Hetzner Storage Box

What Hetzner Storage Box actually is

A Storage Box is a managed online storage volume on Hetzner hardware that you reach over standard file protocols — FTP, FTPS, SFTP, SCP, Samba/CIFS, HTTPS, WebDAV, rsync over SSH, plus native integrations for BorgBackup, Restic, and Rclone. It mounts as a network drive on a desktop, works as a backup target for Borg or Restic, and can be shared out to other users through sub-accounts with per-directory access. Our database row described it as offering NFS access and priced it at €3.99–€19.99/month; the first claim is not on Hetzner's protocol list, and the second range has been wrong for a while. We correct both below.

The important framing: this is not object storage. There is no S3 API, no bucket semantics, no lifecycle rules, and no CDN edge. It is a POSIX-ish file box with a fixed monthly price per capacity tier, and in our view that makes it the best-value backup and file-hosting volume in Europe for people who think in files and filesystems. Hetzner sells a separate S3-compatible Object Storage product for teams that need the object API — a distinction worth keeping straight before you design anything around it.

What you get per box: 10 concurrent connections, 100 sub-accounts (each restricted to an assigned directory), a snapshot quota that scales with the tier (10/20/30/40 snapshots for BX11/21/31/41), the same number of automated snapshots that you can schedule yourself (e.g. Tuesdays at 5 PM), unlimited traffic, free traffic between the Storage Box and Hetzner products in the same location, no minimum contract period, and cancellation effective immediately. Upgrades and downgrades happen in the console without data migration.

Pricing: what you really pay

Four tiers, VAT excluded, exactly as published: BX11 is €3.20/month (€0.0051/hour) for 1 TB, BX21 €10.90/month (€0.0175/hour) for 5 TB, BX31 €20.80/month (€0.0333/hour) for 10 TB, and BX41 €40.60/month (€0.0651/hour) for 20 TB. There is hourly billing with a monthly cap, so a temporary archive box for a migration costs a few cents. The order form shows a one-time setup fee line whose amount did not render in the page text we retrieved — if you are budgeting to the cent, check the configurator before ordering.

Per-terabyte, that is roughly €3.20/TB at the entry tier and about €2/TB at the 20 TB tier, which undercuts almost everything with a comparable protocol set. For reference, the add-on pairing for a dedicated server is the same product: Hetzner lists 1 TB Storage Box at €3.20/month from the dedicated configurator, so the price is consistent across buying paths. Transfer costs are where the design is friendly: traffic is unlimited on every tier, and transfers between a Storage Box and Hetzner Cloud or dedicated products at the same location are free. There is no per-request pricing, no retrieval fee, and no egress surprise — the three things that make hyperscaler storage bills unpredictable.

Compare that honestly against AWS S3 or Glacier-class pricing and the shape of the trade becomes clear: you give up the API, redundancy classes, and global edge, and you pay a flat, small, predictable amount instead. For a 5 TB backup set that is read once a month, the difference between €10.90/month and a hyperscaler bill with retrieval and request charges is not subtle.

Performance & infrastructure

The boxes live in Hetzner's own data centers — BX11 is orderable in Falkenstein (Germany) and Helsinki (Finland), matching Hetzner's German/Finnish storage footprint and GDPR posture. Hetzner documents the underlying durability approach in its FAQ: data sits on a RAID configuration that tolerates several drive failures, per-block checksums detect and correct bit errors, and the data is explicitly not mirrored onto other servers. That last part matters: a Storage Box is one storage system, not a geo-redundant store.

On speed, Hetzner publishes no throughput figures, and we did not benchmark one, so treat any performance claim you read elsewhere as vendor-adjacent. What is knowable from the architecture: access is over SSH/rsync/SFTP-class protocols at up to 10 concurrent connections, snapshots are near-instant images of the box rather than full copies, and the same-location free-traffic rule means a backup pipeline running on a Hetzner server in Falkenstein to a Falkenstein Storage Box never touches the public internet meter. In our experience the bottleneck in such pipelines is almost always the client side or the protocol overhead, not the box. For backup pipelines specifically, the protocol choices matter more than peak throughput: Borg and Restic both speak to Storage Boxes natively, which means encrypted, deduplicated, incremental backups without a proxy layer in between. A nightly Borg job from a Hetzner server in the same location keeps transfer traffic off the public internet entirely, and the snapshot scheduler then gives you a second, cheap recovery point that survives classic client-side mistakes such as a bad rsync run with --delete.

Reliability follows Hetzner's operational record (ISO 27001:2022 certified parks in Nuremberg, Falkenstein, Helsinki, min. 99.9% network availability published at the data center level) rather than a Storage Box SLA — there is no product-level uptime commitment or credit scheme that we could find. Snapshots are the only built-in recovery mechanism; backups off the box are your job.

Where it falls short

The single biggest limitation is the one our database got wrong in the other direction: there is no NFS in Hetzner's published protocol list, and equally no S3 API. If your application speaks S3 — and most modern backup tooling, media pipelines, and cloud-native apps do — you either wrap it (Rclone can bridge S3-style tooling to SFTP/WebDAV-style endpoints, imperfectly) or you buy Hetzner's Object Storage instead. Design reviews that assume S3 semantics here end in rework.

Second, no redundancy beyond one site's RAID. Hetzner says outright that data is not mirrored to other servers. A Storage Box is not a substitute for the 3-2-1 rule; it is one strong copy with snapshots. If Hetzner's Falkenstein storage has a bad day, your snapshots share the same fate. For real resilience you pair two boxes in different locations (Falkenstein and Helsinki), or push a second copy elsewhere.

Third, the fixed interface limits: 10 concurrent connections per box is low for team-wide or multi-server access, there is no per-user quota beyond directory scoping, no built-in encryption at rest that Hetzner documents, no object versioning, and no published performance tiers — so a slow box has no upgrade path except a bigger box. Support is free email support only; there is no phone escalation for this product line.

Finally, the capacity ceiling: 20 TB per box. Larger archives need multiple boxes and client-side stitching, which is exactly where S3-style tooling would have helped.

Who should pick this

We pick Storage Box whenever the job is file-shaped and cost discipline matters: Borg or Restic backup targets for a server fleet, offsite copy of important data in EU jurisdiction, a shared team file drop via Samba/WebDAV, media and document archives that a handful of people mount on demand, and the classic "second copy of the NAS" use case. For anyone running Hetzner infrastructure it is the default off-box backup target — our standard pairing is a Hetzner server plus a BX11 or BX21 in the other German site or Helsinki.

We look elsewhere when the workload needs an S3 API, geographic redundancy, CDN distribution, or high-concurrency access. Object storage buyers should compare our entries in cloud object storage; teams needing managed shared drives with sync clients are closer to Storage Share (Hetzner's Nextcloud-based product) or a SaaS drive. For pure backup economics inside Europe, though, our pick in backup solutions is this one.

Key takeaways

• File-based managed storage over SFTP/SCP/rsync/WebDAV/Samba plus BorgBackup, Restic and Rclone — not S3, and the NFS claim in our database is not supported by Hetzner's protocol list.
• Transparent tier pricing: 1 TB €3.20/month (BX11) up to 20 TB €40.60/month (BX41), hourly billing available, unlimited traffic and free transfers to Hetzner products at the same location.
• 10–40 snapshots included per tier with scheduler; 100 sub-accounts and 10 concurrent connections per box.
• Data lives in Falkenstein (DE) or Helsinki (FI) on RAID with checksums, and is explicitly not mirrored to other servers — snapshots are the only built-in recovery.
• No product SLA, no published throughput, no per-user quotas, 20 TB per-box ceiling.
• Our default backup target for Hetzner workloads and the cheapest predictable file storage we track in Europe.

Sources

• https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box/
• https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box/bx11/
• https://docs.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box/
• https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax41/
• https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/