Hostinger vs Hetzner: The Answer Changed in June 2026

This is the purest time-versus-money pair in hosting, and the usual way of arguing it is useless. One side says Hetzner is obviously cheaper; the other says Hostinger’s panel is obviously worth it. Both are true and neither tells you what to do.

So convert the money into time and the argument resolves.

Matched at every tier

This comparison changed materially in June 2026, and the answer now depends on stock.

Hetzner sells two shared lines. The cheap Intel/Arm CX and CAX tiers, and the AMD CPX tiers. Until this summer you simply bought CX. Both matter now, because when we checked, every plan in the CX and CAX tier was marked not available on Hetzner’s own cost-optimized page, which explains the limited stock as a consequence of running that tier on older hardware.

Read that as two different articles.

If CX is in stock, the old conclusion holds and holds well: Hetzner is cheaper at renewal at 4 and 8 GB and gives double the vCPUs at every tier. Hostinger’s KVM 1 — one core against two, at nearly twice the renewal price — is the starkest case.

If it isn’t, the comparison inverts at the tiers most people buy. A 4 GB CPX22 at €19.99 is more than Hostinger’s $11.99 renewal and over three times its $6.49 intro rate, for the same memory. At 8 GB, €35.99 against $14.99 renewal is not close. Only at 16 GB does the vCPU advantage start to argue for Hetzner again, and even there it’s $75.59 against $28.99.

So: check the cost-optimized page before you assume Hetzner wins. That sentence would have been unnecessary a year ago.

The saving, in hours

Now the number that matters. Take the annual difference at Hostinger’s renewal rates and price it against your own time:

If you can get a CX instance, the entire financial case for Hetzner is worth one to two hours of your year. If you can’t, there is no financial case at all — the CPX line costs $115 to $559 a year more than Hostinger’s renewal rate at the same memory.

That reframes the decision completely. On the CX line the question isn’t “is Hetzner cheaper” — it is. The question is whether Hostinger’s control panel, weekly backups, browser terminal and one-click installers will save you more than about two hours a year compared with administering a bare Hetzner box.

For most people who aren’t already comfortable on a command line, that’s a very low bar. Setting up a panel, configuring backups and verifying they restore will exceed two hours in the first week alone.

For anyone who already runs servers — who has an Ansible playbook, a backup routine and no need for hPanel — the bar is never cleared, and Hetzner on a CX instance is straightforwardly better value with twice the cores.

On CPX, none of this reasoning applies: you would be paying more money for a plainer product. Experienced administrators should still prefer Hetzner’s hardware and network, but should wait for CX stock rather than paying CPX rates to avoid a control panel.

What each side is actually buying

Hetzner gives you compute and predictability. Double the cores at every tier, 20 TB of transfer, flat pricing with no renewal cliff, hourly billing with no minimum contract, and free L3/L4 DDoS filtering. The storage allocation is smaller — 80 GB at the 8 GB tier against Hostinger’s 100 GB NVMe.

Two Hetzner-specific traps worth knowing: the cheap CX line runs on older hardware generations with occasional regional stock limits, and CPX costs four times CX and is still shared — only CCX is dedicated, as we set out in the dedicated CPU guide. Learn the four letters before you buy.

Hostinger gives you the setup hour back. hPanel, weekly backups included, a browser terminal that needs no SSH key, and a one-click catalogue covering OpenClaw, n8n and Docker. For a first server it removes the parts that go wrong.

It costs you half the cores, a 24-month term, and a renewal that roughly doubles.

Who each is wrong for

Hetzner is wrong for you if you want a control panel, you’re new enough to servers that a bare console is a barrier, you need a US-heavy footprint, or you’d rather not meet an identity-verification step at signup.

Hostinger is wrong for you if your workload is CPU-bound — one vCPU at the 4 GB tier is genuinely thin — or you already have your own provisioning and backup tooling, in which case you’re paying for a panel you’ll never open.

Which to choose

Hetzner if you already administer servers. You’ll get twice the cores for less money, permanently, and none of the conveniences you’re paying Hostinger for are things you need.

Hostinger if you don’t, or don’t want to. Two hours a year is a low price for a panel, working backups and one-click deployment — and the honest reading of the table above is that the money difference is too small to justify learning a bare cloud console if you’d rather not.

Either way, budget the renewal. Hostinger’s advertised rates are introductory and roughly double; Hetzner’s are the ongoing price. Over three years that gap is the largest single variable in this comparison, and we costed it in full in Contabo vs Hetzner vs Hostinger.

Check Hostinger VPS pricing → · Read our Hostinger review

Our Hetzner tracking link is currently out of action, so there’s no tracked link for it here — the Hetzner expert review covers the catalogue in detail once it’s live.

How we picked

Prices come from each provider’s pages, verified August 2026: Hostinger KVM 1 at $6.49/$11.99, KVM 2 at $8.79/$14.99 and KVM 4 at $12.99/$28.99 on 24-month terms; Hetzner CX23 at €5.99, CX33 at €8.99 and CX43 at €16.49, and CPX22 at €19.99, CPX32 at €35.99 and CPX42 at €69.99, all as displayed on Hetzner’s own plan pages. Euro figures are converted at approximately $1.08. Hetzner’s displayed price includes its €0.50/month primary IPv4 charge.

A correction to an earlier version of this article. It quoted CX23 at €3.99, CX33 at €8.49 and CX43 at €15.99 and described those as reflecting the 15 June 2026 adjustment. Those figures were below Hetzner’s current published prices, and more importantly the article did not mention that the entire CX and CAX tier was showing as unavailable — which changes the conclusion at the 4 and 8 GB tiers rather than merely the arithmetic. The current numbers, and what the June repricing did to the CPX line, are set out in what a self-hosted agent costs to run on each provider. Hostinger’s own renewal structure is broken down in Hostinger renewal pricing.

The hours conversion uses a $60/hour rate as an illustration — substitute your own. At $150/hour the case for Hostinger’s conveniences strengthens considerably; at $20/hour it weakens.

We have not benchmarked the two. Both are KVM with fast storage, and at these tiers contention matters more than branding.

This page carries one affiliate link, to Hostinger, which is the more expensive option at renewal. Hetzner is unlinked because our tracking link is broken, not because it lost the comparison — on price and cores it wins, and the article says so.

FAQ

Is Hetzner cheaper than Hostinger?

At renewal, yes, at every tier — and it gives twice the vCPUs. The gap is $5.82 to $11.72 a month depending on tier, which annualises to $70–141. Hostinger’s introductory rates are competitive and at 16 GB beat Hetzner, but they need a 24-month prepayment and then roughly double.

Why does Hostinger give fewer cores?

Its plans pair generous RAM and storage with comparatively few vCPUs — one at 4 GB, two at 8 GB, four at 16 GB, against Hetzner’s two, four and eight. For memory-bound workloads that’s fine; for anything that parallelises it’s the most important row in the table.

Which is better for a first server?

Hostinger. The panel, included weekly backups, browser terminal and one-click installers remove most of what goes wrong on a first server, and the price difference works out to one to two hours of your time a year.

Which is better if I already run servers?

Hetzner, clearly. Twice the cores for less money with no renewal cliff, and the conveniences you’d be paying Hostinger for are things you already have in your own tooling.

Does Hetzner charge extra for IPv4?

Yes, roughly €0.50 a month, so the advertised price may describe an IPv6-only server. At the cheapest tiers that’s 10–15% of the bill and worth adding to any comparison.

What’s the catch with Hetzner’s cheap plans?

The CX line is cost-optimised and runs on older hardware generations with occasionally limited regional stock. And the naming is a trap: CPX costs several times CX and is still shared — only CCX has dedicated cores.