Hetzner Reviews: 4.6/5 — Highly Rated

Hetzner sells four different plans with 16 GB of RAM, priced from €15.99 to €85.99 a month. That is a 5.4× spread inside one provider’s catalogue for the same headline specification — and the expensive one gives you half the cores of the cheap one. Understanding that table is most of what it takes to buy Hetzner well, and getting it wrong is the most expensive mistake available here.

• What it is: A German cloud and dedicated-server provider selling raw compute at the lowest credible price per gigabyte in mainstream hosting.
• Best for: Technically confident buyers who want maximum specification per euro and don’t need a control panel or hand-holding.
• Pricing: CX23 (4 GB) around €3.99, CX33 (8 GB) €8.49, CX43 (16 GB) €15.99, all with 20 TB traffic. Hourly billing, no minimum contract. Verified August 2026.
• The honest catch: IPv4 costs extra, the cheap CX line runs on older hardware generations, and CPX is shared despite costing four times CX — only CCX is dedicated.

What Is Hetzner?

Hetzner Online is a German hosting company operating its own datacentres, best known for undercutting the American clouds by a wide margin on raw compute. Where DigitalOcean charges roughly $6.00 per gigabyte of RAM on its Basic Droplets, Hetzner’s CX line works out near €1.00 per gigabyte — a difference large enough to change what projects are viable.

It sells cloud servers (the CX, CAX, CPX and CCX lines), dedicated servers, storage boxes and a load balancer, with a console that assumes you know what a VCN is and documentation that is accurate but sparse compared with DigitalOcean’s teaching library.

The trade is explicit and consistent: you get the hardware, not the platform. There is no marketplace of managed databases, no first-class Terraform ecosystem to match the American clouds, and no control panel unless you install one.

How Hetzner Works

The plan lines are the thing to learn, because the naming does not follow the price:

CPX costs more than four times CX and is still shared. If you buy it expecting isolation because of the price, you have bought an expensive shared server. Only CCX carries a dedicated-core guarantee, and it delivers 4 vCPUs at 16 GB where the €15.99 CX43 gives 8 shared ones.

The CX line is Hetzner’s cost-optimised tier, which the company is upfront about: it runs on proven — meaning older — hardware generations, and availability in that line is sometimes limited by region. For the workloads it serves, an older CPU at 8 cores generally beats a newer one at 2.

Billing is hourly with no minimum contract, from roughly €0.0088/hour, and deleting a server mid-month bills only the hours it existed. One caveat: Hetzner rounds up to full hours, so a six-minute server costs an hour — fine for anything measured in days, less efficient than per-second providers for very short jobs.

DDoS protection is included free at layers 3 and 4 across all products, with automated detection; Hetzner has deployed Nokia Deepfield Defender across its European datacentres. Application-layer attacks remain your problem, which the documentation states plainly rather than obscuring.

Hetzner Pricing

Verified August 2026, in euros, reflecting the 15 June 2026 price adjustment:

Two commercial details that are easy to miss.

IPv4 addresses cost extra. The CX23 is about €3.99 without one and €4.49 with — so the advertised figure may describe an IPv6-only server. On a sub-€5 plan that is 10–15% of the bill, and an IPv6-only box cannot reliably reach the parts of the internet that have not adopted IPv6.

Legacy pricing can end when you touch the server. Hetzner’s own price-adjustment page notes that “certain changes to servers with legacy pricing may trigger a switch to the current pricing.” A flat rate is flat until you rescale — worth knowing before resizing an older, cheaper instance.

Who Should Use Hetzner

Buy it if you are comfortable on a command line, want the most specification per euro available, and your workload is a server rather than a platform. For batch processing, self-hosted applications, development environments, game servers, CI runners and anything memory-hungry, the arithmetic is not close.

Don’t buy it if you need a control panel, want managed databases and object storage on the same bill, need a US-centric footprint with many regions, or want a support organisation that will administer the box for you. Those are real products and Hetzner does not sell them.

It is also not the right first server for a non-technical beginner. There is no panel, the console assumes competence, and signup sometimes triggers identity verification that surprises people.

Honest Pros and Cons

Pros

• The best price per gigabyte of RAM in mainstream hosting, at roughly €1.00/GB
• 20 TB of traffic included across the cloud range
• Hourly billing with no minimum contract and no promotional-renewal ladder
• Free L3/L4 DDoS protection on all products, recently upgraded to Nokia Deepfield Defender
• ARM options (CAX) at genuinely low prices for stacks with ARM builds
• Own datacentres and a long operating history

Cons

• The plan naming actively misleads — CPX costs 4× CX and is still shared
• IPv4 addresses billed separately
• The cheap CX line runs on older hardware generations with occasional regional stock limits
• EU-centric footprint with fewer US regions than the American clouds
• No control panel, thin managed-service ecosystem, documentation that informs rather than teaches
• Signup can require identity verification
• Prices adjusted in June 2026, and rescaling a legacy-priced server can move it onto current rates

Hetzner Alternatives and How It Compares

Against DigitalOcean — the clearest trade in hosting. DigitalOcean costs roughly six times as much per gigabyte and answers with managed databases, object storage, a first-class API and Terraform provider, the best documentation in the industry and a US-centric footprint. If your server is one node in infrastructure managed as code, that premium buys real engineering time. If it is one box running one stack, Hetzner wins on arithmetic and it is not close.

Against Hostinger — Hostinger is cheaper on introductory pricing and includes a control panel, weekly backups and one-click installers, making it a far better first server. Its advertised rates require long prepaid terms and roughly double at renewal, while Hetzner’s price is simply the price. Hostinger also gives fewer vCPUs at the same memory tier.

Against Contabo — Contabo is the only mainstream provider cheaper per gigabyte, with more storage at every tier and flat pricing. The trade is performance variance: Contabo’s shared vCores are oversubscribed more aggressively and benchmark results differ noticeably between customers. Hetzner is the more consistent of the two.

Against Liquid Web — different products entirely. Liquid Web sells managed infrastructure with a published support scope and a team that will administer the server. Hetzner sells the server.

The Verdict

Hetzner is the correct answer to a specific question — how much computer can I rent for the money? — and on that question nothing mainstream beats it except Contabo, which trades away consistency to get there.

The catalogue is the hazard, not the company. A buyer who reads “CPX” as premium and pays €69.49 for a shared 16 GB server, when €15.99 buys the same memory with the same eight shared cores and more traffic, has made a €650-a-year mistake inside a provider chosen for being cheap. Learn the four letters before you learn anything else: CX is cost-optimised shared, CAX is shared ARM, CPX is shared AMD, and CCX is the only dedicated line.

Beyond that, the caveats are ordinary and manageable: budget for IPv4, expect older silicon on the cheap tier, accept a European footprint, and bring your own panel if you want one. What you get in return is 20 TB of traffic, hourly billing with no lock-in, free DDoS filtering, and a price that does not double in year two — which, after a run through this market, is rarer than it should be.

FAQ

How much does Hetzner cost?

Verified August 2026, after the 15 June 2026 price adjustment: CX23 with 2 vCPU and 4 GB at about €3.99, CX33 with 4 vCPU and 8 GB at €8.49, and CX43 with 8 vCPU and 16 GB at €15.99 — all including 20 TB of traffic. IPv4 addresses are charged separately, adding roughly €0.50.

What is the difference between Hetzner CX, CPX, CAX and CCX?

CX is the cost-optimised line on shared Intel cores and older hardware generations. CAX is shared Ampere ARM. CPX is shared AMD despite costing several times CX. CCX is the only line with dedicated vCPUs. Price does not indicate dedication in this catalogue, which is the single most common way people overpay here.

Is Hetzner cheaper than DigitalOcean?

Substantially — roughly €1.00 per gigabyte of RAM against about $6.00 on DigitalOcean Basic Droplets, so around six times cheaper on that measure. DigitalOcean’s price includes managed services, a mature API and better documentation, so the comparison is only decisive if you will not use those.

Does Hetzner include DDoS protection?

Yes, free on all products, at layers 3 and 4, with automated detection and Nokia Deepfield Defender deployed across its European datacentres. Application-layer (layer 7) attacks are not covered — pair it with a reverse proxy such as Cloudflare if you run a web application.

Does Hetzner charge for IPv4?

Yes, separately. A CX23 is around €3.99 without an IPv4 address and about €4.49 with one. That is 10–15% of the bill at this price point, and an IPv6-only server cannot reliably reach services that have not adopted IPv6, so budget for it unless you are certain.

Will my Hetzner price change?

Hetzner adjusted cloud prices effective 15 June 2026. Its documentation also warns that “certain changes to servers with legacy pricing may trigger a switch to the current pricing” — so if you hold an older, cheaper instance, rescaling it may move you onto current rates. There is no promotional-renewal ladder, though: the listed price is the ongoing price.