Hetzner Review 2026: Plans, Pricing, and Who It’s Actually For
Hetzner has built its reputation on one simple pitch: European-grade infrastructure at low prices. It’s a German company that has run its own data centers since the 2000s, not a reseller, and that ownership is a real part of why its pricing looks the way it does.
It’s also easy to misread that low pricing as a compromise. Hetzner runs real dedicated servers, a full cloud VPS lineup, and object storage, and it has expanded well past its European roots into North America and Singapore. Understanding the actual trade-off, and it is a real one, takes more than the sticker price.
3.3/5 (Based on Trustpilot)
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This review is built from Hetzner’s own published documentation plus named independent sources. See “How We Evaluated Hetzner” near the end, and our Methodology page, for what that means.
Pros and Cons
✓ Pros
- ✓ Among the most competitively priced cloud and dedicated servers in the industry
- ✓ Owns and operates its own data centers rather than reselling capacity
- ✓ Wide product range: shared cloud, dedicated vCPU cloud, dedicated bare-metal servers, object storage
- ✓ Strong compliance posture for a company this size: ISO/IEC 27001:2022, BSI C5 Type 2, PCI DSS v4.0
- ✓ Simple, published EUR pricing with hourly billing on cloud plans
- ✓ API and console access included at every tier
✗ Cons
- ✗ General support inquiries are handled Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm Central European Time, not 24/7
- ✗ No Windows Server image offered as a standard one-click option in the Cloud console, self-installed via a custom image instead
- ✗ Historically Europe-centered infrastructure, expansion to North America and Asia is recent and still smaller than the European footprint
- ✗ Has drawn public criticism for how it has handled a small number of government takedown and service-suspension requests (see About Hetzner)
- ✗ Doesn\'t hold a SOC 2 report, by its own published documentation, worth knowing if your compliance checklist specifically requires one
Hetzner Review Summary
| Best for | Cost-conscious developers and small teams, especially with a European-based audience |
| Starting price | €3.99/mo (CX23 shared cloud, 2 vCPU / 4GB RAM) |
| Data center locations | Owned facilities in Germany and Finland, plus North America and Singapore |
| Uptime SLA | Published per-product SLA, see Reliability section |
| Support channels | Ticket, console-based chatbot, 24/7 technical support for hardware issues, limited weekday hours for general inquiries |
| Free trial/credit | Not published as a standing offer on Hetzner’s own pricing pages |
| Compliance | ISO/IEC 27001:2022, BSI C5 Type 2, PCI DSS v4.0, audited by TÜV Rheinland |
Good fit if you: want the lowest realistic price for real cloud or dedicated server specs, are comfortable with SSH and Linux administration, have an audience mostly in Europe, or care about a provider owning its own physical infrastructure rather than reselling someone else’s.
Look elsewhere if you: need 24/7 live phone or chat support for general account questions, want a one-click Windows Server image, or need a SOC 2 report specifically for a compliance requirement.
Pricing & Plans
Hetzner publishes exact EUR pricing for every plan, with hourly billing available on cloud instances. Pricing on the Cost-Optimized cloud line changed in April 2026, current published tiers:
BX11 Storage Box |
BX21 Storage Box |
BX31 Storage Box |
BX41 Storage Box |
AX41-NVMe Dedicated Server |
EX44 Dedicated Server |
AX41-NVMe ECC |
Shared Resources Cloud |
Regular Performance Cloud |
General Purpose Cloud |
vServer MC30 |
vServer MC60 |
MA80 Managed Server |
MA130 Managed Server |
Webhosting S |
Webhosting M |
Webhosting L |
Webhosting XL |
Storage Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
€3.20
/mo |
€10.90
/mo |
€20.80
/mo |
€40.60
/mo |
€38.40
/mo |
€44.00
/mo |
€42.40
/mo |
€4.49
/mo |
€6.49
/mo |
€16.49
/mo |
€34.00
/mo |
€54.00
/mo |
€79.00
/mo |
€139.00
/mo |
€1.60
/mo |
€4.12
/mo |
€8.32
/mo |
€16.72
/mo |
Starting at €4.29
/mo |
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All cloud plans include 20TB of traffic and add roughly €0.50/mo for a dedicated IPv4 address. Because Hetzner has changed cloud pricing more than once in recent years, and dedicated server auctions and configurations shift often, always check Hetzner’s own current pricing page rather than treating any table, including this one, as permanently current.
A real cost example: the CX33 shared instance most small production sites would actually use runs €6.49/mo on paper. Add a Storage Box for offsite backups (starting around €3.20/mo for 1TB) and the dedicated IPv4 surcharge, and a realistic total lands closer to €10/mo, still well under what most competitors charge for comparable specs.
Refund policy and trial: Hetzner doesn’t publish a standing free-trial credit on its own pricing pages the way some competitors do. Check Hetzner’s current promotions and terms directly before assuming a specific trial or refund path exists.
Full, current pricing for every configuration: Hetzner Cloud
Use Cases
Budget-conscious production hosting
The Cost-Optimized cloud line gives small production sites and APIs real specs at a price well below many comparably-specced competitors, without moving to a shared-hosting plan.
European-audience projects
Hetzner's owned data centers in Germany and Finland are a strong fit for anything where EU latency and data residency matter.
Self-managed dedicated workloads
Hetzner's dedicated server line and server auction give access to real bare-metal hardware at prices well below most managed dedicated hosts, for teams that don't need a managed layer on top.
Backup and archival storage
Storage Box plans, priced by the terabyte, are a straightforward fit for offsite backups and archival data separate from a compute instance's own disk.
Hostinger Hosting Types
Hetzner’s product lineup splits into a few distinct lines, worth knowing before comparing the wrong tier against a competitor:
Shared Web Hosting
Entry-level shared hosting with free SSL, unlimited traffic, and 14-day rolling backups. Best for personal sites and small projects hosted in Europe.
Cloud Servers (VPS)
Scalable cloud instances with hourly billing, 20 TB of included traffic, and full root access. Available across four server families: CX, CAX, CPX, and CCX.
Dedicated Servers
Bare-metal servers with full hardware control. Hetzner even runs a server auction platform where you can rent older hardware at heavily discounted rates.
Managed Servers
Managed hosting with server administration handled by Hetzner’s on-site technicians. Suitable for businesses that need power without full self-management.
VPS Hosting
High-performance virtual private servers with KVM virtualization. Plans include NVMe SSD storage, free DDoS protection, and IPv4/IPv6 addresses.
Colocation
House your own hardware inside Hetzner’s ISO 27001:2022 certified data center parks in Nuremberg, Falkenstein, and Helsinki.
Detailed Features
About Hetzner
Hetzner was founded in 1997 by Martin Hetzner in Gunzenhausen, Bavaria, Germany, where it remains headquartered. The company began by reselling server capacity before building its first owned data center park in Falkenstein around 2008 to 2009, later adding a second park in Nuremberg and a facility in Tuusula, Finland.
It expanded into North America (Ashburn, Virginia and Hillsboro, Oregon) around 2021 to 2022 and opened a Singapore location in 2024, reaching one million active cloud instances in 2025, per Hetzner’s own published company history.
Hetzner has also faced public criticism over how it has handled a handful of government-related takedown and service-suspension requests over the years.
That includes briefly complying with a Russian request to block a Ukrainian news site in 2014 (later apologized for), blocking a Russian opposition newspaper’s site in 2016, suspending a Ukrainian state information site in 2022 (attributed to a technical error), ending service for Russian customers in 2023 to 2024, and removing a Ukrainian media project’s site in 2025 over unpaid hosting fees.
Worth knowing if a provider’s track record on content-related requests matters to your use case. None of these are security incidents, they’re policy and moderation decisions.
Sources: Hetzner on Wikipedia, Hetzner’s Story, Hetzner blog
Performance Data
Hetzner’s published specifications and certifications provide the baseline. Independent benchmark data from an external testing service adds real, measured performance evidence on top of that.
What independent benchmarking shows
VPSBenchmarks.com runs its own automated performance trials against Hetzner instances on a recurring basis, tracking CPU, disk, network, and stability. This is a benchmarking database, not another site’s editorial review of Hetzner, citing it adds independently measured data without leaning on a competing review for the facts.
One tier from VPSBenchmarks’ most recent published trial:
| Plan | Web performance | Raw CPU | Stability | Disk I/O | Network | Source |
| CCX13 (dedicated vCPU) | Grade E (5.7/20) | Grade E (5.3/20) | Grade E (3.8/20) | Grade D (9.0/20) | Grade C (13.3/20) | VPSBenchmarks.com, trial dated August 29, 2025 |
The tested instance ran an AMD EPYC-Milan processor, took an average of 25 seconds to provision, and scored 71 out of 100 on VPSBenchmarks’ consistency measure, meaning individual servers of this plan type showed comparatively reliable performance across repeated trials. VPSBenchmarks also notes 6 Hetzner data center locations across 3 continents (Finland, Germany, Singapore, and the United States) at the time of testing.
Note the price VPSBenchmarks recorded for this CCX13 trial (€43.49/mo) is notably higher than Hetzner’s current published CCX13 rate (€12.49/mo) found elsewhere in this research. That gap likely reflects a pricing change since the trial ran, or a different billing configuration in the test.
Either way, treat the trial’s grades as the useful data point here, and check Hetzner’s own pricing page directly for the current rate rather than the trial’s listed price.
This is one tested tier from one benchmarking service at one point in time, not a full picture of Hetzner’s performance across its lineup. Worth weighing against Hetzner’s price advantage rather than reading in isolation. A cheaper instance scoring lower on raw synthetic benchmarks isn’t necessarily a bad trade, it depends what your workload actually needs.
Source: VPSBenchmarks.com, Hetzner performance data. These figures reflect a specific instance tested at a specific point in time by an independent benchmarking service, not a guarantee of what any given new deployment will see.
Reliability and network
Hetzner doesn’t publish one single blanket uptime percentage the way some competitors headline a “100% SLA.” Its cloud terms and service-specific documentation describe availability commitments per product rather than one universal number, check the specific SLA for the product you’re deploying before treating any percentage as a guarantee.
Hetzner’s Finland-to-Germany route connects over C-Lion1, a submarine cable owned and operated by the Finnish company Cinia, not by Hetzner itself. Hetzner is a capacity customer on that route rather than an owner of the cable, worth stating precisely since the two are easy to conflate.
Security and compliance
| Certification | Notes |
| ISO/IEC 27001:2022 | Certificate published by Hetzner |
| BSI C5 Type 2 | Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security cloud computing criteria catalogue |
| KRITIS-V / NIS-2 | Classified as an operator of critical services under German regulation, certified per Section 8a BSIG |
| PCI DSS v4.0 | Via certified payment provider Computop; compliance seal issued by USD AG |
Hetzner’s own security documentation explicitly states it does not hold SOC 2, NIST, BSI Grundschutz, or COBIT certifications, choosing to concentrate on the standards above instead. External audits of its technical and organizational security measures are conducted by TÜV Rheinland. Worth checking directly if your specific compliance checklist requires a certification not on this list.
Sources: Information Security at Hetzner, Hetzner Docs
Support & Usability
The control panel: Hetzner Cloud Console and Robot
Hetzner’s cloud products are managed through its Cloud Console, and dedicated servers through a separate system called Robot. Both include API access, and Hetzner publishes an official Terraform provider for infrastructure-as-code deployment.
There’s no drag-and-drop site builder and no managed setup service bundled into standard plans. You’re expected to configure the server yourself.
What Hetzner’s own documentation says about support
General account, billing, and order inquiries are handled Monday through Friday, 8am to 6pm Central European Time, per Hetzner’s own published support hours. Technical support for data center hardware issues (hard resets, KVM access, equipment replacement) is available around the clock. Available channels include a ticket system, a chatbot for prospective customers, and Hetzner’s Robot and Console interfaces for existing customers.
Hetzner doesn’t publish a stated response-time SLA for ticket support. HostingGuider could not independently verify a current Trustpilot rating for Hetzner’s own domain directly at the time of writing, so no specific figure is cited here, check Trustpilot’s own page directly for the current number.
Sources: Support Team Opening Hours, Hetzner Docs, Hetzner Support Center
Skills you actually need
Hetzner doesn’t configure anything beyond spinning up the instance itself. Comfort with SSH and basic Linux command-line administration is effectively required, and Windows Server needs a self-installed custom image rather than a one-click option.
If none of that sounds familiar yet, a managed hosting provider will get you running faster. Hetzner’s product model rewards existing server-management skill rather than teaching it. Its infrastructure is also strongest for a European audience specifically, based on where its data centers sit, not on measured latency data from other regions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Hetzner good for WordPress?
It can host WordPress via a cloud instance, but it’s not a managed WordPress host. You’re responsible for installation, updates, security, and performance tuning yourself, or via a third-party control panel layered on top.
Why is Hetzner so cheap?
Hetzner owns and operates its own data centers rather than reselling capacity, and runs a comparatively lean product lineup focused on cloud and dedicated compute rather than a wide range of managed services. That ownership model is the main reason its published prices run well below many competitors at comparable specs.
Does Hetzner offer phone support?
General inquiries have published weekday business hours (Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm CET) rather than a 24/7 live phone line, per Hetzner’s own support documentation. Technical support for hardware-level data center issues is available around the clock.
Where are Hetzner’s servers located?
Owned data center parks in Falkenstein and Nuremberg, Germany, and Tuusula, Finland, plus colocation facilities in Ashburn, Virginia and Hillsboro, Oregon in the US, and a Singapore location opened in 2024. Check Hetzner’s own site for the current full list, as it continues to expand.
Does Hetzner support Windows hosting?
Not as a standard one-click OS image in the Cloud Console. Windows Server can be self-installed using a custom image, but it isn’t offered as a managed option the way Linux distributions are.
Is Hetzner reliable?
Hetzner publishes availability commitments per product rather than one single blanket uptime percentage, check the specific SLA for the product you’re deploying. Independent benchmark data (see Performance Data above) showed comparatively strong consistency scores in recent third-party trials.
Does Hetzner include DDoS protection?
Per Hetzner’s own documentation, network-level DDoS protection is included rather than sold as a separate paid add-on.
Is Hetzner good for SEO?
Hetzner’s own infrastructure choice (server location, uptime, response time) is one input into page speed and reliability, both minor ranking factors, but SEO outcomes depend far more on content, site structure, and off-page factors than on which host you pick. A European-based site benefits from Hetzner’s EU data center latency specifically, an audience outside Europe may see less of that advantage.
Is Hetzner good for beginners?
Not particularly. It assumes comfort with SSH and Linux server administration and offers limited weekday-hours support for general account questions. If you’ve never managed a server before, a managed hosting provider will be a smoother start.
How does Hetzner compare to DigitalOcean?
Both are developer-focused providers with transparent pricing, but Hetzner’s prices are typically lower at comparable specs, in exchange for a smaller non-European footprint and less generous support hours. DigitalOcean’s broader managed-service ecosystem and wider global region list are its clearer advantages. The right choice depends on your audience’s location and how much you value managed extras over raw price.
Our Verdict
Hetzner is a capable, cost-focused infrastructure provider that owns its own data centers and backs that ownership up with genuinely low pricing on both cloud and dedicated hardware.
It’s not built for hand-holding, 24/7 live support, or a non-European-first audience.
Based on the published data above, Vultr is worth considering if:
- You’re comfortable managing your own Linux server
- Price per spec is a top priority
- Your audience is mostly in Europe
- You want a provider that owns its own infrastructure rather than reselling it
Look elsewhere if:
- You need 24/7 live support for general account questions
- You want a one-click Windows Server option
- Your compliance checklist specifically requires a SOC 2 report
- Your audience is concentrated outside Europe and North America
Alternative Reviews
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How We Evaluated Hetzner
This review is based on Hetzner’s own published pricing, product documentation, security and compliance pages, supported by independent public benchmark data where cited.
Hetzner sells products from under €4/month shared cloud instances to full dedicated servers, this review covers the overall lineup and public track record, not a performance guarantee for any specific plan.
See our Methodology page for how HostingGuider defines Hands-On Purchase, Provider-Provided Access, and Research-Based evaluations. Some links on this page are affiliate links, see our Affiliate Disclosure. See our Editorial Guidelines for how we fact-check and correct content like this.