Azure VM pricing vs Hetzner/TIMi pricing

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We often get asked which servers offer the best performance and value for analytics. To answer, we’ve compared Azure (representing the “US clouds”) with Hetzner in a detailed analysis.
From the Azure documentation available here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/sizes/overview

… the virtual machines available inside Azure are classified in 9 different “Series”:

Here are the processors available in each of these series:

If we search the performances for each of these processors on cpubenchmark.net, we get (the higher the “Single thread rating”, the better the CPU):

Inside Azure, the processor with the highest speed is thus AMD EPYC 7V12 (7443) with a score of 2907: These processors are only available inside the HBv2-series.

We’ll now make a pricing simulation for a virtual machines based on a the H series.

We start here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/vm-selector/

Here are the configuration steps for the Wizard on Azure:

1. Select the “H series” for high performance computing load:

2. We want a machine with at least 32 cores and 64 GB of RAM:

3. We want a machine with a fast SSD for the OS:

4. We want to store around 4 TB of data (same capacity as the machines on Hetzner): When we select this size, we can only get a SSD with an access-speed of 750 Mbyte/sec (i.e. quite slow). No way to get better speed without exploding the budget.

5. The OS on the machine should be Windows:

6. We want our machine in Europe:

We finally arrive at a proposition from the Azure-Wizard for some machine based on HB60rs series.

The monthly price for the machine (without the SSD storage) is 2647 €: See screenshot:

We tried to make many different other simulations that would allow us to get another type of instance with some CPUs. Actually, when you click ‘+ View more’ , you can see more machines with really bad CPU’s (AMD EPYC 7002 and 7003). The only instance that is slightly better that the others is from the series HC44rs that has an Intel Xeon 8168 processor (you can see the exact processors when clicking on the “View details”) with a performance score of 2092.

In addition to the machine cost, the monthly storage cost is around 330 €:

Thus, the total monthly cost for the best Azure machine is 2647 + 330 = 2977 €/month

Let’s now compare the best&most efficient machine from Azure to 2 machines readily available on Hetzner: AX102 and EX101. Since the machine from Fiberklaar is the AX101 (an older version from AX102), we’ll also add it to the comparison.

Here is a table with the 3 processors from Hetzner:

Here are the specs for the AX102: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax/

Here are the specs for the EX101: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ex/

Here is the final comparison table between Hetzner and Azure:

We recommend to use the EX101 server on Hetzner because it is:

• 22.8 times cheaper than the best available Azure server
• 2.45 times faster in terms of CPU than the best available Azure server
• 2.66 times faster in terms of Storage-Access-Speed (to read & write data on SSD) than the best available Azure server
• The Hetzner server has enough RAM (64GB) to do everything and anything with TIMi.

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