Hetzner Price Increase 2026: Cheaper VPS Alternatives

For years Hetzner was the default answer to "where do I get a cheap VPS?" In 2026 that changed. Hetzner raised prices more than once, citing the jump in memory and SSD costs driven by AI data-center demand, and other European hosts such as OVHcloud and netcup followed.

Short answer: if your server already runs and its price did not change on your invoice, there is little reason to move: migrating costs time and the alternatives went up too. If you are ordering a new small server, compare before you click. For U.S. users, DigitalOcean is now cheaper than Hetzner's U.S. locations; for lots of RAM on a budget, Hostinger's KVM plans are worth a look if you accept a 24-month prepay.

What actually changed

• April 1, 2026: first price adjustment for cloud and dedicated servers, with higher DRAM and NAND costs given as the reason.
• June 15, 2026: a further "standardization and price adjustment" of server products, applying to new orders and rescales.
• Size of the increase: this is where reporting disagrees. Some articles quote about 10%, while others show individual small plans going up by 30–50%. The difference comes from which plans you compare, so the only number that matters is the one on your invoice.

Hetzner's current prices (checked November 8, 2026)

Regular Performance cloud servers, monthly, excluding VAT, IPv4 included:

Should you move an existing server?

Probably not, unless your bill went up. Before migrating, check:

1. Your latest invoice. If the price did not change, the increase does not affect you yet.
2. Do not rescale casually. Resizing a server re-prices it at today's rates.
3. Migration cost. Moving Postgres, DNS, TLS and deploy scripts takes a weekend for a small app. Saving €2 a month is not worth that; saving €20 might be.

The alternatives

DigitalOcean: best for U.S. users

DigitalOcean's Basic Droplets are priced in dollars with simple monthly billing:

The $6 Droplet matches Hetzner's CPX02 on RAM at a similar price, with U.S. data centers. You get far less included traffic than Hetzner's 20 TB, which only matters for bandwidth-heavy apps.

Hostinger VPS: most RAM per dollar, with a catch

Hostinger's KVM plans give much more memory for the money, but the advertised price requires paying for 24 months up front, and renewal is higher:

If your app needs RAM (Node.js plus Postgres plus a cache), KVM 2 at $8.79 is hard to beat for two years. Budget for the renewal price when you plan the third year.

Vultr

Vultr is another common Hetzner alternative with many U.S. and Asian locations and hourly billing capped at a monthly price. Its regular Cloud Compute plan with 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 25 GB SSD and 1 TB of transfer is listed at $5 a month in most locations, with a 512 MB plan around $2.50 in some regions. A few locations, such as Tokyo, cost slightly more, so check the price for the region you pick at checkout.

For a U.S. audience, that makes Vultr's 1 GB plan the cheapest of the mainstream options here, $1 below DigitalOcean, with less included transfer than Hetzner.

Skip the server entirely: Render or Railway

If the price increase is a good moment to stop managing servers, platforms like Render (about $13/month for the smallest always-on web service plus Postgres) or Railway (from $5/month, usage-based) remove OS updates and patching. I compare them with real prices in Cheapest Way to Host a Node.js + Postgres App in 2026.

Or host from a PC you already own

For side projects, a home PC with Cloudflare Tunnel costs about $3 a month in electricity and domain fees. I ran a production app this way for 12 days before moving it to Google Cloud's free e2-micro VM; here is the setup, the outages and the risks.

Side-by-side: about €6–9 a month

How much RAM do you actually need? My own Node.js + PostgreSQL app, a multi-school exam platform, runs on a 1 GB VM using about 520 MB with Postgres tuned down and a 2 GB swap file. So the 1 GB plans above are enough for a small app; pick 2 GB or more only if you add Redis, a search engine or heavier caching.

My verdict

Hetzner is still good value in Europe, especially for traffic-heavy apps, but it is no longer the automatic cheapest choice. For a small Node.js app serving U.S. users, a $6 DigitalOcean Droplet is the simplest replacement. If you need memory and can prepay, Hostinger KVM 2 gives 8 GB for under $9 a month for two years. And if your server's price has not changed, keep it: the cheapest migration is the one you do not need.

As for me, I skipped all of them for now: my app moved from a home laptop to Google Cloud's free e2-micro, and when it outgrows that I will choose by vCPU count, not RAM, because password hashing during logins is my real bottleneck.