Hetzner vs SSD Nodes: Hourly Cloud or Prepaid High-RAM VPS?

Hetzner is a German cloud and dedicated server provider founded in 1997. It runs its own data centers and is best known for low prices on physical and virtual servers, aimed at customers who are comfortable administering them.

From a German web host to six regions

Martin Hetzner founded the company in Gunzenhausen in 1997. By the company's own account, he started it after asking why web hosting in Germany was so expensive. Dedicated servers became a central part of the business, and Hetzner built its own data centers in Falkenstein and Nuremberg, later adding Helsinki — which gives it direct control over hardware, network, power and running costs. Hetzner Cloud followed, with virtual servers managed through a web console and an API, and cloud locations in the United States and Singapore came later still.

What Hetzner sells

• Cloud servers in four lines, named as Hetzner names them: CX and CAX (cost-optimized, shared Intel/AMD or Ampere Arm vCPUs), CPX (regular performance, shared AMD vCPUs) and CCX (general purpose, dedicated AMD vCPUs). They are billed by the hour up to a monthly cap, with volumes, networks, firewalls, load balancers, snapshots and backups available.
• Dedicated servers — physical machines in the AX (AMD), EX (Intel), SX (storage-heavy) and GEX (NVIDIA GPU) lines.
• Managed servers — Hetzner installs and maintains the operating system and server software, applies security updates and runs backups; the customer works through the konsoleH panel, without root access.
• Storage — Storage Boxes for backups and files, and S3-compatible Object Storage.
• Web hosting, colocation, domains and SSL certificates.

Not every product runs everywhere. Ashburn, Hillsboro and Singapore are cloud-only: dedicated servers can't be ordered there. The CX and CAX lines and Object Storage are available in Europe only, and cloud prices in the US and Singapore differ from European ones.

How DohoHub tracks Hetzner

• Prices. Our scraper re-reads Hetzner's prices every six hours from the same price data its own website displays, and every change goes into the price history on this page. The figures are monthly euro prices for the German location. They cover the server alone: a public IPv4 address and, on some dedicated and managed servers, a one-off setup fee come on top. Hetzner doesn't advertise introductory discounts, so there is no separate renewal price to show.
• Uptime and response time. We probe hetzner.com — Hetzner's public website — every five minutes from a single server in Toronto. These figures describe the website as seen from North America; they say nothing about the servers Hetzner rents out, and the response time mostly reflects the distance to Europe. We don't benchmark Hetzner's servers.
• DHH Score. Computed daily from five parts — price, long-term price, what's included, reliability and users — and broken down in the section below. The facts behind "What's included" are Hetzner's own statements, each listed with its source and the date we checked it; we record them, we don't test them. The formula is published in our methodology.
• Support. We don't rate support quality: we can't measure it, and the existence of a ticket system says nothing about how fast it answers.

Who it suits

Hetzner fits developers, technical teams, agencies and self-hosters who want control over their servers and close oversight of what they cost, and European businesses that want their hosting in the EU. It is a poorer fit for customers who need hands-off administration across the board or extensive application-level support. Either way, compare the full cost of the configuration you need — server, IPv4, setup fees, backups and your own time — rather than the headline price.

Sources, corrections and independence

The company facts above were checked against Hetzner's own pages on 9 October 2026: company overview, company story, dedicated servers, information security and cloud locations. Citing them tells you what Hetzner says about itself, not that we have tested it. Spotted something out of date? Tell us — see our corrections policy.

Nothing a provider pays — affiliate commission, advertising, a verified badge or a homepage slot — changes its prices on this page or its score. Read how DohoHub makes money and our editorial independence policy.

SSD Nodes is a budget-focused VPS provider founded in 2011 and headquartered in Tustin, California. It rents capacity from the Hivelocity data center network and runs its own Vippy virtualization stack, which lets it offer KVM plans with 8 GB RAM and up from just $5.50/mo on 3-year terms. The company is deliberately VPS-only and covers 14 locations across the US, Canada, Europe and Asia-Pacific.