Hetzner Review (2026): Pricing, Features & Honest Verdict

TLDR

Hetzner is a German cloud and dedicated hosting provider offering VPS and bare-metal servers at prices that undercut AWS, DigitalOcean, and Linode by a wide margin. The trade-off is fewer managed services and mostly EU/US-region infrastructure. Best for: cost-conscious developers and startups. Price: From €3.79/mo (free plan: no). Rating: 8.1/10

What is Hetzner?

Hetzner is an infrastructure hosting company that rents you compute: cloud virtual servers (VPS), dedicated bare-metal machines, managed storage, and object storage. Its whole reputation rests on one thing — you get dramatically more RAM, vCPU, and bandwidth per euro than you do from the big-name US clouds. A cloud VPS with 2 vCPUs, 4 GB of RAM, 40 GB of NVMe SSD, and 20 TB of traffic starts at roughly €3.79–€4.35 per month. The equivalent on AWS or DigitalOcean costs several times that once you factor in bandwidth.

Hetzner Online GmbH was founded in 1997 by Martin Hetzner and is headquartered in Gunzenhausen, Germany, with data centers in Nuremberg, Falkenstein, Helsinki (Finland), and — more recently — the United States (Ashburn, Virginia and Hillsboro, Oregon). It matters because Hetzner is one of the few hosts that owns and operates its own data centers rather than reselling someone else’s, which is a big part of why it can charge so little. Developers and indie hackers have quietly run production workloads on it for years; it’s the go-to answer when someone on Hacker News asks “how do I host this cheaply without going serverless.”

What Are Hetzner’s Key Features?

Cheap, generous cloud VPS

The Hetzner Cloud lineup spans three families: CX (cost-optimized shared Intel/AMD vCPUs, EU-only), CPX (regular-performance AMD EPYC, available globally including US regions), and CCX (dedicated vCPUs). Entry pricing runs from around €3.79/mo for a CX22 up to €5.99 for a CPX11 and €9.99 for a CPX21. Every cloud plan includes 20 TB of traffic and a dedicated IPv4 address — bandwidth that would cost a small fortune on AWS.

Bare-metal dedicated servers and the Server Auction

Beyond VPS, Hetzner rents full dedicated machines. The AX42 (AMD Ryzen, 64 GB RAM, dual 512 GB NVMe) runs about €46.52/mo and the Intel-based EX44 sits around €44/mo, both with no long contracts. The Server Auction lets you rent previously-used hardware for even less, which is a genuinely unique way to get serious bare-metal capacity cheaply.

Full cloud primitives, not just servers

Hetzner Cloud isn’t only VMs. You get load balancers, private networks, firewalls, floating IPs, volumes (block storage), snapshots, automated backups, and a clean REST API plus a Terraform provider. It’s enough to build a real multi-server production setup, and there’s an official CLI (hcloud) for scripting it.

Storage Box and Object Storage

For backups and bulk data, Hetzner sells Storage Boxes (managed BX storage over SFTP/SMB/WebDAV) and S3-compatible Object Storage at prices far below AWS S3 egress. This makes Hetzner viable as a backup target even if you host your app elsewhere.

How Much Does Hetzner Cost?

Hetzner has no free plan, but it starts about as low as paid hosting goes: a cloud VPS from roughly €3.79/mo (CX22), with CPX AMD plans from €5.99, dedicated-vCPU CCX plans from around €42.99/mo, and full dedicated servers from about €44–€46/mo. All cloud plans bundle 20 TB of traffic. Note that Hetzner raised prices on several CCX and CPX tiers in June 2026, so figures are higher than the legendary lows of a couple years back — but they’re still cheap. For comparison, DigitalOcean’s entry Droplet with 1 GB RAM starts at $6/mo with only 1–2 TB of transfer, and an equivalent AWS EC2 instance plus its per-GB egress charges can easily run several times what Hetzner asks. Even after the increases, Hetzner remains the price leader in serious hosting.

Who Is Hetzner Best For?

Hetzner is for people who are comfortable managing their own servers and want maximum compute per euro. It rewards Linux-literate teams and punishes anyone expecting a fully managed, click-to-deploy PaaS experience.

Use Hetzner if you’re a developer, indie hacker, or startup running self-managed workloads, you care about bandwidth costs, you want bare-metal or high-RAM VPS on the cheap, or you need a cheap backup/storage target. Skip Hetzner if you need managed databases and serverless functions out of the box, you require data centers in Asia-Pacific or many global regions, or you want white-glove enterprise support with SLAs and a dedicated account manager.

Best Hetzner Alternatives

Hetzner sits at the intersection of budget VPS and bare-metal. Here’s how the obvious competitors compare.

DigitalOcean

The friendlier developer cloud. DigitalOcean has better docs, a slicker dashboard, managed databases, App Platform PaaS, and Kubernetes — but you pay for it. Droplets start at $4–$6/mo with far less RAM and bandwidth than Hetzner gives you at a similar price. Choose DigitalOcean if you value managed services and polish over raw price.

OVHcloud

The other big European budget host. OVHcloud offers cheap VPS and dedicated servers with a much wider global data-center footprint (Europe, North America, Asia-Pacific). Pricing is competitive with Hetzner and its bare-metal range is broader, though its control panel and support are widely considered rougher around the edges.

Vultr

A global-first cloud with 30+ locations, hourly billing, and bare-metal options. Vultr’s regular VPS starts around $5–$6/mo and it has GPU instances Hetzner lacks. It’s the pick if you need many worldwide regions or GPU compute, but per-euro value on plain VPS still favors Hetzner.

Final Verdict: Is Hetzner Worth It?

Yes — if you know what you’re doing. Hetzner remains the best price-to-performance ratio in mainstream hosting, and nothing else comes close on the combination of RAM, dedicated hardware, and 20 TB of included traffic for the money. The API, Terraform provider, load balancers, and private networking are good enough to run real production infrastructure, and the Server Auction is a genuinely clever way to get cheap bare metal.

The caveats are real: no meaningful free tier, mostly EU and US regions, no rich catalog of managed databases or serverless functions, and support that is competent but not enterprise hand-holding. The June 2026 price increases also stung long-time users. But for cost-conscious developers, indie hackers, and startups who can manage their own boxes, Hetzner is close to a no-brainer — and at 8.1/10 it’s one of the best-value infrastructure providers you can buy today.