Hetzner
A German host that rents cloud VMs by the hour and whole dedicated servers by the month from its own data center parks in Germany and Finland, plus cloud-only sites in the US and Singapore.
- What it is
- Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
- Type
- Commercial product
- Made by
- Hetzner Online GmbH
- License
- Proprietary
- Facts checked
- 24 October 2026
What it is
Hetzner sells two kinds of machine. Hetzner Cloud servers are VMs on shared or dedicated vCPUs, with Arm (Ampere) types as well as x86, created in seconds through a REST API, the hcloud CLI, Terraform or the console. Around them sit the usual cloud parts: Volumes (block storage from 10 GB to 10 TB, each block stored on three physical servers), private Networks, stateful Firewalls at no extra cost, Load Balancers, Primary IPs and an S3-compatible Object Storage built on Ceph. Dedicated root servers are physical machines (AMD-based AX, Intel-based EX, storage-heavy SX, GPU and Dell DX lines) rented by the month, and a Server Auction resells refurbished ones.
Hetzner owns and runs its data center parks in Falkenstein and Nuremberg in Germany and in Tuusula near Helsinki in Finland, all in the eu-central network zone. Ashburn (Virginia), Hillsboro (Oregon) and Singapore are cloud-only: they offer the AMD shared and dedicated vCPU types and cloud features, but no dedicated servers, no Arm types and no Object Storage.
Cloud servers have an hourly rate and a monthly cap; you pay whichever is lower, and a partial hour counts as a full one. A server is billed until it is deleted, even when it is switched off, because its resources stay reserved. In the EU the CX, CPX and CAX types include 20 TB of outgoing traffic a month, and only outgoing traffic is billed; in the US and Singapore the allowance is far smaller, from 0.5 to 8 TB depending on type and site. Public IPv4 is extra (€0.50 a month), IPv6 is free.
Why teams pick it
- Low prices for raw compute and traffic: 20 TB of egress included per EU cloud server, and dedicated servers on the default 1 Gbit uplink have unlimited traffic
- One provider for both hourly VMs and monthly bare metal, so a cluster can mix cloud nodes with large dedicated machines
- Owned data centers in Germany and Finland under a German company, which suits teams that want EU hosting; the sites are ISO 27001 certified
- A plain REST API and CLI, with integrations for Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, Python and Go listed on the cloud page
Watch out for
- The catalog stops at the infrastructure layer: servers, volumes, networks, firewalls, load balancers and object storage, so databases and other services are yours to run
- The US and Singapore sites are cloud-only, with a much smaller traffic allowance, and no Arm types or Object Storage
- Prices rose sharply in 2026: on 1 April for new and existing products because of RAM and SSD costs, and again on 15 June, when a CCX13 went from €15.99 to €42.99 a month and a CX23 from €3.99 to €5.49
- Switching a cloud server off doesn’t stop the bill, and a Volume attaches to one server at a time
Alternatives
What all infrastructure as a service (iaas) have in common →Compare side by side →
OVHcloudCommercialA French cloud provider that builds its own servers and data centers and sells bare-metal servers, an OpenStack-based public cloud and hosted private clouds.
ScalewayCommercialThe cloud arm of France’s iliad group: VMs, GPUs, bare-metal servers, Kubernetes and managed databases in four three-zone regions in Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw and Milan.
Cherry ServersCommercialA Lithuanian host that rents dedicated bare-metal servers through an API, billed by the hour, as spot capacity or by the month, from seven locations in Europe, the US and Asia.How it fits with other technologies
What Hetzner uses
Create a cloud server in Falkenstein with the `hcloud` CLI and attach a volume · bash
hcloud context create my-project # prompts for an API token
hcloud location list
hcloud server create --name web-1 --type cx23 --image ubuntu-24.04 \
--location fsn1 --ssh-key laptop --user-data-from-file cloud-init.yml
# 100 GB of block storage, formatted and mounted on the server
hcloud volume create --name data --size 100 --server web-1 \
--format ext4 --automountSee it in a real stack
No architecture uses Hetzner yet. Drop it into the playground and wire it up yourself.Open playground →Where it came from1997–2026
Martin Hetzner, an electrical engineer, founded the company in Gunzenhausen in Bavaria in 1997, with the aim of making internet technology affordable and accessible to more people. It rented its first data center in the middle of Nuremberg in 2001. Rented space limited what it could control, so in 2008 it began building its own data center park in Falkenstein, designed from the ground up and opened in 2009, and it started developing its own servers to depend less on existing products.
In 2015 Hetzner began planning a second park in Tuusula, about 20 km from Helsinki, for the cold climate that lets outside air cool the servers and for the cheap electricity; the C-Lion1 submarine cable between Rostock and Helsinki went live in 2016. In 2018 it launched Hetzner Cloud, because many customer projects needed more flexibility than monthly dedicated servers: for the first time, customers could start servers within seconds.
It then went abroad with cloud-only sites: Ashburn, Virginia in 2021, Hillsboro, Oregon in 2022 for lower latency on the US West Coast, and Singapore in 2024. In 2026 rising memory and SSD prices led to several price rounds, including increases on existing products from 1 April and a steeper repricing of cloud servers from 15 June.
Why it’s built this way
- Own data center parks instead of rented space
- Rented data centers left Hetzner little control over power, cooling and cost; the company says long-term good prices and stable performance need control of its own infrastructure.
- A park in Finland
- The cold climate lets servers be cooled with outside air, electricity is cheap, and the C-Lion1 cable gives a fast link to central Europe.
- A cloud next to dedicated servers
- Customers needed machines they could start and remove quickly, not only servers rented by the month; the cloud added that without leaving Hetzner’s own hardware.
- Hourly billing with a monthly cap
- A short test pays only for the hours used, while a server that runs all month never costs more than its monthly price.
Timeline
- 1997
Martin Hetzner founds the company in Gunzenhausen
- 2001
First rented data center, in Nuremberg
- 2009
Own data center park opens in Falkenstein
- 2018
Hetzner Cloud launches
- 2021
First North American site, in Ashburn, Virginia
- 2022
Hillsboro, Oregon added
- 2024
Singapore, the first site in Asia
- 2026
Price increases on 1 April and 15 June, driven by RAM and SSD costs
Sources12 · facts checked 24 October 2026
- Hetzner Cloud: product page (shared and dedicated vCPU, networks, firewalls, load balancers, integrations)
- Hetzner Docs: Cloud locations (network zones, products in the US and Singapore)
- Hetzner Docs: Cloud billing FAQ (hourly rate, monthly cap, stopped servers, outgoing traffic)
- Hetzner Docs: Cloud servers overview (shared and dedicated resources, Primary IPv4 price)
- Hetzner Docs: Traffic (included traffic per location, unlimited traffic on dedicated servers)
- Hetzner Docs: Volumes overview (size, three copies, one server at a time)
- Hetzner Docs: Object Storage overview (Ceph, locations, limits)
- Hetzner: Dedicated root servers (AX, EX, SX, GPU, DX lines, Server Auction, ISO 27001)
- Hetzner Docs: Price adjustment (old and new cloud prices, 15 June 2026)
- hcloud CLI: setup tutorial (contexts, `hcloud location list`)
- hcloud CLI manual: `hcloud server create`
- hcloud CLI manual: `hcloud volume create`