Hetzner Alternatives in Late 2026: Where to Go After Two Price Hikes

Hetzner's 2026, in two price hikes

Hetzner spent a decade as the default answer to "where do I get a cheap European VPS". That answer needs a rewrite. The German provider raised cloud prices twice this year, and the second round landed hard on exactly the plans people actually bought.

On 1 April 2026, most cloud servers went up by about a third. New orders and existing instances both paid it. The official reason was memory costs, which is credible, since DRAM pricing squeezed every host in 2026. Then came 15 June. The cost-optimized CX and CAX lines rose another third, and the shared-vCPU CPX line rose far more. CPX22, a 2 vCPU / 4 GB server that listed at €5.99 back in January, sat at €19.49 on 23 October, before the €0.50 IPv4 charge.

• CX23 (2 vCPU / 4 GB) — €2.99 before April, €5.49 from June, €5.99 with IPv4 today
• CPX22 (2 vCPU / 4 GB, shared vCPU) — €5.99 in January, €19.99 with IPv4 in October, up 144% in June alone
• CPX32 (4 vCPU / 8 GB) — €10.49 in January, €35.99 with IPv4 now, up 154%
• CCX13 (2 dedicated vCPU / 8 GB) — €11.99 in January, €43.49 with IPv4 now, up 169%

There is a twist. On 23 October, Hetzner's own site marked all eight CX and CAX plans "not available" and restricted them to Falkenstein, Nuremberg and Helsinki. The US and Singapore locations never got the cost-optimized line at all. So even shoppers willing to pay CX23's €5.99 frequently find nothing to buy. The console either offers the plan or doesn't, depending on the day.

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The cheapest month-to-month replacement for a 2 vCPU / 4 GB server

The obvious first stop is OVHcloud's 2027 VPS range. VPS-1 costs €4.49 a month with no contract, €3.81 if you prepay twelve months, and the price has not moved since it entered price tracking in June. A daily backup is included, which is unusual at this tier. The catch is disk: 40 GB NVMe, and traffic beyond the monthly allowance gets your bandwidth capped rather than billed.

Others worth a look at this size, all cheaper month-to-month than CPX22's €19.99:

• OVHcloud VPS-1 — €4.49/mo, 2 vCPU / 4 GB / 40 GB NVMe, daily backup included
• CloudBlast VMA21 — €4.80/mo for the same 2 vCPU / 4 GB shape, 10 Gbps options
• HostArmada Flux — $5.18/mo on a 12-month term, renews at $11.52, price stable since February
• Time4VPS Linux 4 — €4.38/mo on a 24-month term, renews at €8.76
• Vultr Regular — $20/mo, which loses to everything above, but has US locations and hourly billing with no price movement since February

Seventeen of 24 providers tracked in October sell a 2 vCPU / 4 GB server for less than Hetzner's CPX22. That is not a rounding error. That is a product line repriced into a different market segment.

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At 4 vCPU / 8 GB, the picture splits

Memory-heavy workloads are where alternatives get interesting, because RAM is precisely what got expensive this year. Contabo's Cloud VPS 4 gives you 4 vCPU, 8 GB and a 100 GB SSD for €5.50 a month, or €4.40 on a 24-month prepay. No, the CPU is not Hetzner-class, and yes, it is often reported as oversold. For a RAM-hungry app that idles more than it computes, that trade can work fine.

• Contabo Cloud VPS 4 — 4 vCPU / 8 GB / 100 GB at €5.50/mo (€4.40 for 24 months), 200 Mbit/s port
• OVHcloud VPS-2 — 4 vCPU / 8 GB / 75 GB NVMe at €8.49/mo (€7.21 for 12 months prepaid)
• netcup VPS Lite 2 — 4 vCPU / 8 GB / 160 GB at €7.98 net, billed quarterly
• Hostwinds SSD Cloud 3 — $18.99/mo, stable since February
• Hetzner CX33 — €8.99 where you can actually create one, which in late October means German and Finnish locations on a lucky day

One planning note if you are comparing quotes: OVHcloud's dedicated server range took its own price update on 1 October (an Advance-1 renewal went from €89.99 to €114.99), so do not assume the whole industry is cheaper. VPS lines and dedicated lines are moving on separate schedules.

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Migration costs people forget to budget

Switching hosts is never just the price difference on the plan page. Three items decide whether the move actually saves money.

Traffic allowances first. Hetzner's European servers include 20 TB a month, and extra terabytes cost €1. OVHcloud's 2027 VPS range caps your bandwidth once you pass the monthly quota, roughly 1 TB on VPS-2 and VPS-3, 3 TB on VPS-4. A media-heavy workload that fits Hetzner's allowance can degrade badly on a capped plan, and no sticker price fixes that.

Second, what counts as included. OVHcloud bundles a daily backup into the VPS price. Hetzner charges separately for snapshots and backups beyond a small free allotment. Contabo's promotional pricing is only guaranteed for the prepaid term, and its control panel and support are bare-bones compared with either.

Third, VAT and IPv4. Hetzner's published prices exclude VAT and, historically, the primary IPv4 address. OVHcloud's €4.49 is also ex-VAT. If your accounts run on VAT-inclusive budgets, do the conversion before declaring a winner.

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When you should just stay put

Fairness requires the other side. If you can create a CX23 in Falkenstein or Helsinki, it remains one of the best deals in Europe: €5.99 a month with IPv4 and 20 TB of traffic on a 2 vCPU / 4 GB machine that, month to month, undercuts every provider above except OVHcloud's VPS-1. The June hike did not destroy the cost-optimized line. It destroyed its availability and repriced everything around it.

Existing CPX customers also have a quiet option: prices from 15 June apply to new orders and rescales, so an instance created before that date keeps its old rate until you resize or reconfigure it. Changing a legacy-priced server in ways that count as a rescale can silently move you to current pricing. Check before you touch anything.

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Picking by scenario

• EU general-purpose server, no contract — OVHcloud VPS-1 at €4.49, accept the 40 GB disk and capped traffic
• Maximum RAM per euro — Contabo Cloud VPS 4 at €5.50 for 8 GB, plan around CPU oversubscription
• US locations with hourly billing — Vultr Regular at $20 for 2 vCPU / 4 GB, stable all year
• German location, NVMe, quarterly billing — netcup VPS Lite 2 at €7.98 for 8 GB / 160 GB
• Already on a legacy-priced Hetzner instance — stay, and do not rescale it casually

Prices in this article were checked in the second half of October 2026 against provider order pages, Hetzner's official price adjustment documentation, and nightly price tracking. The 2026 VPS market moves fast enough that any number here can be stale within weeks. Verify the checkout total before you commit, especially on prepaid terms.