The economics of Hetzner vs OVHcloud budget European VPS hosting

Price adjustments and infrastructure costs

Hetzner raised prices for new orders and rescales of cloud servers on 15 June 2026. This adjustment applies to all cloud server locations, including Germany, Finland, the USA, and Singapore. The price adjustment for CCX dedicated vCPU instances in Germany and Finland caused monthly costs to rise between 2.1x and 2.73x, forcing many teams to choose between absorbing costs or migrating workloads to a different provider. CPX shared AMD vCPU instances saw increases of 2.4x to 2.75x in Germany and Finland, whereas USA prices for the same family climbed up to 3.1x. For the CX and CAX families, the hikes stayed between 1.3x and 1.4x. Singapore saw smaller relative increases because pricing there was already higher in absolute terms before the adjustment. A team running three CCX33 instances in Germany or Finland previously paid €187.47 per month for the same compute, but now must pay €415.47. Existing contracts retain their original terms. Hetzner remains the performance leader despite these rising costs.

Hetzner operates several thousand servers in data center parks in Nuremberg, Falkenstein, and Helsinki, alongside infrastructure in Singapore and the USA. Hetzner offers different instance types for various needs. CX instances use shared Intel or AMD vCPUs, while CAX instances use shared Ampere ARM processors. CPX instances use shared AMD vCPUs, and CCX instances provide dedicated AMD vCPUs. For development and testing, the CX23 instance costs €5.99 per month for 2 vCPUs, 4 GB RAM, and 40 GB NVME. For high-memory applications, the CCX43 provides 16 vCPUs and 64 GB RAM for €276.49 per month. For ARM-compatible workloads, the CAX21 costs €10.49 per month.

Performance metrics and provider scale

Performance metrics distinguish these providers. Hetzner delivers 1,245 single-core CPU points, which exceeds UpCloud’s 1,200 and OVH’s 1,050. Storage performance at Hetzner reaches 1,850 MB/s, which beats UpCloud’s 1,650 MB/s and far exceeds OVH’s 450 MB/s. Hetzner also provides 9,800 Mbps of network throughput, whereas UpCloud provides 8,500 Mbps and OVH provides 3,500 Mbps. Boot times at Hetzner require 18.5 seconds, compared to 22.4 seconds for UpCloud and 48.3 seconds for OVH. OVH operates 43 data centers and manages 1.6 million customers. OVH maintains control over its value chain by designing and manufacturing its own servers.

Other providers compete in the budget space. Atlantic.Net offers a starter VPS for $8 per month with 2 GB RAM and 1 vCPU, while Linode provides a Nanode plan for $5 per month with 1 GB RAM and 1 vCPU. Vultr offers regular performance plans starting at $2.50 per month. Hostinger provides a VPS 1 plan for $3.95 per month with 1 GB RAM and 1 vCPU, and OVH offers a VPS SSD 1 plan for $3.50 per month with 2 GB RAM and 1 vCPU. Cyfuture Cloud offers a starter VPS for $8 per month with 2 GB RAM and 1 vCPU. For enterprise workloads, the OVH b2-7 instance costs $59.35 per month for 2 vCPUs and 7 GB RAM, whereas a Fluence Virtual Server provides 2 vCPUs and 4 GB RAM plus an additional 3 GB RAM for $15.24. Fluence offers a decentralized model that eliminates platform markups. An OVH B2 instance for a medium-sized workload costs between $221 and $232 per month, totaling up to $2,784 annually. An equivalent Fluence setup costs approximately $43 per month, which results in a yearly total of about $516. This difference of over $2,200 per instance per year can support significant business growth or diversification.

Network routing and regional issues

OVHcloud routing in Singapore fails many users. OVH routing in Singapore forces connections to the main link to the USA, causing traffic from Jakarta to Singapore to jump from 12ms to over 100ms. Traffic from OVH Hillsboro to Vancouver goes through Illinois, resulting in a 70ms ping instead of the expected sub-10ms latency. You should check these routing paths if you prioritize low latency for Southeast Asian or West Coast North American users. Which provider handles regional peering more effectively? Hetzner’s network includes transit providers in Germany and Finland. In the USA, Hetzner provides connectivity in Ashburn and Hillsboro. OVH has presence in Vint Hill and Hillsboro, but users note that OVH Singapore does not prioritize peer connections to SGIX or Singapore Global Switch.