Hetzner Cloud Review 2026: The Famous Prices Are Europe-Only. Here Is What the US Actually Costs.

The two Hetzners

Most Hetzner reviews, including the previous version of this one, describe a single product: a $4 or $5 server with 20 TB of traffic that embarrasses everything DigitalOcean and Vultr sell. That product exists. It is sold in three European datacenters (Falkenstein and Nuremberg in Germany, Helsinki in Finland), and only there.

Hetzner's US locations, Ashburn and Hillsboro, get a different catalog with different product codes and different prices. Hetzner's pricing pages make this explicit: each plan row lists the countries it can be ordered in, and the price API returns per-location pricing. Reading those pages line by line in September 2026 gives the picture below. Nothing in this review is measured by us; every number is Hetzner's own.

Two more facts from the same pages. First, the CX22, CX32, CX42 and CX52 plans that older articles (and older versions of this site) quote no longer exist; they were replaced by CX23, CX33, CX43 and CX53 at higher prices. Second, when we read the cost-optimized page in September 2026, every CX and CAX plan carried a "not available" label, which is the provider's way of saying the line is sold out. That is a stock status on one day, not a permanent fact: it can change without notice, so check the page for the plan and location you want before you plan around it. The prices are real; availability is whatever the page says today.

The European catalog: CX, CAX, CPX

Prices are monthly, in USD as quoted by Hetzner's price API for the Falkenstein location, excluding the €0.50 / $0.60 primary IPv4 add-on (September 2026). Nuremberg and Helsinki are the same price.

The CX and CAX lines are the reason Hetzner has a reputation. CX23 gives 4 GB of RAM and 20 TB of traffic for less than DigitalOcean charges for 1 GB. The ARM CAX11 is a dollar more and, for stacks that run on ARM (Node, Python, Go, most Docker images), gets you Ampere cores at the same size. If a European location is acceptable for your users and the plan is in stock, nothing in this price range on any US provider matches it, and that includes the $3 InterServer slice, which has half the memory and a tenth of the traffic.

The CPX line is the same regular-performance product Hetzner sells in the US, at EU prices: CPX12 is $13.49 in Falkenstein and does not exist in Ashburn, where the smallest regular plan is CPX11 at $20.49. Hetzner does not publish why the US SKUs cost more; the datacenter partners and traffic pricing are the plausible reasons, but that is our reading, not Hetzner's statement.

The US catalog: CPX11 to CPX51 and CCX

These are the only plans orderable in Ashburn (ASH1) or Hillsboro (HIL1). Monthly USD, excluding the $0.60 IPv4 add-on (September 2026).

The line that matters for most readers of this site is the first one. $20.49 for 2 GB with 1 TB of traffic is a normal plan at a normal price. The 20 TB figure that circulates in Hetzner discussions does not apply here, and neither does the sub-$7 price.

The CCX line is where the US catalog gets interesting. Dedicated vCPU at $50.99 for 2 cores and 8 GB is competitive with DigitalOcean's and Vultr's dedicated-CPU tiers, and for databases, CI runners and anything that suffers under noisy neighbours, it is the plan to compare, not CPX11.

What a US buyer pays, against US providers

Same-day prices for the closest plan to 2 GB of RAM in a US datacenter, from each provider's own pricing page or public API (September 2026):

If the US price is what sent you here, the InterServer setup guide covers the alternative the paragraph above describes: what a $3 slice includes, what the order form asks and what arrives afterwards. If the workload is WordPress, the Webuzo on InterServer guide is the included-panel path. Hetzner's US plan does have 2 vCPU where the others have 1, and NVMe rather than SSD. Whether that is worth double Vultr's price and seven times InterServer's depends on whether your workload is CPU-bound; for the small web and application servers most people run on 2 GB, memory and traffic are the limits, and Hetzner has the least of both.

What Hetzner does better than its price class

The reasons developers stay with Hetzner after the price stops being the argument are all in the console and the API. Every cloud server, in any location, comes with the same feature set: a REST API with an official CLI (hcloud), a maintained Terraform provider and Ansible modules, cloud-init on every image, snapshots and scheduled backups, cloud firewalls, private networks, floating IPs, placement groups and load balancers. Billing is hourly with a monthly cap, so a server that lives two hours costs two hours. None of that is unusual at DigitalOcean or Vultr. What is unusual is getting it at $6.49, and the implementation is just as clean at $20.49.

Two limits are worth stating plainly. There are no Windows images on Hetzner Cloud at all, so a Windows server means a US provider (InterServer's Windows line starts at $10, and the Windows RDP guide is the first hour after that order; Vultr and Hostinger also sell it). And support is by ticket; there is no phone line and no live chat. For an infrastructure-as-code team that is normal; for someone who wants to call when the site is down, it is a reason to look elsewhere.

Traffic, IPv4 and the other line items

• Included traffic is per location: at least 20 TB per month in Germany and Finland, 1 TB in Ashburn and Hillsboro, 0.5 TB in Singapore. Traffic beyond the allowance is billed per TB at a rate shown on the pricing page for each region.
• Primary IPv4 is a separate line item on every plan: €0.50 / $0.60 per month. Hetzner lets you skip it and run IPv6-only, which is a real saving on fleets and a real inconvenience for a single web server.
• Snapshots and backups are priced separately on the pricing page; automated backups are a percentage of the server price, snapshots are billed per GB. Check the current figures before you enable them on many servers.
• Dedicated servers and the Server Auction (refurbished bare metal at low monthly prices) are a Robot-side product available in the German and Finnish datacenters only. They are outside the scope of a US VPS review, but they are the other reason Hetzner has a following.

If you need a US datacenter

The recommendation for a reader of this site, which is about US-hosted servers, is that Hetzner is rarely the price pick in the US. The three plans in the table above cover the common cases:

• Lowest monthly price for 2 GB in a US location: InterServer at $3 per slice (1 core, 2 GB, 40 GB SSD, 2 TB), in New York, Los Angeles or Dallas, billed month to month with no refund and no hourly option. Our InterServer review covers the trade-offs and the setup. See current InterServer plans.
• Lowest monthly price for 4 GB in a US location, the size CX23 sells in Europe: OVHcloud VPS-1 at $5.35 (2 vCores, 4 GB, 40 GB NVMe, unlimited traffic, daily backup included) in Virginia or Oregon, or InterServer's two slices at $6 with a Dallas or New York City option.
• Hourly billing, API and nine US regions: Vultr at $10 for 2 GB; the closest thing to Hetzner's tooling on US soil. Vultr review.
• Dedicated vCPU in the US: this is the one case where Hetzner's US catalog competes on price. Compare CCX13 ($50.99) against the dedicated-CPU tiers at DigitalOcean and Vultr before deciding.

Affiliate link: BestUSAVPS may earn a commission if you buy from InterServer through the link above. Other provider links on this page are plain links.

If a European location is acceptable, the calculation flips back: CX23 or CAX11 in Falkenstein is the cheapest 4 GB server on this site, subject to stock, and the round trip from the US East Coast to Germany is roughly 90 to 110 ms. Our US vs EU VPS page goes through when that latency is acceptable and when it is not.

Who should use Hetzner, and who should not

Use Hetzner if your users are in Europe or split across the Atlantic; you manage servers with Terraform, Ansible or the API and want the same workflow in both regions; you need dedicated vCPU in a US location at a fair price; or you are building on the cheap EU plans and can tolerate the latency and the stock situation.

Do not use Hetzner if you need one small server in the US and care about the monthly bill (InterServer or Vultr are cheaper); you need Windows; you want phone support; or your traffic in a US location will exceed 1 TB a month, where the overage changes the math quickly.

Rating for US buyers: 4.2 out of 5. The tooling is first-rate and the EU pricing is unmatched; the score is held back by the US catalog's pricing, its 1 TB allowance, the absence of Windows, and the stock warnings on the lines that made Hetzner famous.