Hetzner Price Increase 2026: The Honest List of US Alternatives After June 15

What exactly changed on June 15, 2026?

Hetzner raised cloud prices twice in 2026. The first round on April 1 lifted the cloud lines by roughly a third. The second round, effective June 15 at 8 AM CEST, more than doubled the two AMD lines that make up the entire US catalog: CPX (shared vCPU) and CCX (dedicated vCPU). Hetzner's price-adjustment page states that the change "took effect for new orders and cloud instance rescales starting on the 15 June 2026; 8 AM CEST."

The official numbers for the USA region (Ashburn and Hillsboro), in dollars, excluding the primary IPv4 address:

Hetzner's stated reason, from the June 15 press release, is that the adjustment "takes into account the massive increase in procurement costs"; the release also describes it as what "ensures that we will be able to continue to operate our infrastructure in a reliable, efficient, and sustainable manner". The same release says that "Existing server contracts will keep their terms and conditions and remain active. The changes apply exclusively to new orders and rescales of existing servers."

Europe was hit less hard on the budget end. The Intel-based CX23 went from €3.99 to €5.49, and the ARM CAX11 from €4.49 to €5.99. The AMD CPX22 in Germany went from €7.99 to €19.49, so the AMD line more than doubled there too. The difference for US customers is that the AMD lines are the only cloud lines Hetzner offers in Ashburn and Hillsboro, which is the subject of the next section.

Is Hetzner still cheaper than DigitalOcean in the US?

No. At the 4 GB tier, Hetzner's US price is now above DigitalOcean's, and the two providers Hetzner used to undercut by a wide margin are now the ones undercutting it. Here is the same class of server, priced monthly in a US location, from official pages on September 11, 2026:

Two things to read carefully in that table. Hetzner's CPX21 has one more vCPU than the DigitalOcean plan, so it is not a perfect match; even allowing for that, the Hetzner plan costs 56% more for the same 4 GB of RAM and the same 80 GB of disk. And Hetzner's US prices exclude the primary IPv4 address, which is billed on top.

There is no cheaper Hetzner line to fall back on in the US. In Germany and Finland you can sidestep the CPX increase by picking the Intel CX23 at €5.49 or the ARM CAX11 at €5.99. Hetzner's location documentation states: "Ashburn, VA, Hillsboro, OR, and Singapore are currently only available for cloud products (Cloud Shared AMD, Cloud Dedicated AMD, and Cloud features)." Shared AMD is the CPX line, dedicated AMD is the CCX line, and both were the ones that doubled.

So the comparison most people still have in their heads, Hetzner at a fraction of DigitalOcean, is now backwards for US locations. The remaining question is which providers moved into the gap.

Hetzner alternatives in the US: who took over its price and performance spot?

Three providers sell a 2 vCPU / 4 GB class server in a US data center for far less than DigitalOcean's $24, which is roughly the position Hetzner used to hold. They are ranked here by one rule, fixed before the prices were pulled: the lowest US monthly price for that class, with a tie broken by how much of the hardware claim can be checked from a public source. That rule puts a provider we have no affiliate relationship with in first place, and it stays there.

1. netcup VPS 500 G12 (Manassas, Virginia)

netcup is a German host that opened a US location in Manassas, Virginia and charges the same price there as in Nuremberg. The VPS 500 G12 lists at €5.91 a month including 19% German VAT, which is €4.97 net, for 2 vCores, 4 GB of DDR5 ECC RAM and 128 GB of NVMe. The plan page lists five locations: Vienna, Nuremberg, Amsterdam, Singapore, and "Manassas/USA (MNZ)". The monthly price is tied to a 12-month term; there is also hourly billing at €0.010 per hour with "no minimum contract terms", which works out a little higher over a full month but lets you leave whenever you want.

netcup's pricing page does not name the CPU. Public yabs runs submitted to VPSBenchmarks from the Manassas location show an AMD EPYC 9645 on the G12 root-server line, and runs on the VPS G12 line in Nuremberg report the virtualized CPU as "AMD EPYC-Genoa". That is the current EPYC generation, and it is the reason netcup is first here rather than only cheapest.

The trade-offs are real. Billing is in euros, the VAT you see depends on the country you select at checkout, the cheapest price needs a year-long commitment, and the company, support and documentation are German first. The verdict: for a US server that has to be cheap and modern, this is the closest thing to what Hetzner's US region used to be. We do not earn anything if you sign up, and the link is a plain link: netcup VPS plans.

2. IONOS VPS M+ (US data centers)

IONOS is the one option on this list that bills in dollars and has US data centers of its own; the company's newsroom describes its Lenexa, Kansas facility as IONOS-owned, and it also operates in Newark, New Jersey and Las Vegas, Nevada. The VPS M+ plan is 2 vCores, 4 GB of RAM and 120 GB of NVMe at $4 a month for the first three months and $11 a month after that, on a one-year term, with unlimited traffic and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

IONOS lists the hardware only as "latest AMD and Intel CPUs" and does not publish the model, so this page makes no claim about its speed relative to netcup or Hetzner. What can be said is that $11 for 4 GB and NVMe in a US data center is less than half of DigitalOcean, and about 30% of Hetzner's CPX21. The verdict: the right pick if you want USD billing and a US support line and can live with a 12-month contract. The promotional $4 is a three-month teaser; budget on $11. See IONOS VPS plans.

3. Contabo Cloud VPS 4 (US East, Central, West)

Contabo's Cloud VPS 4 is the most hardware per euro on this page: 4 vCPU cores, 8 GB of RAM and 100 GB of SSD for €5.50 a month including VAT, on a 24-month term. Contabo sells three US regions: US East (New York City), US Central, and US West (Seattle), and its launch post for the coastal regions says plainly that "we charge a Location Fee to cover higher cost of operating Data Centers in major cities like New York or Seattle."

Two things move the real US price above the sticker. Contabo charges a location fee for US regions. Its help center describes the fee as an extra charge that applies to servers in the United States, Asia and Australia, and says the amount is listed in the customer panel rather than on the plan page. And the €5.50 price requires a two-year commitment, the longest on this page. The verdict: choose Contabo when the workload is RAM-hungry and you are certain you will keep the server for two years; skip it if you might move within a year, and read the checkout total before you decide, not the plan page. See Contabo Cloud VPS plans.

Providers that did not make the list, and why: Hostwinds, Kamatera and RackNerd all price a 2 vCPU / 4 GB class US server at $19 to $25 a month on their standard plan pages, which is DigitalOcean's territory rather than Hetzner's old one. Hostinger's KVM 2 plan (2 vCPU, 8 GB, 100 GB NVMe) is $8.99 a month on a two-year term and $14.99 at renewal, and it belongs in this price band, but it is a mass-market brand that already appears on every hosting list and we cover it elsewhere on this site.

When should you stay on Hetzner?

In three situations the right move is to do nothing.

You ordered before June 15, 2026. The price-adjustment page is explicit: "For orders placed before 15 June 2026, but delivered after 15 June 2026, the previous prices will apply." Existing servers keep their old price. The one thing to avoid is a rescale, because the same page warns that "certain changes to servers with legacy pricing may trigger a switch to the current pricing". Keep the server as it is and put new capacity somewhere else.

The workload can live in Europe. The Intel CX23 in Germany or Finland is €5.49 a month for 2 vCPU and 4 GB after the increase, which is still one of the lowest prices in the industry, and Hetzner's regular-performance page states that "Cloud servers located in the EU include at least 20 TB of included traffic." If your users are not latency-sensitive, or you are hosting a backup target, a build runner or a private service, the EU location is the better Hetzner today.

You are deep in Hetzner's tooling. Private networks, load balancers, snapshots, firewalls and the cloud API and its Terraform provider are the reasons people picked Hetzner beyond price. None of the three alternatives above replaces that stack one for one, and rebuilding it costs engineering time that a $25 monthly difference may not justify.

What do you lose when you leave Hetzner for an alternative?

Not much traffic, if you are leaving a US server. The famous 20 TB allowance is a European figure. Hetzner's own page states that "Cloud servers located in the U.S. include at least 1 TB of included traffic." DigitalOcean's $24 plan includes 4,000 GiB of transfer and IONOS advertises unlimited traffic, so on that one line the alternatives are equal or better. If you are leaving a German server, the 20 TB is the thing you will miss most.

Hourly billing without a term. Hetzner and DigitalOcean bill hourly with no commitment. netcup offers hourly billing at a slightly higher effective rate, IONOS needs a year, and Contabo needs two. The cheapest prices on this page are cheap partly because you are lending the provider a year of certainty.

Dollar billing and a US legal entity. netcup and Contabo invoice in euros. For a personal project that is a rounding error on a card statement; for a company with a US accounts-payable process it can matter more than the price difference.

A known quantity. Hetzner's reputation was built over years of stable pricing. The June 15 round, coming ten weeks after the April round, is the part of this story that no spreadsheet captures: the provider you move to can do the same thing, and Hetzner's record before 2026 would not have predicted this either. Prefer month-to-month terms if you are worried about that, and accept a slightly higher price for the option to leave.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Hetzner raise prices in 2026?

Yes, twice: a broad increase on April 1, 2026, and a second round on June 15, 2026 that more than doubled the CPX and CCX cloud lines, including the US region.

Will my existing Hetzner server price go up?

Not on its own. Hetzner's announcement says existing server contracts keep their terms and remain active, and that the changes apply exclusively to new orders and rescales of existing servers. Orders placed before June 15, 2026 but delivered after that date also keep the previous prices. The catch is the word rescale: resizing a server to another plan is a new order at the current price, and Hetzner's price-adjustment page adds that certain changes to servers with legacy pricing may trigger a switch to current pricing. If you hold an old-price server in Ashburn or Hillsboro, the safest move is to leave it exactly as it is and build anything new somewhere else.

Is Hetzner available in the USA?

Yes. Hetzner has cloud locations in Ashburn, Virginia and Hillsboro, Oregon. Hetzner's documentation states that these locations, along with Singapore, are "currently only available for cloud products (Cloud Shared AMD, Cloud Dedicated AMD, and Cloud features)". US cloud servers include at least 1 TB of traffic per month, compared with at least 20 TB in the EU locations.

Is netcup cheaper than Hetzner in the US?

Yes, by a wide margin. netcup's VPS 500 G12 in Manassas, Virginia lists at €5.91 per month including 19% German VAT (€4.97 net) for 2 vCores, 4 GB DDR5 ECC RAM and 128 GB NVMe, on a 12-month term or billed hourly. Hetzner's US CPX21 (3 vCPU, 4 GB, 80 GB) is $37.49 per month excluding IPv4 since June 15, 2026. netcup charges the same price in Manassas as in Nuremberg.

Does Contabo charge extra for US locations?

Yes. Contabo's launch post for its coastal US regions says "we charge a Location Fee to cover higher cost of operating Data Centers in major cities like New York or Seattle", and its help center lists the United States among the regions the fee applies to. The amount is listed in the customer panel rather than on the plan page, so treat the €5.50 sticker price for Cloud VPS 4 as the European price and expect a higher total for US East, US Central or US West.

Three readers, three next pages

If you are holding a pre-June-15 Hetzner server and only want to understand what you have, the Hetzner review covers the product itself, and this page will be linked from its top until the prices there are fully rewritten. If your users are in Europe and the US question does not apply to you, the European VPS comparison already carries the post-June-15 euro prices for Hetzner and its neighbors. If Contabo's 8 GB for €5.50 is what caught your eye, read the Contabo review first, because the 24-month term and the location fee are the two things people regret not reading about. Whichever way you go, the Hetzner alternatives above were priced on September 11, 2026, and the linked pages are the place to confirm before you order.

Sources

• Hetzner Docs: Price Adjustment 15 June 2026 (USA table, effective date, legacy-pricing wording)
• Hetzner press release, June 15, 2026 (stated reason, existing contracts)
• Hetzner Docs: Locations (which product lines are sold in Ashburn and Hillsboro)
• Hetzner Cloud: Regular Performance (CPX) page (plan specs, included traffic per region)
• DigitalOcean Droplet pricing
• netcup VPS G12 plans and VPSBenchmarks yabs run from netcup Manassas
• IONOS VPS plans and IONOS newsroom: Lenexa, Kansas data center
• Contabo Cloud VPS plans and Contabo blog: Two new US Data Center Regions (location fee wording) and Contabo help center: What is the location fee?
• Hostinger VPS plans