Hetzner Alternatives in 2026: What Actually Costs Less Now

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Updated 13 October 2026, second change. Tied the “cheaper per GB” wording to the 29 August price check and the plans compared (CX23, CX33 and CAX11: 2.9–4.9× less per GB of RAM than DigitalOcean and Vultr), put the CX and CAX availability checks of 2 and 8 September and 13 October next to the advice for new orders, corrected the CPX substitute range to 3.1–4.2× as listed in our availability check, scoped the EU-only wording to the EU prices in this table, gave the US and Singapore traffic allowances by plan as Hetzner’s page shows them on 13 October, and removed two support-quality remarks we had not verified.

Updated 13 October 2026. Corrected CPX22 to 2 vCPU, as Hetzner lists it (its price and per-GB figures were already for this plan), and tied the “now” and “cheapest” wording to the 29 August 2026 price check.

Updated 8 September 2026. Clarified that the dollar figures beside Hetzner’s euro prices are our own conversion and not what Hetzner bills a dollar account, since Hetzner publishes a separate USD rate card.

Updated 6 September 2026. If the alternatives you have in mind are European rather than American, note that netcup (new orders +24.33% from 19 March 2026, existing contracts +18.51% from 1 May), Scaleway (1 June: compute about +2%, Flexible IPv4 +25%, Block Storage +10%) and OVHcloud (1 October: local disk and IPv4 billed separately, the same configuration +1.4% to +21.9%) all raised prices in 2026 as well. The dated figures, in each vendor’s own wording, are in our 2026 European cloud price ledger. The comparison below is unchanged and still uses the prices verified on 29 August 2026.

The “Hetzner alternatives” articles we read after June mostly said the same thing: prices went up, here are some other providers. The ones we read did not put Hetzner’s new rate card next to what DigitalOcean, Vultr and Hostinger charged on the same date.

When you do that, the answer is not “Hetzner got expensive.” It is stranger and more useful than that:

Hetzner’s June increase split its own lineup in two. On the 29 August 2026 rate card, the shared Intel and Arm plans in the table below (CX23, CX33 and CAX11) cost about three to five times less per GB of RAM than DigitalOcean and Vultr, though every CX and CAX plan showed as not available for new orders on 2 and 8 September and again on 13 October. The AMD and dedicated-vCPU lines are now priced at parity with them, which means the reason you chose Hetzner over DigitalOcean no longer exists on those plans.

Which side of that split you are on decides everything. Here is the arithmetic.

All prices verified 29 August 2026. Hetzner figures are the post-15-June rate card for Germany/Finland, excluding VAT, converted at €1 = $1.1642. That conversion is our arithmetic, not a price Hetzner charges. Hetzner publishes its own USD rate card, selectable from the currency control on its site, and a vendor USD list price is set independently rather than tracking the euro figure day by day. If you are billed in dollars, read Hetzner in dollars; the euro column here is what a euro-billed account pays and the dollar figure beside it exists only so the per-GB ranking has one unit. The rate is held fixed across the whole table rather than tracked daily. For scale: the European Central Bank’s euro reference rate for the dollar was $1.1622 on 7 September 2026, so the rate used here sits about 0.2% above the reference rate on that date. It will drift. If you are budgeting rather than ranking, apply a current rate to the euro column instead of reading the dollar column as fixed.

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Price per GB of RAM, checked 29 August 2026

We did not find this comparison in the articles we read, and it is the one that answers the question.

Included traffic is the other difference: Hetzner includes 20 TB per server in the EU, against 1–5 TB in the US and 0.5–5 TB in Singapore depending on the plan (CPX plans on Hetzner’s regular-performance page, 13 October 2026). That split is often the real reason to stay or go, see what a TB of bandwidth costs everywhere else.

Sources: Hetzner price adjustment notice, DigitalOcean, Vultr, Hostinger.

A necessary caveat before anyone quotes that table at me. Dollars per GB of RAM is the right first cut for memory-bound workloads, databases, n8n, Ghost, most self-hosted apps. It is the wrong cut for CPU-bound work. Hetzner’s CCX line is dedicated vCPU and DigitalOcean’s Basic droplets are shared; comparing them on RAM alone flatters the shared plan. Read the table as “what does memory cost,” not “which server is faster.”

With that said, look at where the lines fall.

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What the increase actually did

Same table, before and after 15 June:

Before June, every Hetzner line sat between $0.94 and $2.33 per GB. The whole lineup was cheap and you barely had to think about which one you picked.

After June, the lineup runs from $1.24 to $6.26. That is not a price increase; that is a repositioning. CPX and CCX left the budget tier.

And $5.67–$6.26 is the interesting number, because DigitalOcean is $6.00 and Vultr is $5.00. If you are on CPX or CCX, Hetzner is no longer undercutting the providers you passed over. It is priced alongside them.

Recurring protection costs can also change the total: our current Hetzner backup and snapshot costs show the 20% Backup fee and per-GB Snapshot break-even for five plans.

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The trap that costs more than the increase

Hetzner’s notice states the new pricing applies to “new orders and cloud instance rescales.”

That means your existing servers are still on old pricing. A CPX22 provisioned in 2025 is still €7.99, and resizing it moves it onto the current card at €19.49. Up or down; the notice does not distinguish direction.

So under that notice, the single most expensive action available in your Hetzner console is the Rescale button. If you are sitting on old CPX or CCX rates, treat resizing as a pricing decision, not a capacity decision. Sometimes the correct move is to leave an oversized server exactly where it is.

This is also why “should I migrate?” has a different answer than “what should I buy next?” Your old servers are an asset. Your next server is a fresh decision.

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What to do, by which line you are on

You run CX or CAX. Stay. Even after a 31% increase, CX33 at $1.24/GB is the cheapest memory on this page outside Hostinger’s promo, and CX23 at $1.60/GB is beaten only by a Hostinger promo that reverts. Nothing here justifies a migration.

You run CPX or CCX on old pricing. Do not rescale. You are holding rates that no longer exist. When you genuinely outgrow the box, that is the moment to re-run this comparison, because at $5.67–$6.26/GB you are paying US-provider prices for the EU locations priced in this table.

You are buying new and you want the cheapest memory. Hetzner CX33 ($1.24/GB) if it is available in a region you can use. Hostinger KVM 2 is $1.12/GB on promo (cheaper on paper) but that is a two-year prepay at $215.76 up front, and it advertises renewal at $14.99/mo ($1.87/GB). Both numbers are real; which one applies depends on how long you keep it.

Availability is now the binding constraint on that advice: on 2 September 2026 CX33 and every other CX and CAX plan showed as not available for new orders, and the orderable CPX substitutes cost 3.1x to 4.2x more. Still not available when re-checked on 8 September 2026, now flagged on Hetzner’s public Cost-Optimized page as well, and still marked not available on that page on 13 October 2026. Check which Hetzner plans you can actually order before planning around the $1.24 figure.

You need a US or Asia region. Hetzner also has US and Singapore locations, but they include 1–5 TB (US) or 0.5–5 TB (Singapore) of traffic depending on the plan, instead of 20 TB, and are not priced in this table. Among the providers compared here: DigitalOcean at $6.00/GB or Vultr at $5.00/GB. That premium used to be hard to justify against Hetzner. Against post-June CPX and CCX pricing, it is no longer a premium at all.

You want one more provider to compare that is not in the table. AccuWeb Hosting sells Linux VPS plans in 16+ data center locations across North America, Europe and Africa, and Asia Pacific. It is not in the comparison above, so no figure in this article applies to it. Its advertised monthly price is an introductory rate that renews higher, so compare the renewal rate for the billing term you would actually choose, the bandwidth allowance, the region you need and how much server management is included before treating it as an alternative to the providers above. Check AccuWeb Linux VPS terms (paid link)

You would rather not run the server at all. That is a different purchase from anything in the table above. Managed hosting sits on top of these same clouds: on Cloudways a 1 GB DigitalOcean server is $11 a month against $6 for the identical Droplet bought directly, so the management layer costs roughly 1.8 to 2.0 times the machine, and several times what a CX plan costs. Nothing about the June increase makes that trade cheaper. It is a question about what an hour of your time is worth, which we put numbers on in managed hosting vs a VPS you run yourself, with the current rate cards in Cloudways pricing, or straight from Cloudways’ own price list (affiliate link, disclosed at the end of this page), and DigitalOcean vs Vultr on Cloudways.

You need dedicated CPU specifically. This is the case where the table above misleads you. Compare CCX against DigitalOcean’s Premium/Dedicated droplets and Vultr’s High Frequency line, not against Basic, and expect the gap to be much narrower than the RAM math suggests.

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The thing nobody can tell you from a table

When I checked Hetzner’s cost-optimized page on 28 August 2026, every CX and CAX plan rendered as “currently unavailable” with no price shown. The rate card is real and official; whether you can provision the server you want, in the region you want, this week, is a separate question that changes constantly.

That is the honest reason to have a second choice ready even if Hetzner is your first. Not because the price is wrong, because the capacity might not be there when you need it. Our full VPS price comparison has the alternatives with current numbers.

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Why two increases in one year, and will there be a third

Hetzner raised prices on 1 April and again on 15 June 2026. It has not published a detailed rationale, and I will not invent one.

What is observable from the table: the increases are steepest on the compute-dense products (CPX, CCX) and mildest on the small shared instances. That pattern is consistent with capacity and energy costs, but that is inference from a price list, not a statement from Hetzner.

The practical takeaway is about planning, not prediction. Two increases in five months means Hetzner pricing is no longer the fixed point you can size a three-year project around. Whatever you budget, budget for movement.

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FAQ

Is Hetzner still the cheapest VPS? Not outright. On our 29 August 2026 prices the shared CX and CAX lines cost $1.24–$1.74 per GB of RAM against $5.00–$6.00 at the US providers; only Hostinger’s KVM 2 promo was lower, at $1.12/GB. On CPX and CCX, no longer.

Did my existing server get more expensive? No. The increase applies to new orders and rescales. An untouched running instance keeps its old rate.

Does downgrading also reprice me? Hetzner’s notice says “rescales” without specifying direction. Treat any resize as repricing until you have confirmed otherwise in your own console.

Is Hostinger actually cheaper than Hetzner now? On promotional pricing, KVM 2 is $1.12/GB against Hetzner CX33’s $1.24/GB, marginally. That promo requires paying two years up front, and the advertised renewal is $14.99/mo, which is $1.87/GB. Over four years the two land close together, and Hetzner wins on flexibility.

What about the US and Singapore Hetzner regions? Priced on separate rate cards, higher than Germany/Finland. If you need those regions, run the comparison against DigitalOcean and Vultr in the same region, the gap narrows considerably.

Should I move off Hetzner entirely? Only if you are on CPX or CCX and buying new capacity, or if you need a region or a support relationship Hetzner does not offer. A working CX server on old pricing is one of the better deals available and moving it costs you money.

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Hetzner prices are the post-15-June-2026 rate card for Germany/Finland excluding VAT, taken from Hetzner’s own price adjustment notice and converted at €1 = $1.1642 on 29 August 2026. Competitor prices are from each vendor’s own pricing page on the same date, all linked above. Currency conversion moves; the euro figures are the authoritative ones. This page is re-checked quarterly. A paragraph on managed hosting was added on 5 September 2026; no price or ranking in this article changed. This page links to each vendor’s own pricing page. One affiliate link was added on 9 September 2026, to Cloudways’ own price list inside the managed hosting paragraph, and is disclosed below. No price, ranking or recommendation changed. A paragraph on AccuWeb Hosting’s Linux VPS, with one affiliate link through the Awin network, was added on 12 October 2026; the plan details it mentions were checked on AccuWeb’s own Linux VPS page on 12 October 2026. No price, ranking or recommendation in the comparison changed.