The full review
What is Hetzner?
Hetzner is a German hosting company whose cloud arm rents Linux virtual machines, block and object storage, load balancers and private networking from data centers in Europe, North America and Asia. The site positions Hetzner Cloud as affordable cloud hosting for developers and teams: you choose a server plan, an image such as Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora, and a location, then the instance boots in seconds inside the Hetzner Console.
Billing pairs an hourly rate with a monthly price cap, so a machine you delete mid-month is charged only for the hours it ran. The vendor reports over 400,000 customers, and the wider catalog reaches past the cloud into dedicated root servers, web hosting and storage.
Choosing between the Hetzner Cloud server lines
Shared instances split into two families. Cost-Optimized holds plans such as CX23, with 2 Intel or AMD vCPU, 4 GB RAM and a 40 GB NVMe drive, alongside the Arm-based CAX11 on Ampere cores. Hetzner is unusually candid here: the line reuses proven older hardware generations, availability is limited, and the page points it at test environments, small blogs and low-traffic web hosting.
Regular Performance plans like CPX22 move to newer hardware generations for web applications and small databases. General Purpose plans such as CCX13 assign dedicated vCPUs, which Hetzner recommends for ERP and inventory systems, multi-user environments, public game servers, microservices and large databases.
Networking and storage without surprise add-on fees
Stateful firewalls carry no additional cost and can be assigned to as many cloud servers as you like, while Networks give instances a private backbone for a Kubernetes cluster or a database you would rather keep unexposed. Hetzner Load Balancers, sold as LB11, LB21 and LB31, terminate TLS, run active and passive health checks, speak HTTP/2 by default, support the proxy protocol, and can point at Hetzner dedicated root servers as well as cloud instances.
For persistence, Volumes offer SSD block storage that Hetzner says is written to three physical servers through triple replication. Object Storage adds an S3-compatible layer with object locking, versioning, pre-signed URLs, object expiry and optional server-side encryption.
Automation, images and one-click apps
Every meaningful action is exposed through a developer-friendly REST API and a CLI tool, with integrations for Python and Go plus Ansible, Terraform and Kubernetes. Hetzner describes these as covering all essential functions for automatic management of the cloud infrastructure, allowing a high degree of automation, and lists Kubernetes development and staging setups among the recommended workloads for its Regular Performance plans.
Anyone who would rather skip configuration can reach for the one-click apps catalog, which brings up Docker CE, WordPress, Nextcloud, GitLab CE, Coolify, Grafana, Prometheus, Jitsi Meet, WireGuard and PhotoPrism in a few minutes. Snapshots, Backups and Floating IPs fill in the remaining add-ons.
Locations, compliance and the traffic math
Hetzner Cloud runs from Falkenstein and Nuremberg in Germany, Helsinki in Finland, Hillsboro and Ashburn in the United States, and Singapore since 2024. Included traffic is generous but uneven: EU servers ship with at least 20 TB per month, whereas US and Asia-Pacific locations start at 1 TB, worth checking before parking a video-heavy workload in Singapore.
On governance, the German and Finnish data center parks are ISO/IEC 27001 certified, and the vendor cites GDPR compliance, C5 certification according to BSI, a 99.9% uptime SLA with defined credits, and 24/7 email support. Hetzner also publishes an egress cost comparison against AWS, Azure and Google built on independent sparecores.com figures.
Who should choose Hetzner
The sweet spot is developers, agencies and lean engineering teams who are comfortable on a terminal and want European infrastructure cheap enough that always-on staging stops being a budget argument. Hetzner aims its dedicated-vCPU plans at Kubernetes clusters, public game servers and microservices, and argues on the cloud overview page that expensive egress traffic at hyperscalers such as AWS, Azure and Google can quickly drive up total costs.
It is not ideal for teams that need a managed control plane. The catalog sells servers, storage, load balancing and networking, not managed databases or a managed Kubernetes service, so patching, backups and failover stay on your side of the line. If nobody on the team wants that responsibility, a pricier managed platform buys back the sleep.
Strengths
- Class-leading price/performance: still roughly 3-5x cheaper than AWS/Azure even after the 2026 hikes
- 20 TB EU traffic included per server with no per-GB egress fees, so bills stay predictable
- True hourly billing, no contracts or lock-in, full REST API and Terraform provider
- Modern AMD EPYC + ARM Ampere hardware, NVMe SSD, and provisioning in seconds
Watch out for
- Steep 2026 increases: April up to +37%, then June 15 pushed CPX/CCX up to +176%
- Barebones managed services: no managed Postgres/MySQL or hosted K8s control plane; you run ops yourself
- No free tier or signup credit, and IPv4 addresses cost extra (~€0.50/mo each)
- EU-heavy footprint (only US Ashburn/Hillsboro + Singapore outside Europe); support is email/ticket, EU business hours
Key features
| Feature | What it does |
|---|
| All-inclusive traffic | ~20 TB/mo included on EU cloud servers with no egress charges; cheap, flat overage vs hyperscaler per-GB billing. |
| Four server lines | CX (shared Intel/AMD, cost-optimized), CAX (ARM Ampere), CPX (regular performance), CCX (dedicated vCPU). |
| Dedicated servers + Server Auction | Root dedicated hardware plus an auction of ex-lease machines at steep discounts, a Hetzner signature bargain. |
| Hourly, no lock-in | Spin up/tear down by the hour, billed to a monthly cap; snapshots, backups, and floating IPs on demand. |
| Free networking extras | Firewalls, private networks, DDoS protection and IPv6 included at no cost; load balancers and volumes are paid add-ons. |
| Developer tooling | REST API, official Terraform provider, CLI (hcloud), and Cloud Console for infrastructure-as-code workflows. |
How Hetzner compares
| Alternative | How it differs |
|---|
| AWS | Hyperscaler with 30+ regions and deep managed services, but multiples more expensive and meters egress per GB. Hetzner leads AWS on EU traffic share. |
| DigitalOcean | More polished UX, docs and managed databases/K8s, but noticeably pricier per vCPU/GB than Hetzner. |
| OVHcloud | European rival on price and data sovereignty; broader managed/bare-metal catalog but less consistent price/performance. |
Frequently asked questions
Is Hetzner free?
No. Hetzner has no free tier and no perpetual free credits. Billing is hourly with a monthly cap, so the cheapest cloud server (CX23: 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB SSD) costs about €0.0088/hour or €5.49/month, plus roughly €0.50/month for an IPv4 address. You pay from the first hour.
How much does Hetzner cost?
Cloud servers start at €5.49/month (CX23) after the 2026 increases; the ARM CAX11 is €5.99, CPX22 is €19.49, and the dedicated-vCPU CCX13 is €42.99. Dedicated root servers start around €35-40/month, with cheaper deals on the Server Auction. All prices exclude VAT and include generous traffic.
Does Hetzner have a free trial?
No formal free trial or signup credit. But because billing is hourly, you can launch a server, test it for an hour and delete it for a few cents: a CX23 hour is about €0.0088. That effectively makes it pay-as-you-go from day one rather than a fixed monthly commitment.
Is Hetzner cheaper than AWS?
Yes, substantially. Equivalent compute is often 3-5x cheaper, and Hetzner bundles ~20 TB of EU traffic per server versus AWS billing egress per GB, which is where hyperscaler bills balloon. The trade-off is fewer managed services, a smaller global footprint, and a more EU-centric, self-service experience.
Why did Hetzner raise prices in 2026?
Hetzner adjusted prices twice: around April 1 (up to +37%, affecting existing customers too) and again on June 15, 2026, when dedicated-vCPU CPX and CCX lines rose up to +176%, while the cheap CX/CAX lines went up a more moderate ~33-38%. Existing servers stay at old rates unless rescaled.
Hetzner ratings on other platforms
Independent user ratings from third-party review sites, linked here for transparency.
These are not our editorial score, are captured on the date shown, and may have changed since.
