Pick when you want the lowest credible €/spec ratio in the EU and your traffic is happy on a Falkenstein/Helsinki box. Avoid if you need managed databases/Kubernetes, US/APAC low-latency at scale, port 25 from day one, or a polished support story when account verification trips a flag.
Plans
Verified against Hetzner Cloud's pricing pages.
| Plan | vCPU | RAM | Storage | Transfer | Monthly | Hourly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CX23 (Shared Intel/AMD, EU only) | 2 | 4 GB | 40 GB NVMe SSD | 20 TB | $3.99 | $0.0066 |
| CAX11 (Ampere ARM, EU only) | 2 | 4 GB | 40 GB NVMe SSD | 20 TB | $4.49 | $0.0075 |
| CX33 (Shared Intel/AMD, EU only) | 4 | 8 GB | 80 GB NVMe SSD | 20 TB | $6.49 | $0.0108 |
| CPX22 (Shared AMD, all regions) | 2 | 4 GB | 80 GB NVMe SSD | 20 TB | $7.99 | $0.0133 |
| CAX21 (Ampere ARM, EU only) | 4 | 8 GB | 80 GB NVMe SSD | 20 TB | $7.99 | $0.0133 |
| CX43 (Shared Intel/AMD, EU only) | 8 | 16 GB | 160 GB NVMe SSD | 20 TB | $11.99 | $0.0200 |
| CPX32 (Shared AMD, all regions) | 4 | 8 GB | 160 GB NVMe SSD | 20 TB | $13.99 | $0.0233 |
| CCX13 (Dedicated AMD vCPU, all regions) | 2 | 8 GB | 80 GB NVMe SSD | 20 TB | $15.99 | $0.0266 |
| CX53 (Shared Intel/AMD, EU only) | 16 | 32 GB | 320 GB NVMe SSD | 20 TB | $22.49 | $0.0375 |
| CPX42 (Shared AMD, all regions) | 8 | 16 GB | 320 GB NVMe SSD | 20 TB | $25.49 | $0.0425 |
| CCX23 (Dedicated AMD vCPU, all regions) | 4 | 16 GB | 160 GB NVMe SSD | 20 TB | $31.49 | $0.0525 |
| CPX62 (Shared AMD, all regions) | 16 | 32 GB | 640 GB NVMe SSD | 20 TB | $50.49 | $0.0841 |
| CCX33 (Dedicated AMD vCPU, all regions) | 8 | 32 GB | 240 GB NVMe SSD | 30 TB | $62.49 | $0.1041 |
| CCX63 (Dedicated AMD vCPU, all regions) | 48 | 192 GB | 960 GB NVMe SSD | 60 TB | $374.49 | $0.6241 |
SMTP port 25 (outbound mail)
Deal-breaker for self-hosted mail & transactional email.
On request Blocked, unblocked on request Read more
Outbound TCP/25 and TCP/465 are blocked by default on every new Cloud Server to suppress spam. The block lifts once you (a) have been a paying customer for ~30 days and at least one paid invoice has cleared, and (b) open a support ticket asking for the unblock with a stated, legitimate use case (e.g. transactional mail, MX relay). Port 587 (submission, STARTTLS) is open from day one and works fine with relay providers (SendGrid, Mailgun, Postmark, AWS SES). Once unblocked, Hetzner's PTR records are configurable from the console — making it one of the very few mainstream clouds where self-hosted mail (Mail-in-a-Box, Mailcow, Postfix) is actually practical.
Verified Apr 27, 2026 · source
Capabilities & infrastructure
Known pitfalls
What the marketing pages don't tell you.
Port 25 is blocked for the first ~30 days on new accounts
Outbound TCP/25 and TCP/465 are blocked by default on every new Cloud Server. The block lifts only after you have paid your first invoice (typically ~30 days) AND opened a support ticket asking for the unblock with a stated use case. Port 587 (submission with STARTTLS) is open from day one for relay providers. Plan the timeline if you're standing up self-hosted mail (Mail-in-a-Box, Mailcow) — you'll be relay-only for the first month.
Account verification and abuse handling can flash-suspend you
The single most consistent complaint on Reddit, Hacker News (Ask HN: Hetzner banned me), LowEndTalk and Trustpilot is account suspensions with terse or no explanation — typically 'violation of System Policies' or 'verification failed' — and the appeal path is the same support queue with no escalation tier. New accounts created from VPN exits, residential addresses that don't match billing, or signups that share fingerprints with a previously banned account are the most common triggers. Mitigation: sign up from a clean residential connection, complete ID verification proactively, and never run anything mission-critical without offsite backups before day 30.
April 1 2026 price increase narrowed the value gap by ~33%
Hetzner raised cloud server prices 30-37% across the board on April 1 2026, citing increased infrastructure and hardware costs. The CPX22 went from €5.99 to €7.99/mo. Hetzner is still cheaper than DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Linode at equivalent specs — but the previous 'unbeatable' margin is gone. If your last cost comparison was pre-2026, redo it before signing up.
No managed databases, no managed Kubernetes, no native CDN
Hetzner Cloud is unmanaged compute first, full stop. There's no managed PostgreSQL/MySQL/Redis (run it yourself on a CCX or use Aiven/Neon/Supabase), no managed Kubernetes (community uses the Kube-Hetzner Terraform module to deploy k3s on top of regular Cloud Servers), and no native CDN (front public assets with Cloudflare or BunnyCDN). If you need the full DigitalOcean-style managed-services ladder, this is the wrong provider.
US and Singapore regions ship with tiny traffic allowances
EU plans uniformly include 20 TB outbound — practically unmetered. US CPX/CCX plans include only 1 TB, and Singapore plans include 0.5-8 TB depending on instance type. EU and US overage is €1/TB (cheap), but Singapore overage is €7.40/TB (~7x more). A CPX22 in SIN burning 5 TB/mo would owe €40+ in overage on top of the €7.99 instance price. If you pick ASH / HIL / SIN, model the bandwidth bill explicitly before assuming Hetzner is still the cheapest option.
Support is European business hours for non-emergency issues
Cloud-specific tickets are 24/7/365, but the general support team works Monday-Friday 8-18 CET. There is no 24/7 chat, no phone support for cloud customers (phone is dedicated-server-only), and support is English/German only. Time-zone overlap is genuinely tight if you're operating from US Pacific or APAC and need a non-cloud-ticket category answered.
Trust score breakdown
Scored across six dimensions — an editorial estimate, not a guarantee.
Why 78/100
Hetzner Cloud Console is clean and fast — server creation is genuinely under 60 seconds. The hcloud CLI is well-maintained, the REST API is straightforward, and Terraform/Pulumi/Ansible providers are first-class. One-click apps cover the core self-hosting stack (Coolify, Docker, GitLab, Nextcloud, WordPress, WireGuard). The gap vs DigitalOcean is breadth and polish — fewer Marketplace apps, no App Platform / managed PaaS layer, and the docs feel German-engineered rather than warmly conversational. Sufficient for engineers, less obvious for first-timers.
Why 88/100
Modern AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon hardware, NVMe RAID10 storage across all tiers, ~40k IOPS at 4k random and 1.5 GB/s sequential. Geekbench 6 single-core ~939 — above DigitalOcean Basic, below Vultr High Frequency / EPYC Genoa. EU network is genuinely exceptional (8+ Gbps to Amsterdam, 10 Gbit redundant uplinks); US and Singapore latency to EU is the natural trade-off (130-180ms). For workloads pinned to a single EU region, this is one of the best-performing budget clouds available.
Why 85/100
99.9% per-server SLA with cloud-credit compensation if missed, public status page (status.hetzner.com) with timely incident posts, mature DC operations since 1997. Localised outages happen — the 2024 NBG3 fire and several short FSN1 maintenance windows in 2025 were transparently posted — but the long-term track record is solid. The bigger reliability question is account-level: discretionary suspensions can take a service down with little warning, which is a separate dimension from infrastructure uptime.
Why 65/100
When tickets land in the standard cloud queue, replies are typically fast (often under an hour) and technically competent. Documentation and the community.hetzner.com tutorials site are excellent. The drag is everything outside the happy path: no 24/7 chat, no phone for cloud, English/German only, and Reddit / Trustpilot / HN consistently surface stories of slow or terse handling around verification, abuse reports, and billing disputes. Trustpilot sits at 3.3/5 across ~2,700 reviews, with the bottom-third reviews clustered around exactly those failure modes.
Why 80/100
Public pricing, public SLA, public status page, public docs site, public price-adjustment statement (with the actual reasoning), and a clear changelog on the API. The SMTP port 25 policy and 30-day unblock window are documented in the FAQ. The opacity is around account-level decisions: when an account is suspended or verification fails, the explanation is often 'system policies violated' with no specifics, and that's the consistent complaint across review platforms. Pricing itself is honest; account governance is not.
Why 95/100
Even after the April 1 2026 price adjustment (+30-37% across most plans), Hetzner is still the best price/spec ratio in the mainstream cloud market. CPX22 (2 vCPU / 4 GB / 80 GB / 20 TB) at €7.99/mo undercuts DigitalOcean's $24/mo Basic 2/4 by ~3x at similar performance. EU traffic allowances are practically unmetered (20 TB), backups are 20% flat, and there's no first-term/renewal split. The new pricing narrowed the gap but didn't close it.
Operating systems & apps
Control panel: Hetzner Cloud Console (own); hcloud CLI; full REST API; Terraform / Pulumi / Ansible providers · full root access
Operating systems
One-click apps
Datacenter locations
6 regions worldwide.
Support
Response time: No published SLA — cloud tickets typically answered within ~1h in EU hours, sometimes minutes. No 24/7 chat. No phone for cloud (dedicated-only).
Verified Apr 27, 2026
Community pulse
Sentiment in 2026 is sharply bimodal. The hands-on developer crowd (r/selfhosted, r/sysadmin, Hacker News, LowEndTalk) overwhelmingly recommends Hetzner Cloud as the best price/performance in unmanaged VPS — the running joke is 'just use Hetzner' — and sees the April 1 price increase as still leaving Hetzner ~50-60% cheaper than the US-based alternatives. Trustpilot tells a different story, sitting at 3.3/5 across ~2,700 reviews where the negative cluster is overwhelmingly about account suspensions, verification failures, and abuse-handling: people who hit the happy path love Hetzner, people who trip a flag tend to write detailed angry reviews. The April 1 2026 price hike was widely discussed but mostly accepted — community framing was 'still the cheap option, just less unbeatable than before'.
Sentiment verified Apr 27, 2026
Recent changes
How Hetzner Cloud compares
Top-rated alternatives on the board.
UpCloud
€3 / $3.50 /mo
25 on req
Linode (Akamai Cloud)
$5/mo
25 on req
DigitalOcean
$4/mo
25 blocked
Vultr
$2.50/mo
25 on req