Hetzner Raised Prices Twice in 2026, and the Cheap Line Is Currently Unorderable

Yesterday I wrote in the previous post that the cheapest answer for a side project is one Hetzner CX23 at US$7.09/month. Going back to check today, I found the CX23 row on Hetzner's own plan page carrying a "not available" badge. All eight Cost-Optimized plans carry it. The /cloud/ landing page labels the whole Cost-Optimized plan "Currently not available."

Every Hetzner price here was read on 7 August 2026 directly from Hetzner's own docs, pressroom posts and price feed. Competitor prices come from each provider's own pricing page or public API. No third-party comparison articles were used as a source.

Nobody has covered this in Traditional Chinese. English coverage mostly tells half the story: it says "Hetzner raised prices," but there were two adjustments in 2026, they applied to different people, and the shape of the increase was completely different each time. If you already rent a Hetzner box, the one that matters to you is April's. If you are about to open one, it is June's, plus which side of the split your size falls on.

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The answer first

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1. Two adjustments, different rules

Both are documented in Hetzner's own pressroom and docs.

The first was published 23 February 2026 as "Statement on price adjustment as of April 1st 2026" and took effect 1 April 2026. The important part is who it hit, which Hetzner states twice on the page: it applied "for both new orders and existing products." Bills went up on machines people already had. The stated reason:

"There have been drastic price increases in various areas in the IT sector recently... The costs to operate our infrastructure and to buy new hardware have both increased dramatically."

The second was published 27 May 2026 as "Details regarding the standardization and price adjustment of our server products effective 15 June 2026" and took effect 15 June 2026, 08:00 CEST. This one is new orders and rescales only:

"Existing server contracts will keep their terms and conditions and remain active. The changes apply exclusively to new orders and rescales of existing servers."

The same change renumbered the dedicated catalog into -1, -2 and -3 tiers, added a -1-Ltd tier built from cheaper-sourced hardware, and cut setup fees significantly on most dedicated servers. The reason given was "the ongoing challenges in the hardware procurement market" and "the massive increase in procurement costs."

June's exclusion list is worth memorising: web hosting, managed servers, Server Auction, IPs, storage products, Load Balancers, Volumes, Snapshots and Object Storage were not affected. Those went up in April and then stayed put.

"Orders before the date keep old pricing" has a trap

The previous post said orders placed before 15 June keep old pricing. True as far as it goes, and it left out half the picture. Hetzner's docs add that "certain changes to servers with legacy pricing may trigger a switch to the current pricing," and the billing FAQ names them:

• Rescaling, up or down
• Restoring a deleted server
• Transferring a server to a project in a different currency

Any of the three moves a legacy-priced server onto current pricing. Rebuilding, and transfers between same-currency projects, do not.

Resize a 2025 CX23 downward to save money and your bill triples. That is the sharpest trap in the whole document set, precisely because scaling down feels like the money-saving move.

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2. The split runs by product line

This is the part that actually changes advice.

April: uniform

April was close to a flat percentage. Germany / Finland, monthly EUR, ex-VAT:

The Germany/Finland table has nineteen cloud plans (fourteen shown above) and all nineteen land between +30.0% and +36.5%. Load Balancers, Object Storage, Volumes and Snapshots rose in the same pass.

Dedicated servers got off much lighter: AX41-NVMe €41.10 → €42.30 (+2.9%), EX44 €42.30 → €47.30 (+11.8%), AX42 €47.30 → €57.30 (+21.1%), AX162-R €207.30 → €242.30 (+16.9%). Server Auction took a flat +3%.

The full April table is no longer on Hetzner's site - the docs page was overwritten with the June version. I used the Internet Archive's 2026-03-17 capture of that same docs URL. It is still Hetzner's own primary document; Hetzner just no longer serves it.

June: cut in two

Same document, and the June table has an entirely different shape. Germany / Finland:

The entire Cost-Optimized line (CX shared Intel/AMD, CAX Ampere Arm) sits between 1.30x and 1.38x. The entire Regular Performance (CPX) and General Purpose (CCX) range sits between 2.13x and 2.75x. The two bands do not overlap anywhere.

The line is drawn by product family, not by how big a box you buy. The smallest CAX11 and the largest CCX63 differ by nearly a factor of two in how much they rose; and a 4 GB CPX22 and a 32 GB CX53, sitting in the same Hetzner datacentres, rose 2.44x and 1.31x respectively - the small one by more.

Both adjustments stacked

From the price before 1 April to the price today:

The two adjustments are eleven weeks apart. In those eleven weeks the cheap shared boxes got 70-84% more expensive, and the dedicated-vCPU and AMD lines went to 2.9x-3.6x.

One pair of numbers I want to single out

CAX11 is 2 Ampere Arm vCPUs, 4 GB of RAM and 40 GB of disk, at €5.99/month. CPX22 is 2 AMD vCPUs, 4 GB of RAM and 80 GB of disk, at €19.49/month. Same core count, same memory, same datacentres, 3.25x the price.

In January those two were €3.29 and €5.99, a gap of 1.82x. That is a sensible "Arm is a bit cheaper" discount - you could pick x86 for toolchain reasons and not feel it. After June the same choice is a $7 box versus a $23 box.

I think this is the sentence that most needs saying out loud: Hetzner has turned Arm and x86 into two different price tiers. If your Docker image builds for arm64, you are paying last year's prices. If it doesn't, you are paying more than triple. And for most Rails, Node and Go projects, arm64 images stopped being a problem a while ago.

It is a location fact too

The same June step landed with very different force in three regions:

• The USA took the worst of it: CPX41 €38.99 → €120.49 (3.09x), CPX31 €20.99 → €62.49 (2.98x). Stacking both adjustments, CPX41 is 4.02x.
• Singapore got off lightest: CPX32 €32.49 → €48.99 (1.51x), CPX42 €55.99 → €93.49 (1.67x), CCX23 €51.49 → €108.49 (2.11x).
• Germany sits in between at 2.13x to 2.75x.

Singapore rose less because it was already priced well above Germany. That is not good news, as the comparison section shows.

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3. What you can actually buy

What you cannot

On 7 August 2026, Hetzner's Cost-Optimized plan page shows a "not available" badge on every one of CX23, CX33, CX43, CX53, CAX11, CAX21, CAX31 and CAX41. The German-language page shows the same. The "Shared Resources" card on /cloud/ reads "Currently not available."

The page explains the mechanism itself:

"Since proven hardware generations that continue to be used are sufficient for these areas of application, we use them specifically and pass the savings directly on to you. However, this resource-saving use means that the number of available servers is limited."

Older hardware generations to keep costs down, at the cost of limited stock.

It can be dated. Internet Archive captures of that page on 3, 8, 13 and 27 July 2026 have no badges. Captures on 2 and 4 August do. So it appeared between 27 July and 2 August 2026.

I could not find out why. No pressroom post, no blog post, no changelog, no status entry. And Hetzner's own price feed still marks every CX and CAX product active: true and still returns prices, so the badge is CMS-authored copy rather than the output of a live stock API. The only thing I can state is this: Hetzner's own pages say you cannot order them right now, and Hetzner has not said why. I am not going to write "Hetzner discontinued CX/CAX," because no primary source supports it.

Worth mentioning alongside: while checking netcup, its VPS 500 G12 page also showed "This product is currently unavailable at this location." I have no way to quantify how short cheap European VPS stock is right now, but two providers at once does not read like coincidence.

Current prices, Germany (FSN1/NBG1) and Finland (HEL1)

Monthly, ex-VAT, excluding IPv4, in EUR and in Hetzner's own USD list:

A primary IPv4 is €0.50 / $0.60 on top. Primary IPv6 is free.

Filter that table down to the orderable rows and the result is ugly:

• The cheapest orderable Hetzner cloud server in the EU is now CPX12, 1 vCPU / 2 GB, at €11.49 + €0.50 = €11.99 (USD list $13.49 + $0.60 = $14.09). The CX23 the previous post recommended is €5.99. Double the money for half the RAM.
• The 16 GB rung is worse. With CX43 unorderable, the cheapest 16 GB Hetzner box in the EU is CPX42 at €69.99 with IPv4 ($82.59). It was €16.49. If Cost-Optimized does not come back, Hetzner's price advantage at 16 GB is zero.

I verified CPX12's Germany and Finland price (it is in both Hetzner's price feed and its product page), but CPX12 appears only in the Singapore column of the April and June adjustment tables, never in the Germany/Finland column. So I do not know when Hetzner started selling CPX12 in the EU or what it cost before. €11.49 is a confirmed current price with no history behind it, and I am not going to invent an increase for it.

Tax: zero for readers in Taiwan

All Hetzner list prices are ex-VAT, as their docs state. The VAT table their own price widget reads has 36 country entries and Taiwan is not one of them, so Taiwanese buyers fall under "All others" at 0%. Germany is 19%, Finland 25.5%, Singapore 9%, USA 0%.

The previous post listed VAT among the excluded costs, with "Hetzner list prices are ex-VAT" attached. Literally true, but it reads as though a Taiwanese reader should budget for tax. They should not. The ex-VAT list price is the price.

Traffic: the previous post said this was unobtainable, and that was wrong

The previous post said included traffic and overage rates could not be found on a Hetzner page. They can, at docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/:

Overage is €1 ($1.20) per TB, metered in 100 MB blocks. Only outgoing traffic is billed; incoming traffic, traffic inside the same network zone and traffic to Hetzner dedicated servers are free. Hetzner emails the project owner at 75% and 100% of the allowance, and states plainly that those notifications "do not cap or stop" usage and that overage is billed even if the mail arrives late or not at all.

That page is stamped "Last change on 2024-05-21." Neither 2026 adjustment mentioned traffic, so I believe it still holds, but it does predate the current prices.

One more billing detail worth remembering: Hetzner bills every primary IPv4 that has finished creation, including ones not attached to any server. To stop paying you have to delete the IP; detaching is not enough.

The dedicated side, which is now oddly cheap

After a rise like that on the cloud side, the most interesting thing at Hetzner is on the other side of the catalog.

June's Limited tier starts at AX41-1-Ltd and EX44-1-Ltd, €57.30/month with a €0.00 setup fee, in Falkenstein, Nuremberg and Helsinki, plus €1.70/month for the IPv4. On the live product pages they are shown simply as AX41 and EX44.

EX44 is an Intel Core i5-13500 (6 P-cores + 8 E-cores), 64 GB DDR4, 2 × 512 GB NVMe, on a 1 Gbit port with unlimited traffic.

Against the cloud: CX53 is 16 vCPU / 32 GB / 320 GB at €29.49, and unorderable. CPX62 is 16 vCPU / 32 GB at €129.99. A €57.30 EX44 gives you 64 GB and unlimited traffic.

EX44's trajectory was €42.30 → €47.30 (1 Apr) → €57.30 (15 Jun), +35.5% across 2026, far gentler than cloud, and the setup fee went to zero.

One discount on that: -1-Ltd is a June-new type, and the press release says it is built from cheaper-sourced hardware, so comparing it to the pre-June EX44 is not strictly like-for-like. I could not find what EX44's setup fee was before 15 June, so I cannot say how far it fell, only that it is €0.00 now.

There is also one route that was barely touched: Server Auction, Hetzner's marketplace for used and returned hardware, took a flat +3% in April and was explicitly excluded from June. It is the one Hetzner line that came through 2026 close to intact. Prices there are per-listing and constantly changing, so I have no figure to quote.

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4. Against the alternatives, at two sizes

Europe, around 4 GB

Hetzner is still three to four times under the US trio at this size, but it is no longer the European floor. netcup's €5.91 includes 19% German VAT (about €4.97 net, my own arithmetic), on DDR5 ECC with more than three times the disk of a CX23. netcup's condition is a 12-month term; without commitment the hourly rate is €0.010/hour, about €7.30/month.

Contabo's €5.50 needs an asterisk: their page labels it "for the first 24 months" and does not say what it becomes afterwards. The previous post flagged this too and I still cannot settle it.

Europe, 16 GB

This is the table I think matters most right now. If CX43 is orderable, Hetzner wins, and wins big. If it is not, the best Hetzner can do at 16 GB is CPX42 at €69.99, roughly level with Vultr's $80 - and Vultr has a Tokyo region.

The €59.00 EX44 in the same table is hard to ignore: twice the RAM, cheaper than CPX42, unlimited traffic. The cost is that it is a physical machine - no snapshots, no one-minute provisioning, and a support ticket when hardware dies.

Asia: Hetzner is now the most expensive

Hetzner has exactly one Asian location, Singapore. No Tokyo, Osaka, Seoul or Hong Kong. And CX and CAX are EU-only, so they cannot be ordered there at all.

Around 4 GB, in an Asian datacentre:

At 16 GB, in an Asian datacentre:

At both sizes Hetzner Singapore is the most expensive option on the list. And CPX in Singapore includes only 0.5-5 TB of traffic against 20 TB in the EU.

netcup prices Singapore as base price plus a location surcharge: +€8.14 on VPS 500 and +€24.41 on VPS 2000, against +€0.90 and +€2.91 for its European and US locations. I read those from netcup's own order configurator; they include 19% German VAT. Whether a Taiwanese buyer is actually charged that 19% I did not verify, so do not budget from these figures.

Dedicated vCPUs: the lead is nearly gone

The previous post never covered this tier, and it is the most honest answer to "is Hetzner still the cheapest."

At 8 GB with dedicated vCPUs:

CCX13 was $13.49 in January and $18.49 just before June. Vultr was three to four and a half times its price back then, which is a difference you do not have to think about. It is now under 20%.

In Singapore it flips outright: Hetzner CCX13 in Singapore is $64.09 with IPv4, while the same-shaped Vultr Optimized instance is $60 in Tokyo, Osaka, Seoul or Singapore. And Vultr gives you four Asian cities to choose from.

Whatever large price advantage Hetzner still has lives entirely in the CX and CAX lines, which are sold only in Germany and Finland and are currently unorderable.

A datacentre in Taiwan

遠振資訊 publishes a full NT$ price list at host.com.tw, in a Far EasTone datacentre:

One IPv4 included; extra IPs NT$250/month, two maximum; annual billing gives one month free. At NT$32.21 to US$1 the 4 GB plan is about US$39 and the 16 GB plan about US$156. Against Hetzner Germany with IPv4 - CX23 at US$7.09 and CX43 at US$19.09 - that is 5.5x and 8x.

The previous post said I had found no Taiwan-based VPS provider whose pricing I could confirm from its own page. That was wrong, and this corrects it. It is one provider's price list, not a survey of the Taiwanese market.

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5. Is this just Hetzner?

No. In the first half of 2026, essentially every European provider that owns its own hardware repriced, and they all gave the same reason.

The US side did not move: I found no 2026 compute list-price change announced by DigitalOcean, Vultr or Akamai/Linode, and their current prices match long-standing tiers. That means I found no announcement; none of them has publicly committed to holding prices. Treat it as an observation with no counter-evidence.

All four European providers name the same cause: DRAM and NAND procurement. OVHcloud put numbers on it and was the bluntest:

"the prices related to RAM and storage could increase by 15% to 300% compared to 2025 prices, depending on the volumes."

Plus a timeline:

"prices are not expected to return to their historical levels before 2028"

If OVHcloud's judgement is right, the planning baseline for the next two years should not be "wait for it to come back down." The netcup community calls the whole thing the RAMpocalypse.

So my reading is this: this is a market-wide repricing, and Hetzner just moved the furthest. "Hetzner got expensive so switch providers" has less room to be true inside Europe than it looks, because the neighbours went up too. What genuinely changed is three things: a 3.25x gap opened between Arm and x86, the price-per-spec case flipped from cloud toward dedicated, and Hetzner in Asia went from acceptable to most expensive.

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6. What to do

"I already have a Hetzner box"

Nothing. Machines opened before 2026-06-15 keep the old rate, and Hetzner states that in writing.

But leave it alone: rescaling in either direction, restoring a deleted server, or moving it to a project in a different currency pushes it onto current pricing. If you want to change spec, work out the new price before you click.

April you could not avoid; that one applied to existing products. Pull up your April and May invoices and check the numbers line up.

"I want a 4 GB box in Europe"

CX23 at €5.99/month with IPv4, if it comes back. It is still the best thing in that price band.

If it does not, I would take netcup VPS 500 G12: €5.91 including 19% German VAT, 4 GB DDR5 ECC, 128 GB NVMe, IPv4 included, no setup fee, in exchange for a 12-month term. It is the same kind of company as Hetzner - German, owns its metal, sells to the same people - and at this size it now undercuts them.

I would not buy a Hetzner CPX12 for a 4 GB workload: €11.99 buys 2 GB of RAM, and the same money buys 8 GB at netcup.

"I want a 16 GB box in Europe"

CX43 at €16.49, no argument, if you can order one.

If you cannot, I would skip cloud and look straight at the EX44 dedicated server: €57.30 plus €1.70 for IPv4, 64 GB of RAM, 1 TB of NVMe, unlimited traffic, no setup fee. Cheaper than CPX42 with twice the memory. The condition is that you accept dedicated-server operations: no snapshots, provisioning takes time, and hardware failure means a ticket.

If you want the cloud API and not a physical box, Hetzner has no clear advantage at this size any more. netcup (€19.24 incl. VAT) and Vultr ($80, with Tokyo) both belong on the shortlist.

"My users are in Taiwan"

Not Hetzner. The previous post said this and it is more true now: CPX22 in Singapore is $31.59, more expensive than Vultr, DigitalOcean, Linode and Lightsail, with a fraction of the EU traffic allowance.

My recommendation is still Vultr Tokyo: $20 at 4 GB, $80 at 16 GB, same price in every region except São Paulo, and Tokyo is usually the lowest-latency choice from Taipei. Linode Tokyo at the same price works too.

For an actual Taiwanese datacentre, 遠振 is NT$1,260 at 4 GB and NT$5,040 at 16 GB, which works out to 5.5x and 8x Hetzner Germany at the same RAM. Whether that premium is worth it depends on whether your users can tell 30 ms from 60 ms. Most side projects cannot.

"I need dedicated vCPUs"

Price it before you default to Hetzner. CCX13 with IPv4 is $51.09 against Vultr Optimized at $60 and DigitalOcean General Purpose at $63 - under 20%, and the other two have Asian regions. In Singapore, Hetzner is already more expensive than Vultr.

What the previous post needs corrected

The previous post's table has a row reading "One Hetzner Germany VPS, ~$7." The arithmetic is still exactly right: CX23 at €5.49 plus €0.50 for IPv4 is €5.99 / US$7.09. The problem is that the machine is currently unorderable, and that state had been live on Hetzner's own page for four days before the article went out. I missed it.

The honest correction is a fork: $7 if Cost-Optimized comes back, $14 if it does not, with half the RAM. Both language versions have been updated.

Three other things were corrected there too: the previous post said Hetzner's per-plan traffic could not be found (it can, see section 3); it listed VAT as an excluded cost in a way that implies Taiwanese readers should budget for it (their rate is 0%); and it said no Taiwanese provider publishes prices on its own page (遠振 does).

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What this article could not confirm

• Why CX and CAX became unorderable. Hetzner has published nothing, and its price feed still marks them active. Temporary stock-out or wind-down, I do not know.
• Whether Hetzner has raised prices again since June. The docs page's most recent edit is 2026-07-08 and the price feed matches the June table exactly, so nothing has moved. But there is no positive statement to that effect.
• Whether 2026 really contained only two adjustments. Some English coverage describes June as Hetzner's fourth pricing action of 2026. I found Hetzner primary sources for exactly two, 1 April and 15 June, and none for any others, so this article claims two.
• How long CPX12 has been sold in Germany and Finland, and what it cost before. It is in no adjustment table's Germany/Finland column. €11.49 is confirmed as current; the history is not.
• EX44's setup fee before 15 June 2026. The press release only says setup fees fell significantly for most dedicated servers.
• Whether the per-plan traffic allowances are still current. That page is stamped 2024-05-21, before both adjustments.
• The Singapore traffic overage rate specifically. The docs give one rate, €1 / $1.20 per TB, with no regional breakdown. Hetzner's price feed contains an entry at €1.00 for all locations and €7.40 for SIN1 that looks like a per-TB traffic rate, but that feed carries no product names, so I will not assert it.
• Contabo's price after the committed term. Their page says only "for the first 24 months."
• What tax a Taiwanese buyer actually pays at netcup. Every figure I could read includes 19% German VAT.
• Whether DigitalOcean, Vultr or Akamai really made no 2026 price change. I found no increase announcement on their own channels, and no public commitment from them not to raise prices either.

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One sentence

In 2026 Hetzner cut its cloud range in half: the cheap half went up 70-84%, the expensive half went to 2.9x-3.6x. And the cheap half is currently unbuyable, with no explanation from Hetzner.

If your side project needs 4 GB, this is a question about switching providers. If it needs 16 GB, it is a question about whether to rent a physical machine. Those are two different answers. "Just rent a cheap box" was the standard advice for five years; it now depends on how big a box you need.

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Hetzner prices and dates here were read on 7 August 2026 directly from four Hetzner-owned sources: the price-adjustment docs page (the live June table, plus the Internet Archive's 2026-03-17 capture of the same URL, which holds the April table), the two pressroom statements, the traffic and billing FAQ docs, and live_data_prices.json, the feed Hetzner's own site uses to render its price widgets. Competitor prices come from netcup, OVHcloud, Scaleway, DigitalOcean, Akamai, AWS, Contabo and 遠振's own pages, and from Vultr's own public API. Currency conversions use the 2026-08-06/07 rates of 1 EUR ≈ 1.153 USD and 1 USD ≈ 32.21 TWD. Prices move; check the provider's own page before you put in a card.