There has been a lot of discussion on HN about dedicated hosting at Hetzner vs Amazon, and while they offer different pros and cons, Amazon appears to be a lot more expensive for comparable or even worse specs. Here's a comparison of two servers that have roughly comparable specs, Amazon High-Memory Double Extra Large and Hetzner ex8s:
cpu:
hetzner: Intel Xeon E3-1275 (4 physical cores)
ec2: 4 virtual cores (13 "ecus" where each ecu is ~ 2007 xeon core)
ram:
hetzner: 32 GB ECC
ec2: 34 GB (previous commenters have speculated that it's non-ecc because Amazon only mentions otherwise for compute units)
disk:
hetnzer: customizable, cheapest is 3TB disk or 120 GB SSD for 15 euros/month
ec2: 850 GB (ephermeral)
network:
hetzner: 100 Mbit (incoming free, 10TB outgoing free, 7 euros/TB after)
ec2: unknown speed (incoming free, $0.12/GB outgoing, $120/TB)
price:
hetzner: ~$265 for first month, $115 thereafter (includes setup fee, excludes VAT, after euro to usd conversion,
includes cheapest hd option)
ec2: $648/month
There are a lot of other factors like the additional services amazon provides, failover, scaling, bandwidth quality, US ping times, reserved instance pricing, etc. It's not a straightforward comparison, but I would argue that for many users hetzner is the much faster and cheaper option.
edit: formatting, spelling
edit: formatting, spelling