The economics of moving to Hetzner dedicated servers in 2026

Hardware price volatility and new tier structures

Hetzner’s April 1 price increases raised cloud server prices in Germany and Finland by 30% to 37% per tier. This move followed a February 23 announcement that affected all products and existing customers. On May 27, Hetzner changed its strategy to protect existing contracts, applying the June 15 price adjustments to new orders only. This third adjustment introduces a "-1-Ltd" Limited tier using hardware sourced at lower costs. The decision responds to the 43% to 48% rise in server DRAM contract prices in Q4 2025. North American cloud providers demand High-Bandwidth Memory for AI. This reallocates production capacity from conventional DDR5. Hetzner’s dedicated server prices rose by 3% to 21% during the April 1 round. This follows a second adjustment on April 29 that raised setup fees for dedicated servers due to rising prices for RAM and NVMe SSDs. OVHcloud raised its VPS-1 prices by 41% to 55% on April 1. Scaleway updated its pricing on June 1. The market expects these price pressures to persist through at least 2027 as DDR5 contract prices rose over 300% in some segments.

Comparison of cloud egress and compute costs

Teams leave AWS because outbound traffic fees reach $0.09 per GB, whereas Hetzner includes 20 TB of monthly traffic per instance in EU regions. A medium AWS EC2 instance costs roughly $110.16 per month, while a Hetzner CX33 costs only €10.31. You should verify your egress needs before signing a multi-year contract. The introduction of the Limited tier allows Hetzner to capture price-sensitive buyers by using hardware sourced at lower costs without diluting the reputation of its standard service tiers or the premium brand identity established by its higher-end hardware. DigitalOcean’s medium VM costs $48.00 per month, while Hetzner’s CX33 is €10.31. For storage, 1 TB of AWS S3 costs $37.96, whereas Hetzner charges €7.44 for 1 TB of object storage. Companies using DigitalOcean find that its egress prices of $10.00 per TB make it difficult to compete with Hetzner’s €1.15 per TB rate. Scaling on AWS requires managing expensive per-request billing and storage IOPS fees. The economic case for moving to Hetzner remains strong for bandwidth-heavy workloads because of how AWS managed services and egress fees create a pricing trap for growing applications.

Sovereignty and GDPR compliance in Europe

AWS launched a €7.8 billion European Sovereign Cloud in Brandenburg. This infrastructure uses the eusc-de-east-1 region and operates separately from global regions. However, US jurisdiction under the CLOUD Act means US authorities can still request data from US-headquartered companies. Organizations seeking true sovereignty often select German provider Hetzner or French provider Scaleway instead, as Hetzner’s German headquarters and EU-based data centers provide a distinct advantage for GDPR compliance. The AWS infrastructure uses a new German parent company, AWS European Sovereign Cloud GmbH, to manage operations. An engineer noted that technical isolation slows down debugging issues. OVHcloud raised its VPS-1 prices by 41% to 55% on April 1. Scaleway updated its pricing on June 1. Will the expansion of AI data centers keep DRAM prices at these levels indefinitely?