Product details — Cloud Compute
Hetzner Cloud
This page is a decision brief, not a review. It explains when Hetzner Cloud tends to fit, where it usually struggles, and how costs behave as your needs change. This page covers Hetzner Cloud in isolation; side-by-side comparisons live on separate pages.
Quick signals
What this product actually is
Cost-effective cloud VMs with strong price/performance, often chosen for Europe-centric deployments and straightforward infrastructure.
Pricing behavior (not a price list)
These points describe when users typically pay more, what actions trigger upgrades, and the mechanics of how costs escalate.
Actions that trigger upgrades
- Need broader region coverage
- Need deeper managed services ecosystem
- Need enterprise governance and compliance features
When costs usually spike
- Region selection can be a hard constraint
- Support and compliance expectations must be validated for your use case
- Operational ownership still exists even if the platform is simpler than hyperscalers
- Validate networking capabilities and backup/restore expectations early
Plans and variants (structural only)
Grouped by type to show structure, not to rank or recommend specific SKUs.
Plans
- On-demand - pay by instance size - Primary drivers are vCPU/RAM, region, and runtime hours.
- Commitments - discounts (where offered) - Reserved/committed use can reduce unit cost but adds lock-in.
- Network - egress + load balancers - Egress and networking services are common surprise cost drivers.
- Official pricing: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/#pricing
Costs & limitations
Common limits
- Regional footprint may be narrower than hyperscalers
- Enterprise governance/compliance patterns may require extra validation
- Managed service ecosystem is smaller than hyperscalers
- If you need deep managed-service adjacency, you may outgrow the ecosystem
- Support/compliance expectations should be validated for your organization
- Multi-region patterns may require more bespoke design work
What breaks first
- Region/footprint mismatch if your customer base expands beyond the provider’s strongest regions
- Compliance/governance requirements that require enterprise controls and audits
- Needing a deep managed-services ecosystem without a migration plan
- Multi-region availability patterns that weren’t designed up front
- Operational standards when teams provision VMs without shared templates
Fit assessment
Good fit if…
- Teams prioritizing cost/performance on VM hosting
- Workloads with Europe-centric deployment needs
- Teams that don’t require deep hyperscaler ecosystems
- Standard web services and APIs where a simple VM model is sufficient
- Teams that can own lifecycle practices (patching, backups, observability)
Poor fit if…
- You need broad global regions and enterprise managed services
- You need hyperscaler-level governance tooling
Trade-offs
Every design choice has a cost. Here are the explicit trade-offs:
- Price/performance → potentially narrower ecosystem and regions
- Simplicity → fewer enterprise governance features
- Lower cost → more validation needed for enterprise requirements
- Great for standard workloads → may require migration as complexity grows
Common alternatives people evaluate next
These are common “next shortlists” — same tier, step-down, step-sideways, or step-up — with a quick reason why.
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DigitalOcean Droplets — Step-sideways / DX-first VPSCompared when teams prefer a very developer-friendly control plane and broader managed ecosystem expectations over pure price/performance.
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Linode — Step-sideways / predictable VPSEvaluated as a predictable VPS alternative when platform fit and operational expectations matter more than optimizing unit cost.
-
AWS EC2 — Step-up / hyperscaler ecosystemShortlisted when global footprint, enterprise governance, or managed services adjacency outweigh VPS simplicity.
Sources & verification
Pricing and behavioral information comes from public documentation and structured research. When information is incomplete or volatile, we prefer to say so rather than guess.