Hetzner
German engineering, unbeatable price-to-performance.
The verdict
Hetzner is a German hosting provider famed among developers for extraordinary price-to-performance ratios on both cloud instances and dedicated auction servers, backed by rigorous German data protection standards.
The full picture
Hetzner is a German hosting company founded in 1997 that has quietly become the price-to-performance benchmark that every other provider is measured against. A Hetzner cloud instance with two dedicated vCPU, four gigabytes of RAM, forty gigabytes of NVMe and twenty terabytes of traffic costs about five euros a month. The equivalent at a hyperscaler costs five to ten times as much, largely because of egress pricing that Hetzner simply does not charge at those rates.
The company operates its own data centres in Falkenstein, Nuremberg and Helsinki, added Ashburn and Hillsboro in the United States in 2021, and Singapore in 2024. It builds its own racks, runs a large auction market for used dedicated servers at even lower prices, and invests heavily in renewable energy — the German and Finnish sites run on hydroelectric and wind power.
What you trade for the price is polish and hand-holding. Support is email-based and competent but not instant, the account verification process is stricter than most and can delay signup, there is no managed WordPress product, and the documentation assumes Linux competence. Hetzner is for people who know what they want.
What you get
- Cloud & dedicated auction servers
- Free 20TB traffic
- German data protection
- Simple hourly cloud billing
- Robot server management
Every hosting type it sells
| Product | From | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud servers | $4.15/mo | Shared and dedicated vCPU, ARM and x86, 20TB traffic included. |
| Dedicated servers | $39/mo | Enterprise-grade hardware at prices well below the market. |
| Server auction | $28/mo | Used dedicated hardware at steep discounts, available immediately. |
| Storage boxes | $3.60/mo | Cheap bulk storage over SMB, WebDAV, SSH and rsync. |
| Managed web hosting | $5/mo | Simple shared hosting with a control panel, German market focused. |
Plans & pricing
- 2 vCPU
- 4 GB RAM
- 8 vCPU
- 16 GB RAM
What the price actually costs you
- Prices are quoted in euros and include VAT handling for EU customers.
- No long-term contract on cloud; dedicated servers may carry a one-off setup fee.
- Automatic backups add 20% to the instance price.
- The server auction market is where the deepest dedicated discounts live.
Technical specification
| Control panel | Hetzner Cloud Console and Robot, plus API, CLI and Terraform provider |
|---|---|
| Virtualisation | KVM with shared vCPU, dedicated vCPU and ARM64 Ampere options |
| Storage | NVMe SSD local storage, network volumes, and S3-compatible object storage |
| Traffic | 20TB included on most cloud plans, with very low overage rates |
| Networking | Free private networks, cloud firewalls, floating IPs, IPv6 |
| Backups | Automatic backups at 20% of server price, plus free snapshots |
| Load balancers | Managed load balancers available from a few euros a month |
| Locations | Germany, Finland, United States (two regions), Singapore |
| Energy | Renewable power in the European facilities |
| Support | Email and ticket support in German and English |
| Uptime SLA | 99.9% with credits on cloud products |
Performance in practice
Dedicated vCPU Hetzner cloud instances on NVMe are among the fastest euro-for-euro machines you can rent anywhere, and the included twenty terabytes of traffic removes the egress anxiety that shapes architecture decisions on AWS. European latency is excellent. The United States and Singapore regions are newer and have fewer instance types. The shared vCPU tier is genuinely shared, so production databases belong on the dedicated variants.
Infrastructure & support
Support channels
- Ticket system
- Robot management portal
- Community forum
Data centers
- Germany (Nuremberg, Falkenstein)
- Finland (Helsinki)
- United States (Hillsboro, OR)
- Singapore
Security & compliance
- Free cloud firewalls and private networks between instances
- ISO 27001 certified data centres with biometric access control
- German and EU data protection law, with a strong privacy track record
- DDoS protection included at the network edge at no charge
- Automatic backups and free snapshots, both opt-in
- Strict identity verification at signup, which is a security feature and a friction point
Moving a site in
Self-service. Snapshots, rescue system boot and custom image support make moving in straightforward for anyone comfortable with Linux, but there is no migration team and no managed WordPress import.
The trade-off
In its favour
- Best-in-class value for money
- Strong privacy & compliance
- Reliable network performance
Worth knowing
- Primarily EU data centers
- Support mainly ticket-based
Who should look elsewhere
- Beginners or anyone needing managed hosting and phone support
- Buyers who need a managed WordPress or cPanel product out of the box
- Workloads requiring many global regions
- Accounts that cannot complete the identity verification process quickly
The company behind it
| Ownership | Privately held, founder-led by Martin Hetzner |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Gunzenhausen, Germany |
| Founded | 1997 |
| Scale | Hundreds of thousands of servers across Germany, Finland, the United States and Singapore |
| Energy | German and Finnish facilities run on renewable hydro and wind power |
How it got here
- 1997 Founded by Martin Hetzner in Bavaria.
- 2010 Opens the Falkenstein data centre park, later one of Europe's largest.
- 2018 Launches Hetzner Cloud with per-hour billing and an API.
- 2021 Opens United States regions in Ashburn, Virginia and Hillsboro, Oregon.
- 2024 Adds a Singapore region, its first in Asia-Pacific.
Common questions
What is the Hetzner server auction?
It's a marketplace of discounted, previously used dedicated servers at reduced prices.
The bottom line
The best raw value in hosting, full stop, and the reason many agencies run their own infrastructure instead of buying managed plans. Choose dedicated vCPU instances for production, enable backups, and only buy here if you are comfortable being your own systems administrator.