebox simply delivers more per euro.

Storagebox vs Amazon S3: an order-of-magnitude difference

Comparing to S3 is where the value gap becomes dramatic. S3 Standard costs about $0.023 per GB per month — roughly $23.55 per terabyte. Storing 16 TB in S3 costs around $377 every month before you've transferred a single byte. The same 16 TB on a HostBrr Storagebox is $35.50 — more than 10× cheaper.

And storage is only half of the S3 bill. Getting data out of S3 costs about $0.09/GB. Restoring a 16 TB archive to your own infrastructure — the entire point of keeping backups — would cost roughly $1,400 in egress fees alone. That single restore costs more than three years of the equivalent Storagebox, where downloading your data is simply included in the plan.

To be fair, S3 earns its price in scenarios Storageboxes don't target: eleven-nines durability across availability zones, effectively infinite scale, per-object lifecycle policies, and deep integration with the AWS ecosystem. If you're building a SaaS platform that serves millions of objects programmatically, S3 (or an S3-compatible service) is the right tool. But if you're storing backups, media libraries, or archives measured in terabytes, you're paying an enormous premium for capabilities you'll never use.

No S3 API — on purpose

Let's be upfront: a Storagebox is not S3-compatible. There's no object storage API, no buckets, no access keys. If your application is hard-wired to speak the S3 protocol, this isn't the product for that job.

For everything else, skipping the S3 API is precisely what keeps things simple:

• No IAM policies or key management. No JSON policy documents, no leaked-credential horror stories, no signature-version debugging. You get a username, strong authentication, and standard protocols.
• No SDK required. Every operating system, NAS, and backup tool made in the last 25 years can already talk FTP, SFTP, or rSync. rsync -avz /data/ user@yourbox: and you're done — the tools you already know just work.
• No per-request billing. S3 charges for every PUT and GET on top of storage and egress. A Storagebox has exactly one number on the invoice.
• Your files stay files. No objects, no metadata layers — browse everything in the DirectAdmin file manager or any FTP client, exactly as you uploaded it.

Who a Storagebox is not for

In the spirit of honest hosting, a Storagebox is the wrong choice if you need root access or custom server software (look at our Cloud VPS or Hybrid Storage VPS instead), if you're running database-heavy production sites (our NVMe webhosting plans are built for that), or if your tooling strictly requires an S3-compatible API.

The bottom line

Per terabyte per month, the field looks like this: Amazon S3 at ~$23.55 plus egress, Hetzner from €3.20, and HostBrr Storageboxes from €2.00–2.50 flat — with a full DirectAdmin hosting stack, 10 Gbps connectivity, and locations in both Germany and the USA thrown in. For backups, archives, media libraries, and personal cloud storage, that's the most storage value per euro we know of.

Every plan is covered by a 7-day money-back guarantee, so you can put those numbers to the test yourself.

Frequently asked questions

Is a HostBrr Storagebox S3-compatible?

No. Storageboxes intentionally use standard protocols — SSH, FTP, FTPS, and rSync — instead of an object storage API. That means no access keys, SDKs, or per-request fees, and compatibility with virtually every backup tool out of the box.

How much does 1 TB of storage cost per month?

A 1 TB HostBrr Storagebox costs €2.50/month, compared to €3.20 for Hetzner's BX11 and roughly $23.55 (plus egress fees) for Amazon S3 Standard. Larger Storagebox plans drop to €2.00 per TB per month.

Are there download or egress fees?

No. Every Storagebox includes transfer equal to five times its storage capacity — the 16 TB plan includes 80 TB of transfer — so restoring your own backups never generates a surprise bill.