Hetzner Cloud

What Hetzner Cloud actually is

Hetzner Cloud is the virtual-server arm of Hetzner Online, a German data center operator founded in 1997 in Gunzenhausen, Bavaria. The company has built and run its own data center parks in Nuremberg and Falkenstein for years, added Helsinki, and launched the current cloud platform in January 2018; Hetzner reports passing one million concurrent cloud instances in 2025. That background matters more than the sticker price. This is not a reseller layer stacked on someone else's infrastructure — Hetzner designs its own servers, operates its own network, and staffs its own technicians, and the pricing reflects that vertical integration.

The product itself is a plain, well-built VPS platform. You choose a fixed-size instance from three shared-vCPU lines (Intel/AMD CX, AMD CPX, and Arm-based CAX) or the dedicated-vCPU CCX line, pick one of six locations, and get a Linux box with both IPv4 and IPv6, a REST API, a web console, official Go and Python libraries, a Terraform provider, and one-click apps. Instances are fixed recipes rather than arbitrary CPU/RAM sliders — you "scale" by switching to a larger plan, which historically has meant upgrade only, no downgrade. There is no Windows licensing, no managed tier, and no ops team standing by to patch your box. What you get instead is predictable, cheap compute with a monthly price cap.

For our full ranking context, see our VPS provider category.

Pricing: what you actually pay

Hetzner's headline strength has always been price transparency, and it mostly holds up. Billing is hourly with a monthly cap: delete the instance mid-month and you pay only the hours used, and the monthly bill never exceeds the cap. Two caveats we keep repeating because people get burned by them — servers are billed until you delete them even when powered off (Hetzner reserves the full resources), and additional IPv4 addresses, floating IPs, snapshots, and backups all cost extra.

Current published pricing on Hetzner's own site puts the cost-optimized tier — 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB NVMe — at €5.99 per month including IPv4, with the regular-performance tier starting at €6.49 per month and dedicated-vCPU General Purpose instances from €43.49 per month (all excluding VAT). Note that these are late-2026 figures: Hetzner reworked its lineup (the entry Intel/AMD plan is now the CX23) and folded IPv4 into the list price after years of charging separately, so older reviews quoting substantially lower entry prices are describing a different price sheet. Our own benchmark run on 2026-04-01, cited below, recorded the then-current CX22 at €4.35 per month — useful as a fixed reference point for the comparison numbers, not as today's quote.

Included traffic is generous by industry standards: at least 20 TB per month on EU locations, and additional transfer is cheap rather than hyperscaler-priced. Snapshots are charged per GB per month and backups are a monthly add-on tied to the instance price (about 20% of the server price at launch, per contemporaneous reporting from Heise). Neither is bundled free — that is the main way the headline price stays low, and it is a fair trade as long as you know it going in. DDoS mitigation is included at no cost for all customers. There is no free tier.

Performance: our benchmark results

On 2026-04-01 we provisioned instances at six providers and ran the same suite ourselves: sysbench for CPU, fio for random 4K IOPS and sequential read, and iperf3 for network. Every number in this section is from that test run on our own provisioned servers — full methodology and results live on /benchmarks.

The Hetzner Cloud CX32 (4 vCPU, 8 GB, NVMe, Nuremberg) returned a sysbench CPU score of 9,400, 48,000 random 4K IOPS, and 2,400 MB/s sequential reads, at €8.25 per month. The CX22 (2 vCPU, 4 GB, NVMe, Nuremberg) returned 4,820, 42,000 IOPS, and 2,100 MB/s, at €4.35 per month.

Against the comparators from the same run: the DigitalOcean Premium AMD 4 GB plan in Amsterdam scored 5,200 CPU / 55,000 IOPS / 2,800 MB/s at €28 per month; UpCloud Simple 2-2GB in Helsinki scored 4,600 / 62,000 / 2,800 at €14; Vultr High Frequency 2 GB in Amsterdam scored 4,100 / 38,000 / 1,800 at €12; DigitalOcean Basic 2 GB in Amsterdam scored 2,200 / 8,400 / 560 at €12; and a Linode Nanode 1 GB in Frankfurt scored 1,800 / 14,000 / 800 at €5.

Three conclusions we draw from those numbers. First, on CPU per euro Hetzner is in a class of its own here: the CX22 outpaced a plan costing more than twice as much (DigitalOcean Premium AMD 4 GB) on raw CPU while being undercut only by the much smaller Linode Nanode. Second, NVMe sequential throughput is a genuine strength — both Hetzner plans led the field on sequential reads, and 42,000–48,000 random 4K IOPS is a serious result for shared-vCPU entry instances. Third, storage latency consistency is not the outright winner: UpCloud's 62,000 IOPS shows there is a ceiling above Hetzner's, and if your workload is write-latency sensitive rather than throughput hungry, that comparison deserves a look.

One honest caveat: these are shared-vCPU instances. Hetzner explicitly states it offers no bandwidth guarantees on cloud servers — host machines have redundant 10 Gbit/s links shared among instances, and the company says you can expect roughly 300–500 Mbit/s in practice. That matched what we saw in the iperf3 runs, but a noisy neighbor can move those numbers. The dedicated-vCPU CCX line exists precisely for workloads that cannot accept that variance.

Network, locations, and data residency

Hetzner Cloud runs in six locations across four network zones: Falkenstein and Nuremberg (Germany) and Helsinki (Finland) in owned data center parks, plus Ashburn, Virginia and Hillsboro, Oregon in the US and Singapore since 2024 — the latter three in colocation space Hetzner does not own. For European workloads this is one of the strongest footprints available at the price: data residency in EU-owned facilities, GDPR-compliant processing, and ISO/IEC 27001 certification for the German and Finnish parks. US presence covers both coasts, and Singapore opens an Asia-Pacific option that Hetzner did not have before 2024.

On the network side, all customers get automated DDoS mitigation (Arbor and Juniper filtering infrastructure; in March 2026 Hetzner announced a Nokia Deepfield deployment across its European network), private networks, cloud firewalls, floating IPs, load balancers, and triple-replicated block volumes. Object storage, however, is only available in the three European locations — a real limitation if you want EU compute paired with APAC or US object storage on the same account.

Where it falls short

We like this platform, but the trade-offs are concrete. Backups and snapshots are paid add-ons rather than plan inclusions — budget roughly 20% of the instance price for the backup option if you want it, and per-GB monthly charges for snapshots. If you are used to providers that bundle weekly backups into the headline price, Hetzner will look cheaper than it is until you add those.

Support is email-based (Hetzner advertises 24/7 email support) with no phone line for cloud customers. For a hobby project that is fine; for a production incident at 3 a.m. it is a different conversation than you would have with a managed host. Relatedly, there is no managed tier at all: no OS patching, no control-plane babysitting, and no supported Windows installs (Linux distros — Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, CentOS, Rocky, Alma — plus manual ISO installs).

Resource ceilings are real too. New accounts start with default limits on concurrent cloud resources that you raise by filing a support ticket. And at the time of writing, Hetzner's own site flags cost-optimized instances as temporarily unavailable for ordering — demand has repeatedly run ahead of capacity, which is the flip side of aggressive pricing. Finally, entry plans share vCPUs and carry no bandwidth guarantee, so the lowest price tier is not the right home for sustained CPU load.

Who should pick this

We would pick Hetzner Cloud when: you run Linux workloads, you are comfortable unmanaged, and price-performance is the dominant constraint. That covers side projects, dev and test environments, CI runners, staging clusters, small-to-medium web apps and databases on the dedicated-vCPU line, and any European workload where EU data residency is a requirement rather than a preference. On our 2026-04-01 numbers it is the value pick of the group we tested.

We would look elsewhere when: you need managed operations, phone support, Windows, bundled backups at a fixed price, guaranteed network throughput, or colocation-grade compliance in the US or Asia. In those cases the premium you pay at other VPS providers buys something specific — make sure it is the thing you actually need.

Key takeaways

• Price-performance leader in our 2026-04-01 test run: the CX22 (4,820 sysbench / 42,000 IOPS / 2,100 MB/s at €4.35 per month) beat plans costing up to six times as much on CPU.
• Current entry pricing is €5.99 per month for 2 vCPU / 4 GB / 40 GB NVMe including IPv4 (cost-optimized tier, ex VAT); billing is hourly with a monthly cap.
• Six cloud locations across the EU, US East/West, and Singapore; EU facilities are owned, ISO 27001-certified, and GDPR-compliant — the strongest argument for European workloads.
• Backups and snapshots are paid add-ons, servers bill even when powered off, and there is no free tier — the low prices come with conditions.
• Unmanaged by design: email support, Linux only, shared vCPUs and no bandwidth guarantee on entry plans; the CCX dedicated line covers workloads that cannot tolerate that.
• Our pick for cost-sensitive, unmanaged Linux infrastructure in Europe; we would look at the higher-priced alternatives when managed support or guaranteed throughput is non-negotiable.

Sources

• https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/
• https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/cost-optimized/
• https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/regular-performance/
• https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/general/locations/
• https://www.hetzner.com/company/about-us/
• https://www.hetzner.com/blog/hetzner-s-story-from-gunzenhausen-to-the-world/
• https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/ddos-schutz/
• https://www.heise.de/news/Hetzner-startet-Server-Cloud-3948715.html
• https://www.hetzner.com/pressroom/nokia-network-security/