Last reviewed, October 2026
Hetzner Storage Box is a popular, low-cost place to park backups in Germany or Finland. ServerCrate takes a narrower approach: Restic REST vaults in Los Angeles, sized from 10 GB up, with health reporting built in. Here is an honest look at where each one fits.
| Hetzner Storage Box | ServerCrate | |
|---|---|---|
| Smallest plan | 1 TB (BX11) | 10 GB free, then 100 GB for $2/mo |
| 1 TB price | A few euros per month (see hetzner.com) | $9/mo (Standard) |
| Largest plan | 20 TB (BX41) | 2 TB (Pro) |
| Protocols | FTP, FTPS, SFTP, SCP, SMB/CIFS, WebDAV, rsync, BorgBackup, Restic, Rclone | Restic REST over HTTPS; PBS datastores and Borg repositories available |
| Encryption | Not stated in the docs; encrypt client-side yourself | Client-side, keys never leave your machine |
| Traffic and restores | Unlimited traffic | No egress or restore fees |
| Locations | Falkenstein (Germany), Helsinki (Finland) | Los Angeles, USA |
| Snapshots and sub-accounts | 10 to 40 snapshots, up to 100 sub-accounts | Append-only vaults by default, daily ZFS snapshots kept 14 days |
Storage Box is general-purpose network storage. Plans start at 1 TB (BX11) and scale to 5 TB, 10 TB and 20 TB. Every plan includes unlimited traffic, up to 10 concurrent connections, up to 100 sub-accounts, and a snapshot allowance that grows with the plan (10 on BX11, up to 40 on BX41).
Protocol coverage is wide. Hetzner lists FTP, FTPS, SFTP, SCP, Samba/CIFS, WebDAV, rsync over SSH, BorgBackup, Restic and Rclone, and a Storage Box can be mounted as a network drive. Data sits on HDDs in a RAID array, and you choose Falkenstein, Germany or Helsinki, Finland. Hetzner's own documentation notes the disks are on a single host server, so RAID covers disk failures rather than host-level failures.
Storage Box has no web interface for files; Hetzner's docs point you to its management console and command-line tools, and Hetzner recommends it for backups rather than live databases. Support runs through tickets during German business hours on weekdays. For teams already running servers at Hetzner in Europe, it is a natural, inexpensive add-on.
We do one job with our backup vaults: we give Restic a purpose-built REST endpoint over HTTPS. Your data is encrypted on your machine before it leaves, and the keys never leave your machine. Our team stores ciphertext on ZFS and has no way to read it.
Restic works on Storage Box too, and Restic encrypts your data either way. The difference is in everything around the repository. With a generic storage target, monitoring, alerting and restore testing are jobs you script and maintain yourself. With ServerCrate, they are part of the vault.
Around that core we added the parts a plain storage target leaves to you.
Storage Box is priced for bulk capacity. Its entry plan is 1 TB and pricing is a few euros per month, with the 5 TB tier only modestly higher (see hetzner.com for current prices). If you need several terabytes, that per-TB rate is hard to match, and we will not pretend otherwise.
Our plans start smaller. The Free vault is 10 GB at $0, forever, with no card required. Lite is 100 GB for $2/mo, Starter is 250 GB for $3/mo, Standard is 1 TB for $9/mo and Pro is 2 TB for $17/mo. Annual billing costs 10x the monthly price, so you get two months free. Our price lock means your renewal never goes above your signup price, and every paid plan has a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Many workloads, such as a few servers, a laptop or a database dump, fit well under 1 TB. For those, paying for exactly what you use often costs less than renting a terabyte you will not fill.
Hetzner Storage Box lives in Germany or Finland. That is a strong choice for European data, and for anyone who wants their backups under EU jurisdiction.
If your servers or office are in North America, especially on the West Coast, a backup target in Los Angeles cuts round-trip time for every Restic request. Restic makes many small requests during backup, prune and check, so latency adds up. Our vaults keep the data close to you.
Jurisdiction matters as much as distance. Some teams prefer their backups in the same country as their customers, and some deliberately keep an offsite copy on another continent. Restic makes it easy to run both: one repository at Hetzner in Europe and one ServerCrate vault in Los Angeles gives you two independent copies in two regions.
Hetzner runs a broad catalog of its own. ServerCrate is also more than vaults: we sell VPS from $3/mo and web hosting from $3/mo, and we offer Proxmox offsite (PBS) datastores and Borg repositories. If you run Proxmox Backup Server or Borg today, you can keep that tooling and still store with us.
Keeping backups, servers and sites with one provider means one account, one invoice and one support team who can see the whole picture when something goes wrong. Our team handles all of it with the same zero-knowledge approach we apply to the vaults.
Built for Restic from day one. Running Borg instead? We offer hosted Borg repositories with append-only keys too.
Every vault sits on ZFS with checksumming and snapshots. Bit rot on a 3-year-old archive gets caught. Most providers won't tell you their backend.
Single Los Angeles location. Low latency for North American users, and a natural second region when your primary copy lives in Europe.
Frequently asked
Hetzner Storage Box details checked October 2026 against: docs.hetzner.com, hetzner.com