https://www.hetzner.com/cloud gives you 20TB bandwidth for €3.49/mo VMs, which I've essentially regarded as Hetzner gives unlimited free bandwidth for all servers.
Being lynched for egregious egress fees is only something I've experienced when using mega corp's clouds, where economies of scale suggests their vastly larger size should allow them to provide even better value.
But that's in a normal market, not the artificial lock-in mega cloud corps enjoy where they're able to distort customer behavior from artificially high pricing.
I'm a Hetzner home user and a huge fan, but let's not compare the quality of networking you get for free from them with the networking you get from AWS.
I don't think I've seen a latency spike on AWS in 10 years. Hetzner, it's often possible to observe latency and drops over 10 minutes (and the situation hasn't changed much in about 10 years)
In all the years I've used Hetzner I've never observed these random 10 minute latency drops you speak of. They've always had much faster internet access then I've ever been able to get from my home broadband so I'll even SSH into & use them for network intensive dev tasks like iterating on a new Docker container since it's able to download & build the image packages in a fraction of the time.
The primary issue I have with them is latency access to their DE/FI data centers from the US, if their US DC offered dedicated servers I would be migrating to over to use them instead.
They launched Cloud in the US this month, very likely dedicated will be offered soon enough. The bang for buck on Hetzner is insane, really love them, but have and would rip them out of any business environment I come across, largely due to network quality and attitude to support.
If you haven't experienced Google translating insistently German responses from one of their DC techs you probably haven't been using them for long enough ;)
As for networking, would encourage installing something like Smokeping
I've needed to access their tech support 1 time when my HDD failed and a couple of times for new SSL certs before LetsEncrypt, who were always responsive and supportive. Don't see how derogatory characterizations of their DC techs is in anyway necessary.
But I don't really access AWS support either, when something doesn't work I've just killed the VM and started a new one. It's less disposable with bare metal servers, I can physically restart the server from their control panel or if issues are not fixable, reset the server with a new Linux OS image, which granted would be a lot more time consuming.
I will add that whilst I'm not in the business of dictating which cloud services business customers would use, I'd agree that I would recommend AWS over Hetzner who are a) paying for & would have to administer it themselves and b) is going to have access to all the managed services they would ever need in future.
I would still recommend they consider Hetzner for any high-resources intensive workloads where their raw compute is vastly less expensive. I'll also chose the cheaper reoccurring cost over convenience when I'm able to self-service it myself.
Hetzner has its network hiccups sometimes, but AWS quality may be a joke if you really care about latency tails and even median under any significant load. I didn't analyze the networking itself, but - you run in a VM and share host machine with other clients VMs - you just can't get stable latencies this way. It's night and day when you migrate to baremetal Hetzner and observe how latencies change.
(Again - it's about dedicated baremetal - I know nothing about Hetzner's cloud)
Being lynched for egregious egress fees is only something I've experienced when using mega corp's clouds, where economies of scale suggests their vastly larger size should allow them to provide even better value.
But that's in a normal market, not the artificial lock-in mega cloud corps enjoy where they're able to distort customer behavior from artificially high pricing.