Hetzner Cloud Review 2026: Benchmarks, Pricing, and the Real Trade-offs

Hetzner has been running datacenters in Germany since 1997, but for most of that history it was primarily known as a European dedicated server provider. Its cloud product, Hetzner Cloud, arrived in the late 2010s and reset expectations for what budget VPS pricing could look like.

For most of the years since, the pitch was simple: comparable specs for a fraction of what DigitalOcean or Vultr charged. European developers adopted it quickly, then American developers followed. 2026 tested that pitch. When we benchmarked a 2 vCPU / 4 GB CX23 in March, it cost €2.99/month. After two price adjustments, on 1 April and 15 June, it now lists at €5.99/month including an IPv4 address, roughly double. Hetzner's Regular Performance line was hit far harder: the 2 vCPU / 4 GB CPX22 went from €5.99 to €19.99, and at the time of writing it isn't offered for new servers at all.

Correction and update, October 2026: An earlier version of this review identified the benchmarked server as a CPX22. Our billing records show it was a CX23, Hetzner's Cost-Optimized plan with 2 vCPU, 4 GB of RAM, and 40 GB of storage. We've corrected the plan name and every comparison built on it, and updated all prices for Hetzner's 15 June 2026 price adjustment. Prices reflect Hetzner's current list prices as shown on its website: excluding VAT and including one primary IPv4 address, which Hetzner now bundles into the displayed price. The benchmark results themselves are unchanged and come from the CX23 we provisioned in March 2026. See Hetzner's price adjustment page for the full before-and-after tables.

The question worth asking now is whether the CX23 still delivers the value that made Hetzner the default budget choice, and what the CPX repricing means if you need more than the cost-optimized line.

This review answers that with real benchmark data. We provisioned a CX23 instance in Hetzner's Helsinki (hel1) datacenter and ran YABS twice to measure disk I/O, network throughput, and CPU performance. Then we went beyond the numbers to cover support, reliability, security, billing, and what Hetzner's 2026 pricing changes mean for you if you're buying today.

Quick verdict

What Hetzner Cloud offers

Hetzner Cloud's compute lineup is organized around Cloud Servers (their term for virtual machines) in two broad categories: Shared vCPU for general-purpose workloads and Dedicated vCPU for production and compute-intensive jobs.

Under Shared vCPU, Hetzner splits plans by processor type:

• Shared Cost-Optimized (CX-series): general-purpose shared instances on Intel or AMD hardware with NVMe SSD storage in a local RAID10. The cheapest entry point on the platform and available only in EU regions. This is what we benchmarked. Hetzner's cloud page marks it "Currently not available", but at the time of writing the Cloud Console listed the CX plans as the only shared plans you can create.
• Shared Regular Performance (CPX-series): AMD EPYC shared instances, available globally including the US and Singapore. Delivers meaningfully stronger single-core performance than the CX tier. At the time of writing, CPX plans don't appear in the Cloud Console for new servers.
• ARM64 (CAX-series): Ampere Altra-based instances, now the best-value line Hetzner sells after the June adjustment, suitable for workloads compiled for ARM or containerized applications running multi-architecture images. CAX plans didn't appear in the Console's shared plan list during our October check.

Under Dedicated vCPU, which Hetzner's website now lists as General Purpose, the CCX-series offers AMD EPYC cores where no neighboring tenant can contend for your CPU time, designed for production databases, CI/CD pipelines, and anything where performance consistency under load matters more than raw price.

Beyond compute, Hetzner Cloud includes load balancers, managed Kubernetes, object storage (S3-compatible), volumes (attachable block storage), private networks, firewalls, and DNS management. Backups and snapshots are built in at predictable per-GB pricing.

It is a more focused product than DigitalOcean or Vultr. There is no managed database service, no container registry, and no PaaS app deployment layer. What Hetzner offers, it does well. What it doesn't offer, you'll need to build or source elsewhere.

Account registration and verification

One thing worth knowing before you commit: Hetzner sometimes requires identity verification for new accounts, particularly for accounts being created outside of Germany or paying with certain methods. This can mean submitting a passport scan or government ID before your first server can be provisioned.

This is not universal. Many accounts are approved automatically, but it's common enough to trip up developers who want to spin up a server immediately. The process is generally completed within a business day once documentation is submitted.

A newer hurdle sits on top of verification. Since 26 June 2026, Hetzner's status page has carried a "Limited availability of cloud instances" notice: because of high demand and limited hardware supply, Hetzner restricts the creation of new cloud servers for new customers and for some randomly selected existing customers, and it says individual requests can't be prioritized. A verified account no longer guarantees you can provision a server the same day. If you're evaluating Hetzner under a deadline, register early and confirm in the Console that the plan you want can actually be created in your chosen location.

Payment methods accepted include credit/debit cards and PayPal. Hetzner does not currently accept cryptocurrency.

Setup and first impressions

Hetzner Cloud's provisioning interface, the Cloud Console, is the simplest in this benchmark series. Everything fits on a single page with no second screen, no upsell funnel, and no clutter. The form flows top to bottom: plan type, location, OS image, networking, SSH keys, and optional extras.

For this review we provisioned a CX23: 2 vCPU / 4 GB RAM / 40 GB SSD in the Helsinki (hel1) datacenter. Hetzner operates this from Tuusula, Finland, about 30 minutes from central Helsinki. The instance ran Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Monthly cost at the time of benchmarking was €2.99/month excluding IPv4. The same plan lists at €5.99/month including IPv4 today, and at the time of writing it's one of the plans the Console lets you create.

The first choice is the plan, split into Shared Resources and Dedicated Resources tabs. When we ran our benchmarks in March 2026, the Shared tab was divided by processor type into Cost-Optimized (CX-series, Intel/AMD), Regular Performance (CPX-series, AMD EPYC), and ARM64 (CAX-series, Ampere Altra), and we picked the CX23 from the Cost-Optimized tab:

When we returned to the Console in late October 2026 for this update, the same tab listed only the four CX plans, from the CX23 to the CX53, with no CPX or CAX options:

We didn't provision or re-test a server for this update, so the benchmarks below still reflect the March CX23. Each plan card shows vCPU count, RAM, disk, included traffic, hourly rate, and monthly cap, and the Console shows prices for your billing country, so they may include VAT. All plans use NVMe SSDs in a local RAID10 on the host system, providing fault tolerance and high I/O performance across every tier and region.

Location comes next. The selector in our test showed Nuremberg (Germany), Falkenstein (Germany), Helsinki (Finland), Ashburn (US East), and Hillsboro (US West), and Hetzner also offers a Singapore location for the CPX line. The selector notes that private networks, load balancers, primary IPs, and volumes must share the same location or network zone as the server, which is a useful reminder when building multi-resource stacks. For European workloads, the German and Finnish options are geographically dense and well-peered at major exchange points. Note that included transfer is far lower outside Europe: US plans include 1 to 5 TB depending on plan size, and Singapore plans 0.5 to 5 TB, compared to 20 TB for every European plan. Overage is charged at €1.00/TB in EU and US, and €7.40/TB in Singapore.

Image selection follows location. OS support covers Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, CentOS Stream, AlmaLinux, and Rocky Linux, with the most current release of each available. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is the default. An Apps tab offers pre-configured images including WordPress, Docker, LAMP, and Nextcloud, pre-installed and ready to use on first boot.

Networking is next, with three options: public IPv4 and IPv6, IPv6 only, or private network only (which requires selecting a private network first). A primary IPv4 address costs €0.50/month whether or not it is attached to a running server. IPv6 is free. SSH keys follow networking: keys saved to your account appear as checkboxes, and adding one means no root credentials are sent by email. After SSH keys, the form exposes optional extras in order: Volumes (up to 10 TB SSD block storage), Firewalls, Backups (automated daily snapshots at 20% of the server price), Placement groups, Labels, and Cloud config for cloud-init scripts up to 32 KiB.

Benchmarks (YABS)

I ran Yet Another Bench Script (YABS), the standard benchmark used across the LowEndTalk community, twice on fresh instances to verify consistency.

To run it on your own Hetzner instance:

curl -sL yabs.sh | bash

To save results as JSON for cross-provider comparison:

curl -sL https://yabs.sh | bash -s -- -w results.json

Both runs were conducted in March 2026 on Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS, kernel 6.8.0-90-generic, KVM virtualization, Helsinki, Finland. Disk figures are averaged across both runs; network figures are from the second run, which had fewer busy endpoint collisions.

CPU

Processor  : AMD EPYC-Rome Processor
CPU cores  : 2 @ 2445.404 MHz
AES-NI     : ✔ Enabled
VM-x/AMD-V : ❌ Disabled
RAM        : 3.7 GiB

Geekbench 6 scores:

Full results are available for Run 1 and Run 2.

The two runs show normal variance for a shared-CPU instance. Single-core scores of 964 and 914 reflect host-level load variation rather than instability. The working average of ~939 single-core is the more useful planning number.

That average sits about 20% above DigitalOcean's Basic Droplet (772 single-core) and at roughly half of what Vultr's AMD EPYC-Genoa instance delivers. The gap to Vultr is explained by silicon generation: the CX23 ran on EPYC-Rome at 2.4 GHz, while Vultr's High Performance AMD tier uses newer EPYC-Genoa with higher clock speeds and better IPC.

Price changes how you should read that. At €5.99/month, about $7.09, the CX23 costs less than a third of Vultr's $24 plan, so you're trading roughly half the single-core performance for about 70% off the bill. If you need more CPU, Hetzner's Regular Performance CPX22 runs on newer EPYC-Genoa hardware and independent benchmarks put it at around 2,000 single-core, but at €19.99 it now costs about the same as Vultr's instance and wasn't orderable in the Console at the time of writing. For consistently CPU-saturating workloads, the dedicated-vCPU CCX13 starts at €43.49/month, about seven times the CX23.

The VM-x/AMD-V flag shows disabled, which is standard for shared-CPU instances where nested virtualization is not exposed to the guest. This is irrelevant for typical application workloads.

Disk I/O

fio results averaged across both runs:

The 4k random IOPS figure of ~40.9k is solid and consistent across both runs. It lands well below Vultr's 118k IOPS result, though Vultr's plan costs more than three times as much, and direct comparison is complicated by workload conditions and host-level variance on shared storage. Sequential throughput scales well: 1.54 GB/s combined at 64k block sizes, approaching 3 GB/s at 1m, consistent with the NVMe RAID10 local storage that Hetzner uses across all plans and regions.

The YABS fio test runs mixed read/write at 50/50, so absolute throughput numbers will be lower than single-direction benchmarks. For most web application workloads, these numbers are sufficient. Teams where 4k random IOPS is a hard bottleneck (high-write databases, dense logging pipelines) should evaluate the CCX Dedicated vCPU series, which guarantees CPU and storage resources without noisy-neighbor contention.

Network

The server is in Helsinki, and the results show Hetzner's home advantage clearly. IPv4 results from the second run:

*The NYC receive anomaly (115 Kbits/sec) was a test endpoint issue. Run 1 returned 1.42 Gbits/sec to the same location and is more representative.

The European results are the standout. Amsterdam clocked 8.08 Gbits/sec send at 28.8 ms, the highest throughput in this benchmark series for that direction. London returned 5.02/5.22 Gbits/sec send/receive at 38 ms. Hetzner's network peers directly at DE-CIX (Frankfurt) and AMS-IX (Amsterdam), and for workloads serving European users, these numbers represent a genuine infrastructure advantage. After the June price change, this is the part of the review that still separates Hetzner most clearly from its competitors.

The picture changes across the Atlantic and into APAC. NYC sits at 131 ms, Los Angeles at 157 ms, Singapore at 184 ms. These figures are the honest cost of running from Helsinki when your users are not in Europe. For US-facing workloads, Hetzner's Ashburn or Hillsboro regions close this gap. For APAC audiences, Singapore is Hetzner's only Asian location, with much smaller transfer allowances, and there is no Australian datacenter.

IPv6 performance matches IPv4 across European endpoints: 7.41–7.93 Gbits/sec to Amsterdam, 4.20+ Gbits/sec receive to London. IPv6 is first-class here, not an afterthought.

Control panel and management

Hetzner Cloud's Cloud Console is fast, minimal, and visually uncluttered. It loads instantly, the navigation is obvious, and every common operation is within two or three clicks of the server list. No dashboard banners, no upsell prompts in the UI, no navigation elements that exist primarily to surface other products.

After provisioning, the server detail page shows status, public and private IP addresses, usage graphs (CPU, disk, network, traffic), and a browser-based console. Action menus expose power controls, networking configuration, snapshot management, and resize options.

Notable management features:

Firewalls. Stateful, free, and applied at the infrastructure level, not as an iptables wrapper inside the VM. Define inbound and outbound rules, assign a named firewall set to one or more servers, and changes propagate immediately. Reusable across a fleet without per-server rule management.

Placement groups. Configure servers to always land on different physical hosts, reducing the blast radius of a hardware failure. Available at no extra cost and set at provisioning time. This is an operational resilience feature that neither DigitalOcean nor Vultr offer as a first-class provisioning option.

Volumes. Attachable block storage at €0.057/GB/month. Detachable and reattachable, useful for separating persistent data from stateless compute.

Snapshots. On-demand full disk images at €0.014/GB/month. Useful for recovery points, staging copies, and pre-upgrade checkpoints.

Backups. Automated daily snapshots at 20% of the instance cost, retaining up to 7 backups. Because backups are priced as a share of the server, they rose with it: for the CX23, that's about €1.10/month, up from €0.60 in March.

Private Networks. Layer 3 virtual networks connecting servers within a project, for isolating backend services from public internet exposure without firewall rule complexity.

Cloud-init support. Pass user data at provisioning to automate first-boot setup. Combined with the Hetzner API or Terraform provider (both actively maintained), reproducible infrastructure is straightforward.

Browser Console. In-browser terminal access that bypasses SSH entirely. No additional configuration needed when a firewall rule locks you out.

Support

Hetzner offers 24/7 support by ticket and email for cloud products, available around the clock every day of the week. Phone support is available but restricted to dedicated server customers who have activated a telephone password; it does not extend to cloud VPS products.

There is no live chat. For cloud products, your channel is the ticket system via the Hetzner Console, and response quality is generally considered competent when they engage. The platform's stability means most teams rarely need to open a ticket, and Hetzner's 350+ community tutorials cover the majority of common issues.

For teams running production systems with tight on-call SLAs, the absence of phone support for cloud products is worth factoring in. Hetzner's philosophy leans toward stable, self-service infrastructure rather than managed hand-holding. On the CX line, where the price is still a fraction of the competition's, that trade-off is easy to accept. On the CPX line, you're now paying DigitalOcean-level rates for a leaner support model.

Uptime and reliability

Since 16 March 2026, Hetzner has published a 99.9% monthly availability SLA for each cloud server. If a server misses that threshold, you can claim compensation as Cloud Credits, calculated from the instance's hourly rate for the downtime beyond the 43-minute allowance. Credits are offset against future Hetzner Cloud usage rather than paid out. The compensation is modest: Hetzner's own worked example credits €0.87 for roughly three hours of downtime. DigitalOcean's SLA targets 99.99%, so teams with contractual uptime requirements should still read both sets of terms closely.

In practice, independent monitoring and community reports show Hetzner Cloud performing reliably for running servers. The platform's architecture is KVM-based virtualization on their own hardware in their own datacenters, which gives them direct control over maintenance windows and hardware replacement. Hetzner is vertically integrated in a way most providers are not: they own their physical infrastructure rather than reselling from a hyperscaler.

The reliability question that matters most in 2026 is capacity rather than uptime. The limited-availability restriction in place since June affects your ability to create or rescale servers, not servers that are already running. If your high-availability plan depends on spinning up replacement or additional instances quickly during an incident, test that you can actually do so in your locations before relying on it. Spreading existing instances across Nuremberg and Helsinki, or adding an Ashburn instance, still provides meaningful redundancy, and placement groups help with physical host diversity within a single datacenter.

Security and data privacy

Hetzner is a German company subject to strict EU data protection law and GDPR-compliant by default across all datacenter regions. European data residency is the platform's baseline. Your data does not leave the EU unless you explicitly provision in Ashburn, Hillsboro, or Singapore. For companies with data residency requirements or EU-facing compliance obligations, this is a meaningful structural advantage over US-headquartered providers.

Built-in security features included at no extra cost:

DDoS protection. Basic DDoS mitigation is included free of charge on all cloud servers with no opt-in required. Hetzner's network infrastructure absorbs volumetric attacks before they reach your instance. This is handled at the network level, without any configuration step on your part.

Firewalls. As covered above: stateful, infrastructure-level, free, and applied before traffic reaches the VM.

Private networks. Isolate backend services from public internet exposure with no additional cost.

SSH key authentication. The default authentication method. Password-based root login is disabled by default on clean installs.

On certifications, Hetzner states that its data center parks in Germany and Finland are ISO/IEC 27001 certified and that it holds C5 certification from Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI). It does not advertise SOC 2 or PCI DSS for cloud products, so if your auditors require those reports specifically, larger cloud providers may be more appropriate.

Billing model

Hetzner bills hourly, capped at the monthly rate. You pay by the hour for as long as a server exists (including while it's powered off), but the bill is capped at the monthly price. There are no surprise overages at month end for compute, and no termination fees.

The hourly cap model means short-lived instances (for CI/CD jobs, batch processing, or spinning up a staging environment for a day) are billed at their actual usage rather than a full month. Combined with sub-30-second provisioning, this makes Hetzner practical for ephemeral workloads, provided capacity is available when you need it.

Servers accrue charges from creation until deletion. Powering off a server stops compute activity but keeps the disk and IP reserved, and billing continues. To stop accruing charges completely, you need to delete the instance (snapshot it first if you need to restore it later).

If you run servers created before 15 June 2026, one billing rule now matters more than any other: rescaling moves a server to current pricing. The June prices apply to new orders and to cloud instance rescales, and Hetzner notes that certain other changes to servers with legacy pricing can also trigger the switch. On the CPX and CCX lines, a routine resize can more than double a server's monthly cost, so check Hetzner's billing FAQ before you touch a grandfathered instance. Deleting one has a similar catch: with new capacity restricted, you may not be able to create the same plan again.

Transfer is included generously in European regions (20 TB/month on every plan). Overage rates are modest and clearly documented. US plans include 1 to 5 TB/month and Singapore plans 0.5 to 5 TB/month depending on size, so factor that into your region selection if bandwidth volume matters.

The ecosystem

Hetzner Cloud's managed service layer is intentionally narrower than DigitalOcean or Vultr. No hosted database product, no container registry, no PaaS deployment platform, and no built-in CDN. What Hetzner does offer around its compute core:

Load Balancers. Starting at €7.49/month for the LB11, handling up to 25 services and 10,000 connections, with HTTP, HTTPS, and TCP support and TLS termination included.

Managed Kubernetes (HKE). Worker nodes are provisioned as Cloud Server instances, so platform familiarity carries over. The Kubernetes control plane is free; you pay only for worker nodes and associated resources, which means node costs follow the June server prices. Auto-scaling node groups and integrated load balancers are supported.

Object Storage. S3-compatible storage starting at €6.49/month base, available in Nuremberg, Falkenstein, and Helsinki. Not available in US datacenter regions.

Dedicated Servers. Accessible under the same account as Hetzner Cloud. Dedicated servers were also repriced and restructured into fixed configurations in June, but they remain a competitive source of bare-metal compute, and the path forward stays in the same billing account.

The absence of managed databases is the most significant gap for teams wanting a single-provider stack. PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, and message queue services all require either self-hosting on Hetzner Cloud instances or introducing a third-party provider like Supabase, PlanetScale, or Upstash. That's a real operational cost. On the CX line, the compute savings can still pay for that work. On the CPX line, at today's prices, they mostly can't.

Documentation and community

Hetzner's official documentation covers the essentials accurately: server provisioning, the API, networking, Kubernetes, and CLI usage. It is not as comprehensive or tutorial-rich as DigitalOcean's documentation library, which remains the industry standard. Hetzner doesn't invest in SEO-driven community content at the same scale, and it shows for less common configuration scenarios.

What the official docs don't cover, community resources often do. The LowEndTalk forums have active Hetzner threads, the Hetzner subreddit is well-trafficked, and the platform's popularity among European developers means third-party guides are easy to find. The Hetzner Community site hosts user-contributed tutorials, though quality varies more than on DigitalOcean's curated library.

For debugging or advanced configuration, expect to rely on general Linux and cloud administration resources rather than Hetzner-specific documentation. This is not a blocker for experienced teams, but it's worth naming for developers new to self-managed infrastructure.

Hetzner's 2026 price increases

Hetzner changed its cloud prices twice in 2026. The first adjustment, announced on 23 February and effective 1 April, raised cloud server prices by roughly a third and applied to existing servers as well as new orders. The CX23 went from €2.99 to €3.99/month, and the CPX22 from €5.99 to €7.99.

The second, announced on 27 May and effective 15 June at 8 AM CEST, applied only to new orders and rescales, and it hit the product lines very unevenly. Hetzner cited a sharp rise in hardware procurement costs and did not publish a percentage. Calculated from its own adjustment tables for Germany and Finland, which quote prices without IPv4:

Across the year, the CX23 we benchmarked has gone from €2.99 to €5.49, an increase of about 84%, while the CPX22 went from €5.99 to €19.49, about 225%. Load balancers, volumes, snapshots, and object storage kept their April prices in June.

Our take on Hetzner's pricing

The underlying cost pressure is real. Memory and flash prices rose steeply through the first half of 2026 as AI datacenter demand absorbed supply, and a provider that owns its own hardware feels that directly. Protecting running servers from the June increase was also the right call: if you don't rescale, you keep paying April's rate.

The execution is harder to defend. The second increase arrived ten weeks after the first, with less than three weeks' notice, and it landed hardest on the CPX and CCX lines, the ones Hetzner itself steers production workloads toward. Hetzner's Regular Performance page still advertises the CPX line as its "best price-performance ratio", but at €19.99 for 2 vCPU and 4 GB, the CPX22 now costs about the same as a $24 DigitalOcean or Vultr instance, so the label no longer describes a discount. For new buyers, the CPX price is also partly academic: at the time of writing, the Cloud Console doesn't offer CPX plans at all, which leaves the CX line, the one that took the smallest increase, as the only shared option you can create. And the rescale rule turns a routine operation into a pricing event, which punishes exactly the incremental scaling that hourly cloud billing is supposed to make painless.

None of that makes Hetzner a bad provider, and the plan we tested is still a bargain. It does mean Hetzner's value now rests almost entirely on the Cost-Optimized line. If you price a new CPX deployment today, treat Hetzner as a peer of DigitalOcean and Vultr, not a discount alternative to them.

Pricing

All prices below are Hetzner's current list prices for Germany and Finland as displayed on its website, excluding VAT and including one primary IPv4 address. Remove roughly €0.50/month per server if you run IPv6-only. Benchmarks in this article were run in March 2026 on a CX23, which then cost €2.99/month excluding IPv4.

Shared Regular Performance AMD, CPX-series. Not offered for new servers in the Cloud Console at the time of writing:

Shared Cost-Optimized, CX-series, EU only. Lowest prices. Marked unavailable on Hetzner's website, but listed and orderable in the Cloud Console at the time of writing:

ARM64, CAX-series, EU only. Not listed in the Cloud Console during our October check:

Dedicated vCPU, CCX-series, listed as General Purpose on Hetzner's website:

US and Singapore regions: The US runs the older CPX11 to CPX51 plans, priced higher than Europe and with far less transfer. In dollars, including IPv4, the CPX11 with 2 vCPU and 2 GB costs about $21.09/month, the CPX21 with 3 vCPU and 4 GB about $38.09/month, and the CPX31 with 4 vCPU and 8 GB about $74.09/month. In Singapore, the CPX22 costs about €26.99/month with 1 TB of transfer. The CX and CAX series are EU-only.

Additional resources, all locations. None of these changed in the June adjustment:

Pricing context. At €5.99/month including IPv4, or about $7.09 when billed in dollars, the CX23 we benchmarked costs roughly 70% less than the $24/month DigitalOcean Basic Droplet and Vultr High Performance AMD instances benchmarked in this series, and it beat the Droplet on single-core CPU in our tests. The trade-offs are half the disk, 40 GB against 80 GB, and roughly half the single-core score of Vultr's instance. The CPX22, by contrast, now lists within half a dollar of both, which is why the CX line is where Hetzner's value lives in 2026.

What also survives is the transfer allowance: 20 TB a month in European regions against DigitalOcean's 4 TB and Vultr's 5 TB on their $24 plans. If you move a lot of data, that difference can outweigh everything else on this page.

Final thoughts

Hetzner's value story survived 2026, but only on one product line. The CX23 we benchmarked still costs less than a third of a comparable DigitalOcean or Vultr instance, even after its price nearly doubled, and it beat DigitalOcean's Basic Droplet on single-core CPU in our tests. Vultr's instance was faster on CPU and random disk I/O, at more than three times the price.

What Hetzner still does better than either competitor is Europe. You get 20 TB of included transfer, exceptional intra-EU throughput, EU data residency, and ISO 27001 and C5-certified datacenters. If your workload moves a lot of data to European users and fits in 40 GB of local disk, the CX23 remains an easy recommendation.

The weak spots are availability and the rest of the lineup. The CPX line now costs about what DigitalOcean and Vultr charge, Hetzner's website marks the cost-optimized plans as unavailable even while the Console sells them, and new capacity has been restricted since June. If you already run servers bought before 15 June, leave them alone: you keep your old rate until you rescale, and you may not be able to create a replacement. If the Console lets you create a CX23 today, it's still one of the best deals in cloud hosting, so don't wait for the next price adjustment to find out whether it still can.

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