Why is Hetzner so cheap, and is it still cheap?

Hetzner is cheap because it runs a narrow, highly automated catalogue of servers on its own data center parks in Germany and Finland, keeps hardware in service for years, and bundles 20 TB of traffic into every EU cloud server. After two price rises in 2026, it is still cheaper than the hyperscalers: as of 14 November 2026, a 4 dedicated vCPU, 16 GB Hetzner Cloud server costs €73.49 to €86.49 a month, against about $195 for a comparable AWS instance with disk and an IPv4 address in Frankfurt. The gap is now roughly 2x to 3x, not the 5x or more that older comparisons quote.

Where the low prices come from

Hetzner Online, founded in 1997, operates its own data center parks in Nuremberg, Falkenstein and Helsinki and adds cloud locations in Ashburn, Hillsboro and Singapore. Several structural choices keep its costs down:

• Own facilities. Hetzner builds and runs its European data center parks itself instead of renting colocation space from a third party.
• Long hardware life. Hetzner states that it uses components “for as long as it makes technical and economic sense”. Its Cost-Optimized plan runs on older Ampere, Intel and AMD processor generations, which is why it is the cheapest line.
• A short product list. Hetzner sells servers, block storage, object storage, load balancers, private networks and firewalls. It does not run a long tail of managed services, so there is less to build, staff and support.
• Bundled traffic. Every cloud server in the EU includes at least 20 TB of outbound traffic a month, and Hetzner bills only outgoing traffic beyond that, at €1.00 per TB. Inbound and internal traffic are free, according to the billing FAQ.
• Self-service with guardrails. Hetzner screens new accounts and first orders and caps how many resources a new account can create.

What you trade for the price

The price buys infrastructure, not a platform. The cloud SLA promises 99.9% monthly availability per server and pays out only as cloud credit: Hetzner’s own example credits €0.87 for 185 minutes of downtime. There are six cloud locations and no availability zones inside a location. Managed databases, managed Kubernetes and identity services that AWS, Google Cloud and Azure offer are things you run yourself. The article on whether Hetzner is reliable enough for production covers how teams design around this.

The 2026 price increases

In February 2026, Hetzner first raised one-time setup fees for dedicated servers and named the cause: purchase prices for RAM and NVMe SSDs had risen sharply. It then changed its cloud prices twice:

1. 1 April 2026. Prices rose for new orders and existing servers. Hetzner cited “drastic price increases in various areas in the IT sector” and higher costs to operate infrastructure and buy hardware. Cloud servers went up by about a third.
2. 15 June 2026. Prices rose again for new orders and rescales only. Running servers keep their terms. Hetzner pointed to “the massive increase in procurement costs”. Shared AMD (CPX) and dedicated vCPU (CCX) servers rose far more than the Cost-Optimized line.

On 10 November 2026, Hetzner cut prices for CPX and CCX servers in Helsinki by 15% for new orders, because grid connections are easier to add in Finland than in Germany.

Monthly prices in euros, excluding VAT, including one primary IPv4 address (€0.50 a month), for EU locations:

Sources: Hetzner’s April price table (archived copy) and the current Cost-Optimized, Regular Performance and General Purpose pages.

Hetzner was not alone. OVHcloud raised dedicated server prices from July 2026, attributing it to a memory and storage shortage driven by AI demand, and from 1 October 2026 it bills local storage and IPv4 separately on its Gen 3 public cloud instances. The same DRAM and NAND squeeze sits behind both providers’ moves.

Since 26 June 2026, Hetzner’s status page has shown an open incident, “Limited availability of cloud instances”, and the Cost-Optimized CX and CAX servers are listed as unavailable. The cheapest line exists on the price list but often cannot be ordered. See why you can’t create a Hetzner server for the causes and workarounds.

Is Hetzner still cheap?

Yes for compute and traffic, by a smaller margin than before. The table compares orderable Hetzner servers with AWS on-demand Linux instances in Frankfurt (eu-central-1) as of 14 November 2026. AWS totals add gp3 storage of the same size ($0.0952 per GB-month) and one public IPv4 address ($0.005 per hour). Euros are converted at the ECB rate of 1.1052 USD on 13 November 2026.

Traffic widens the gap. Sending 10 TB a month to the internet is included with any Hetzner EU server. On AWS in Frankfurt the same 10 TB costs about $891 at $0.09 per GB after the free 100 GB, as the article on cloud egress fees explains.

Three caveats apply. A vCPU is not the same unit everywhere: t3.medium is a burstable instance with a 20% baseline, and Hetzner’s CPX line shares cores between tenants (see shared vs dedicated vCPUs). AWS prices drop with savings plans and spot capacity, which Hetzner does not offer. And the hyperscaler bill includes managed services that you would otherwise build and operate on Hetzner. The Hetzner vs AWS comparison weighs those factors by workload.

Running Kubernetes on Hetzner

Hetzner provides servers, networks and load balancers, but no managed Kubernetes control plane of its own. The Hetzner Kubernetes guide compares kubeadm, k3s, Cluster API and managed options. Cloudfleet’s managed Kubernetes for Hetzner runs the control plane and provisions Hetzner Cloud servers in your own Hetzner account, billed by Hetzner at Hetzner’s prices, and our benchmark of Hetzner’s new network stack shows how the platform performs under Kubernetes-style load.