Hetzner's 2026 Price Increase: The Percentage Everyone Quotes Is the Wrong One

Hetzner repriced its cloud line in June 2026, and most coverage reports it as two numbers: a modest 33–38% rise on the cost-optimized CX and CAX lines, and a much steeper one on the dedicated-vCPU CPX and CCX lines.

Both figures are close to irrelevant to anyone actually buying, because of something the percentages don’t capture. The measure that does capture it is price per gigabyte — on which Hetzner now sits second-from-top across the market, at roughly three times Hostinger’s 8GB tier.

The cheap tier is showing as unavailable

Hetzner’s own cloud page carries a “Currently not available” label on its Cost-Optimized plans — the CX and CAX lines. We first saw this weeks ago and re-confirmed it live on 17 August 2026. Hetzner’s status page carries a matching “Limited availability of cloud instances” notice open since 26 June, which is a real consideration for anything production-bound.

So the question isn’t what happened to the CX price. It’s what you pay instead.

A 33% increase on a plan you cannot put in a basket is not a 33% increase. For a 4GB buyer the effective change is 3.34×; at 8GB it’s 4.00×. That’s the number that belongs in the headline.

And one charge that isn’t in any of those figures: Hetzner bills €0.50/month excluding VAT for an IPv4 address, per its own documentation. Small, but it’s per server and it’s outside the plan price.

It wasn’t the only change this year. We’ve logged the 2026 hosting price movements we could verify first-hand — including DigitalOcean’s signup credit dropping from $200 to $5, which almost nothing online reflects yet.

Where that leaves Hetzner against the field

Here’s the part that would have been unthinkable eighteen months ago. Steady-state prices, euro figures converted at approximately 1.08:

At 4GB:

At 8GB:

Hetzner is fifth of six at 4GB and third of four at 8GB. It costs 1.96× the cheapest option at 4GB and 2.59× at 8GB.

For a provider whose entire reputation is being the cheapest serious host in Europe, that’s the story. IONOS gives four vCPUs at 4GB for half Hetzner’s price with two. Hostinger’s 8GB tier is under $15 against Hetzner’s $38.87.

What Hetzner still genuinely wins

This isn’t a “leave Hetzner” article, and three things haven’t changed.

Jurisdiction. Hetzner Online GmbH is registered in Gunzenhausen under Ansbach HRB 6089 — a German company with German data centres and no US parent in the chain. If your requirement names the supplier’s jurisdiction rather than the data’s location, that shortlist is short and Hetzner is on it. Nothing in the repricing changes that.

Latency, if your users are European. We measured its Nuremberg facility answering a German probe in 0.60ms and Falkenstein in 2.94ms, against 98.74ms to its own Ashburn site. The continent decision is worth ~98ms and dwarfs the price difference for a European audience — the full ladder is here.

No promotional ladder. Hetzner’s price is its price. There’s no introductory rate expiring into a renewal cliff, which across the shared hosting market runs to a 268% median increase. You’re comparing a flat number against other people’s temporary ones — and several of the figures above are renewal rates precisely so the comparison is fair.

Also worth checking before you plan around it: Hetzner’s US regions in Ashburn and Hillsboro, and its Singapore region, carry different traffic allowances from the European ones, with Singapore’s overage notably higher.

What to do about it

Hostinger — the direct replacement on price, at $11.99 renewal for 4GB and $14.99 for 8GB, with one-click Docker templates that remove the install step. At 8GB it’s under 40% of Hetzner’s cost for the same memory. The catch is the long prepaid term needed for the promotional rate; the figures above are renewals.

UltaHost — more cores per plan than most at $15.87 for 4GB with 3 vCPU, and structurally unusual: its two-year discounted rate is also its renewal rate, so there’s no year-three cliff at all. If what you liked about Hetzner was pricing you didn’t have to think about, this is the closest analogue.

IONOS — the best value per core we’ve found anywhere, at four vCPUs and 4GB for $11.00, and six vCPUs at 8GB for $21.00. Genuinely European, which matters if jurisdiction was part of why you chose Hetzner — but buy from your local European site, not the .com, because the German imprint names IONOS SE and the .com names IONOS INC. Note the short promotional window.

Cloudzy — $17.37 for 4GB billed monthly with no term, which suits running something in parallel while you decide. Nothing stranded if you change your mind.

DigitalOcean — now only marginally more expensive than Hetzner at 4GB rather than dramatically so, which is itself a comment on the repricing. Buy it for the documentation and API predictability.

ScalaHosting — a different product rather than a cheaper one: managed VPS with its own SPanel included instead of a per-account cPanel licence. Relevant if the Hetzner bill was going up anyway and you’d rather buy management with it.

For the ARM crowd specifically: the CAX line’s unavailability leaves a real gap. ARM instances at this price point are thin on the ground, and none of the alternatives above is a like-for-like replacement — that’s the one case where waiting for CAX availability may genuinely beat switching.

For the normalised view across the whole market, price per gigabyte of RAM is the reference table.

How we checked this

The availability finding is our own, observed directly and twice. Hetzner’s cloud page displays “Currently not available” on its Cost-Optimized plans; we captured that screenshot earlier in this research and re-confirmed the label was still present on 17 August 2026. That is the load-bearing fact in this article and it’s the one we’re most confident in.

The pre-increase CX and CAX prices — CX23 at €5.99 for 4GB, CX33 at €8.99 for 8GB and CAX21 at €10.99 — are read from Hetzner’s own cost-optimized plan table as captured in our Hermes Agent cost analysis, where every row carried a not-available badge. The effective-increase percentages are our arithmetic comparing those to the CPX plans a buyer falls back to.

What we could not verify. The brief for this article described two increases in 2026 — a moderate April adjustment followed by a June standardisation — and asked which existing contracts were grandfathered and until when. We could not confirm a separate April change, and we found no evidence that existing customers were grandfathered, but we have not read Hetzner’s own announcement of the repricing and cannot state its terms. If you hold an older contract, check your own billing rather than trusting either us or the coverage.

We also haven’t independently verified the reported per-line percentages of roughly 33–38% for CX/CAX and 113–176% for CPX/CCX. Our own prior research put the CX and CAX movement at roughly 1.3–1.4× — consistent with the lower figure — and we’ve built the article on the before-and-after prices we read rather than on percentages we didn’t derive.

Comparison pricing is each provider’s steady-state rate from our research across this series in August 2026, converted at approximately 1.08 USD/EUR. These are renewal or flat rates rather than introductory ones, deliberately, so that Hetzner’s flat pricing is compared like for like. Hetzner’s prices exclude VAT.

The latency figures — 0.60ms to Nuremberg, 2.94ms to Falkenstein and 98.74ms to Ashburn from a machine in Germany — are our own TCP measurements to Hetzner’s published per-datacentre speed-test endpoints, described in full in our Germany hosting guide.

What we did not do: hold a Hetzner account, observe a price change on an invoice, contact Hetzner about availability, or establish when or whether the CX and CAX lines will return.

The host links above are affiliate links, and Hetzner — the subject of this article — is one we also earn from, which is worth stating given the conclusion is that it’s no longer the cheapest option at either tier we priced.

FAQ

How much did Hetzner prices increase in 2026?

Reported as roughly 33–38% on the cost-optimized CX and CAX lines and 113–176% on the dedicated-vCPU lines. But the cost-optimized tier has been showing as unavailable, so a 4GB buyer’s real increase is from €5.99 to €19.99 — 234%.

Why can’t I buy a Hetzner CX plan?

Hetzner’s own cloud page has been displaying “Currently not available” on its Cost-Optimized plans. We confirmed the label was still there on 17 August 2026. Hetzner hasn’t told us when or whether they return.

Is Hetzner still the cheapest VPS provider?

No. At 4GB it’s fifth of six providers we price, at $21.59 against IONOS at $11.00, and at 8GB it’s $38.87 against Hostinger’s $14.99. It’s roughly twice the cheapest option at 4GB and 2.6 times at 8GB.

What should I use instead of Hetzner?

Hostinger for straight price, IONOS for cores per dollar and a European entity, UltaHost if you want pricing that never changes. For ARM specifically there’s no good like-for-like replacement, which is the one case for waiting.

Is Hetzner still worth it for anything?

Yes — a German legal entity with German data centres, sub-millisecond latency within Germany, and flat pricing with no promotional cliff. If jurisdiction or European latency is why you chose it, the repricing doesn’t change that reasoning.

Were existing Hetzner customers grandfathered?

We found no evidence that they were, but we haven’t read Hetzner’s own announcement and can’t state its terms. Check your own billing.

Does the Hetzner price include an IP address?

No. IPv4 addresses are charged separately at €0.50/month excluding VAT, per Hetzner’s documentation, and that’s outside every plan price quoted here.