Hetzner

Hetzner Cloud's panel is clean and functional — better than many budget providers, not as polished as DigitalOcean. Unmanaged VPS requiring Linux expertise.

Hetzner Cloud provides a modern web console for cloud server management — provisioning, resizing, networking, and snapshot management are well-organized and logically structured. SSH key management is integrated into the console. The Robot panel for dedicated servers is a separate, older interface that reflects the company's history as a dedicated server provider before the Cloud product existed; it's functional but less polished than the Cloud console. Full root access is available on all cloud servers and dedicated machines from provisioning. The experience is competent and above budget-tier providers without matching DigitalOcean's polish and documentation ecosystem. For teams comfortable with cloud infrastructure concepts, it's an efficient interface.

CCX dedicated CPU plans provide competition-free performance at prices below comparable tiers from major cloud providers. CX shared CPU plans are solid budget options with standard contention trade-offs.

Hetzner's CCX dedicated CPU line uses vCPUs that are not shared with other tenants — no neighbor contention, consistent performance under sustained load. This is the relevant tier for CPU-intensive workloads. CX plans use shared vCPUs with burstable performance, suitable for lower-intensity workloads where cost matters more than CPU consistency. All current Hetzner Cloud server plans use local NVMe SSD storage, providing fast I/O across both the CCX and CX lines. Hetzner operates its own network backbone in Europe, which provides strong network performance for EU-based workloads without the per-gigabyte charges that add up quickly on some cloud providers. The performance ceiling on CCX dedicated plans is genuinely competitive with equivalent tiers at major cloud providers at significantly lower cost.

Published SLA with pro-rata credit terms. European infrastructure with strong reliability track record. The SLA applies to monthly uptime with credits for violations.

Hetzner Cloud's SLA commits to monthly availability with pro-rata credit terms for violations — meaning credits are issued proportionally to downtime rather than at fixed rates regardless of duration. Infrastructure reliability across both cloud and dedicated server products is strong based on operating track record. Cloud server snapshots are available for point-in-time backup copies. The backup service provides automated periodic copies at additional cost. The SLA financial commitment is functional but not as strong as providers who offer fixed credits for any qualifying incident. For most workloads, the practical reliability is solid; the SLA structure is the documentation of what happens if it isn't.

Live resize for CPU and RAM without reboot on most cloud server types — one of the better scaling experiences in the category. Full infrastructure range from cloud to dedicated.

CPU and RAM resize on Hetzner cloud servers is available live without a reboot on most server types — a meaningful operational advantage for teams that need to scale without service interruption. Disk resize requires a server stop but can be performed through the console. Load balancers and floating IPs support traffic distribution and high-availability architectures. Private networks enable multi-server setups where application and database servers communicate on isolated infrastructure. The full tier range from CX shared VPS through CCX dedicated VPS to dedicated bare metal covers all infrastructure requirements. Geographic coverage is currently concentrated in European datacenters, which is the primary geographic scaling constraint for teams with users outside Europe.

Full root access, solid API, Terraform support, and hcloud CLI. Not as polished as DigitalOcean's API but functional for automation and infrastructure-as-code workflows.

All Hetzner servers provide full root access from provisioning with no managed layer restrictions. The Hetzner Cloud API covers server management, networking, load balancers, and volumes with consistent design. The Terraform provider is actively maintained and well-documented for infrastructure-as-code workflows. The hcloud CLI provides command-line management for teams that prefer terminal-based infrastructure operations. SSH key management in the console reduces the setup friction for new server deployments. The API quality is solid for automation use cases, though the documentation ecosystem and community resource depth are smaller than DigitalOcean's — edge cases require more independent research than on the more heavily documented platform.

Technical depth for infrastructure issues is solid. Ticket-based — no live chat or phone for standard accounts. Documentation covers common patterns well.

Hetzner support is primarily ticket-based without live chat or phone for standard accounts. The technical quality for infrastructure issues — hardware, network, billing — is consistently noted as above average for the price tier in independent community feedback. Response times are reasonable but not live; urgent infrastructure failures have a wait-and-respond resolution cycle. Documentation covers Hetzner-specific cloud server setup patterns well. The community forum and third-party tutorials are useful for common configurations but represent a smaller resource pool than DigitalOcean's extensively developed community. For teams comfortable with async support and self-service troubleshooting, the support model works well at the price point.

Listed price equals renewal price — no promotional games. Among the best performance-per-euro in the category for dedicated CPU plans.

Hetzner's pricing is stable — the listed price at signup equals the renewal price with no promotional structures that inflate future bills. The CCX dedicated CPU plans deliver performance per euro that is among the strongest in the cloud infrastructure category, often beating equivalent DigitalOcean Premium or Linode Dedicated at significantly lower monthly cost. IPv4 addresses carry a per-IP charge that accumulates for deployments requiring many public IPs — a cost that's worth modeling separately from compute. Storage volumes and snapshots have their own pricing beyond the server cost. Overall, Hetzner represents the best raw performance-per-euro in the European cloud category for teams managing their own infrastructure.