How do Hetzner and OVHcloud compare?

Hetzner and OVHcloud are long-established European-owned hosting and cloud providers that both sell cloud servers and dedicated servers from their own data centers. Hetzner, based in Germany, keeps a narrow catalogue of servers, storage and networking in six cloud locations and includes 20 TB of traffic per EU cloud server. OVHcloud, based in France, runs a wider platform: public cloud in 15 locations across three continents, managed Kubernetes, managed databases, cloud GPUs and SecNumCloud-qualified offers. Both raised prices in 2026, citing hardware and memory costs.

At a glance

Comparison as of 14 November 2026:

Sources: Hetzner locations, billing FAQ, servers overview and information security; OVHcloud regions, Public Cloud prices, vRack, SecNumCloud and compliance pages.

Footprint and availability

Hetzner’s three EU locations form one network zone, eu-central, so its private networks and Floating IPs work across Germany and Finland. There are no availability zones, so high availability means spreading servers across locations, as described in whether Hetzner is reliable enough for production.

OVHcloud covers more geography, including Canada, several European countries, Singapore, Sydney and Mumbai, and offers regions with three availability zones in Paris and Milan. Its managed Kubernetes Standard tier carries a 99.99% SLA in those 3-AZ regions and 99.9% in single-zone regions.

Product breadth

Hetzner sells infrastructure: cloud servers in shared and dedicated vCPU lines, dedicated servers, GPU dedicated servers, volumes, object storage, load balancers, firewalls and private networks. Databases, Kubernetes control planes and other managed services run on top of those, operated by you or by a third party.

OVHcloud sells infrastructure plus managed services: Managed Kubernetes Service, managed databases, a managed private registry, cloud GPU instances and Hosted Private Cloud. A team that wants fewer components to run itself will find more of them at OVHcloud. A team that runs everything on Kubernetes already may need only servers and networks, which both provide.

Networking and traffic

Both providers include outbound traffic for most European use, but in different ways. Hetzner attaches an allowance to each server and bills €1.00 per extra TB in the EU; US and Singapore servers include much less. OVHcloud includes outbound public traffic on Public Cloud instances outside Asia-Pacific, where each project gets 1 TB a month and pays per GB after that. OVHcloud instances have a public bandwidth cap per size instead. The article on cloud egress fees compares these models with hyperscaler per-GB pricing.

For private traffic, OVHcloud’s vRack connects bare metal, Hosted Private Cloud and Public Cloud resources across regions at no extra charge. Hetzner connects cloud servers through Cloud Networks inside one network zone, and joins dedicated servers to a cloud network through a vSwitch.

Dedicated servers

Both providers are known for dedicated servers, and both changed that business in 2026:

• Hetzner raised one-time setup fees for dedicated servers in February and April 2026, naming RAM and NVMe SSD purchase prices. On 15 June 2026 it standardized dedicated servers into fixed configurations with -1, -2 and -3 suffixes, added lower-priced “Limited” models, raised monthly prices for new orders and cut setup fees for most models. Existing contracts kept their terms. The Server Auction sells refurbished servers without setup fees.
• OVHcloud raised prices for its Advance, Game, Scale and High Grade ranges in the second half of 2026: for memory and storage options on new orders from 1 July, for new server configurations from 11 August, and for running servers at renewal from 1 October. It cited a shortage of memory and storage driven by AI demand. Kimsufi, So you Start and Rise were not affected.

Cloud price changes in 2026

Hetzner raised cloud prices for all servers on 1 April 2026 and again for new orders and rescales on 15 June 2026, then cut CPX and CCX prices in Helsinki by 15% on 10 November 2026. The full timeline with dated prices is in why Hetzner is cheap, and whether it still is.

OVHcloud kept hourly instance prices unchanged but, from 1 October 2026, bills local storage and public IPv4 separately on Gen 3 instances (B3, C3, R3). OVHcloud puts the resulting increase at 1.4% to 21.9% for an identical configuration, with small instances affected most.

Compliance

Hetzner holds ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and a BSI C5 Type 2 attestation for its European sites. OVHcloud lists ISO/IEC 27001 and BSI C5 among its certifications and offers SecNumCloud-qualified services, such as its SecNumCloud private cloud. SecNumCloud applies to those specific offers, not to standard Public Cloud. Check the scope of any certificate against the exact service you plan to use; the overview of European cloud providers compares the same attributes across eight providers.

Kubernetes on Hetzner

Teams that pick Hetzner for price and run Kubernetes on it need a control plane from somewhere. The Hetzner Kubernetes guide compares the options, and Cloudfleet’s managed Kubernetes for Hetzner runs the control plane and provisions Hetzner Cloud servers in your own account, with Hetzner Dedicated servers as additional nodes.