Hetzner Cloud Pricing 2026: Price Hikes & CX Availability

Hetzner Cloud pricing changed twice in 2026. The last price increase hit on June 15, 2026, and the cheap line everyone recommends is now the problem: a CX23 that cost €2.99 at launch is €5.49 (+84%), and right now that plan is unavailable to order. A CPX22 went from €5.99 to €19.49 (+225%) in the same period. Below are the full June 2026 price tables, the CX23 availability status, the grandfathering rules, and what to order instead.

VPS prices jumped across the board in 2026. For the market-wide picture, see what happened with VPS price increases in 2026 and when a mini PC wins instead.

What Hetzner Cloud costs now (June 2026 prices)

Everything below is the official June 15, 2026 list for EU locations (Nuremberg, Falkenstein, Helsinki). Prices are in EUR, exclude VAT, and exclude IPv4. A primary IPv4 address adds €0.50/month on every shared plan. Servers ordered before June 15, 2026 kept their old price, so a bill you already have may be lower than these numbers.

Cost-Optimized (CX and CAX) prices

These are the plans this article is about, and the ones you currently cannot order. The “Available” column is what Hetzner showed on October 13, 2026. A price on an unorderable plan is not an offer.

CX Gen3 (x86), EU, excl. VAT and IPv4:

CAX (ARM, Ampere), EU, excl. VAT and IPv4:

Add €0.50/month for IPv4 and the real cost of a CX23 is €5.99/month, CAX11 is €6.49/month, CX33 is €8.99/month. Cumulative damage on this line is +70% to +84% since the October 2025 launch. Painful, but nothing like what happened to the other lines.

CPX and CCX prices: the plans that really got hit

Regular Performance (CPX Gen2) and Dedicated (CCX) were repriced on June 15 far harder than the cost-optimized line. In the June wave alone CPX rose 144-175% and CCX rose 113-173%. Since launch that is +225% to +259% on CPX and +178% to +259% on CCX. These plans are orderable today. This is what an unorderable CX23 pushes you into.

EU (FSN/NBG/HEL), excl. VAT and IPv4:

Other regions got hit too, and US billing hit harder in April (+38-53% in USD). Compact picture of current non-EU prices:

If you bill in USD, expect the April increase to look worse than the EUR tables suggest.

Two increases, one year: launch to April to June

Bar chart of cumulative Hetzner price increases from the October 2025 launch to June 15 2026: cost-optimized CX and CAX plans up 70 to 84 percent while CPX and CCX plans are up 178 to 259 percent

Add-ons follow the April 1 prices. They were not raised again in June, but they are not cheap anymore:

Budget with the total, not the sticker: server price plus €0.50 IPv4 plus backups plus snapshots. Those extras moved with the base prices.

Can you order a CX23 right now? Availability status

Decision flowchart for ordering a Hetzner CX23 when cost-optimized plans are out of stock: check the Console, then order, wait, fall back to CPX22, or compare netcup, OVH and Hostinger

What to order instead

If the Create button is disabled, you have three moves. The first is to do nothing if you already own a CX/CAX server, because grandfathered boxes are the cheapest compute Hetzner sells right now. If you need a new server today, here is what the fallback costs:

Two notes on that table. CPX gets you double the disk of the CX equivalent, which softens the blow a little. And Hetzner has started listing a CPX02 (1 vCPU, 1GB) marked “new”, but I have not verified its price, specs, or locations as of this update, so do not budget around it.

Before you accept +€14/month or more, price the outside options. Hostinger VPS runs aggressive first-term promos (the renewal price is higher, so model year two), netcup wants a 12-month term and raised its own prices in September 2026, and OVHcloud only raised 5-10% in the same window Hetzner went up 30%+. The CPX22 fallback at €19.99 is roughly DigitalOcean pricing. The “always cheapest” story breaks when the cost-optimized line is out of stock.

Check live prices and stock yourself

Do not budget off a screenshot. Here is a 60-second check you can run before every order:

# Read-only token is enough. Create one in your Hetzner Cloud project:
# Project -> Security -> API Tokens -> Generate API Token (Read)

export HCLOUD_TOKEN="your-project-token"

# Price for cx23 per location and per billing type
curl -s -H "Authorization: Bearer $HCLOUD_TOKEN" \
  "https://api.hetzner.cloud/v1/server_types?name=cx23" | jq '.server_types[0].prices[]'

# Same thing with the hcloud CLI
hcloud server-type describe cx23 -o json | jq '.prices[]'

# What types exist at all
hcloud server-type list -o table

Verify: the curl call returns a JSON list of price objects with location and price_monthly fields. Expected output includes gross/net values around €5.49 net for cx23 in EU locations.

Failure modes: a 401 means the token is missing or wrong (HCLOUD_TOKEN not exported). jq: command not found means you need apt install jq or equivalent. And the big one: the API returning a price does not mean the plan is orderable. Orderability is only confirmed by an enabled Create button in the Console. That mismatch has been the normal state for CX/CAX since late June 2026.

Why Hetzner raised prices twice in 2026

The April wave has an official explanation. On February 23, 2026, Hetzner’s PR manager Christian Fitz published a statement saying the cost to operate its infrastructure and to buy new hardware had “increased dramatically”, and confirmed the April 1 adjustment would apply to both new orders and existing products. The statement does not name DRAM or any specific component. The June 15 wave was documented only on the Hetzner docs price-adjustment page (ID GE-D9256), cloud servers only, with no separate press release.

Background, not from Hetzner: reporting from cloudtally.eu (published March 2, 2026, reviewed April 18, 2026) ties the increases to DRAM contract prices surging on AI and HBM demand, with TrendForce forecasting a 90-95% quarter-over-quarter increase for Q1 2026 and wafer capacity reallocated away from conventional DRAM. The same reporting notes OVHcloud raised only 5-10% for April through September 2026, which makes Hetzner’s 30%+ look less like an industry tax and more like a specific catch-up on memory-exposed hardware.

Grandfathering rules: who keeps the old price

The effective-date rules from the June 15 documentation, in operator terms:

Rescaling and migrating between plans

If you are moving anyway (new workload, or the old server is already on current pricing), the operator flow is the same as before, with two new checks:

The classic “I rescaled down and my bill went up” failure is now the default behavior, not an edge case. Migrating down in specs does not migrate down in price list.

The plan structure explained (CX Gen3, CAX, CPX Gen2, CCX)

Hetzner organizes cloud servers by generation and performance class instead of by hardware type. Three lines, and where you can get them:

Region and plan line at a glance:

Performance testing: CX Gen3 benchmarks

These numbers are my own test of a CX33 (4 vCPU, 8GB RAM, 80GB SSD) in the Nuremberg datacenter, run in October 2025 during the launch period. They are not re-run for this update. Prices shown in the video and in the original writeup predate both 2026 increases: the video’s “€3.49” was the USD launch price of the small CX23 (€2.99 in EUR), and the CX33 tested here launched at €4.99/month, went to €6.49 in April 2026, and is €8.49 as of June 15, 2026. (An earlier revision of this article misquoted €5.49 for this plan. That price never existed.)

System specifications

Disk performance (fio)

Peak speeds reached 4.46 GB/s on large blocks. The NVMe stack was solid for a budget plan.

Network performance (iperf3, IPv4)

Intra-Europe was fast (12+ Gbits/sec to Amsterdam). Transatlantic was fine for a European box. Asia-Pacific is what it is from Germany.

CPU performance (Geekbench 6)

Solid scores for the launch price. If you want to run the same battery yourself on whatever plan you can actually order, here is how to benchmark cloud servers with YABS and compare results honestly.

Is Hetzner still worth it in 2026?

Short answer: yes when you can get a cost-optimized server, no longer obviously yes when you cannot. The old “4x cheaper” line from this article’s earlier days is dead. Like-for-like against DigitalOcean, a CX23 at €5.99 including IPv4 is about 3.6x cheaper than a $24/month 2 vCPU/4GB droplet. When the only orderable Hetzner option is a CPX22 at €19.99, that gap is gone.

Competitor list prices for the 2 vCPU / 4GB / 80GB class, September 2026 snapshot. Spot-check these on publish day before you decide:

For more opinions on the platform itself, see our full Hetzner Cloud review and the DigitalOcean vs Vultr vs Hetzner comparison.

ARM vs x86: CAX vs CX

At June 2026 prices the cost-optimized ARM line is no longer cheaper than x86. It is more expensive: CAX11 is €5.99 vs CX23 at €5.49 (+9%), CAX21 is +24% over CX33, CAX31 is +31% over CX43, CAX41 is +39% over CX53. The “better performance per euro” pitch from launch is gone. Pick CAX for the silicon and the ecosystem, not for the bill.

Automation notes for Hetzner ops

Backups, storage costs and hardening

Everything around the server got more expensive in April 2026 and stayed there. Volumes are €0.0572/GB/month, snapshots are €0.0143/GB/month, Object Storage is €6.49 base plus €0.0087/GB. Backups are priced as a percentage of server price (about 20% at last check, confirm on the current docs page before you quote it), which means backup cost rose in lockstep with the June server increases.

Frequently asked questions

Conclusion and key takeaways

Hetzner Cloud pricing in 2026 is a two-wave story: April took prices up 30-37%, June 15 took CPX and CCX up another 144-175%, and the cost-optimized CX/CAX line is currently unorderable. When you can get one, Hetzner is still the best per-core deal in Europe by several multiples. When you cannot, the fallback pricing is ordinary, and you should run a real comparison before signing anything.

Who should use Cost-Optimized plans when they return: developers and startups watching costs, side projects, dev and staging environments, small WordPress sites, CI runners, monitoring stacks, learning platforms.

Who should look at CPX, CCX, or elsewhere: high-traffic production, heavy databases, CPU-bound processing, anything with an SLA, anything that cannot tolerate a plan disappearing from the order page.

If you hold a pre-June-15 server, keep it and leave it alone. If you need one now, price CPX and the outside options before committing, and if the rented box keeps getting more expensive, the “own the hardware” exit is newly competitive: see the best home server mini PCs guide, or if you want a compact box that runs a small Docker fleet quietly, the ASUS DC510 mini PC is the class of hardware that makes the math work. And for the full market picture behind all this, VPS price increases in 2026 covers what changed and when.