Hetzner review - the price-performance king for self-hosting

Hetzner is the one to beat on price-performance, and it is the whole engine behind the self-hosting case this site keeps making: if a recurring SaaS bill is really just software you could run yourself, Hetzner is where you run it cheaply. A German provider that hands you far more compute per euro than the US clouds.

Who it is for

Technical owners, developers, and small teams who can run a Linux box - or who have a developer who can. A single CX23 will host a database, a self-hosted analytics tool, a link shortener, and a small app at once, each of which might otherwise be its own monthly subscription. This is the machine that replaces a stack of SaaS bills.

The real pricing math

The CX23 (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB NVMe, 20 TB traffic) is EUR 5.49/mo excl. VAT. ARM is often the better buy: CAX11 at EUR 5.99/mo, CAX21 (4 vCPU, 8 GB, 80 GB) at EUR 10.49/mo. Billing is hourly with a monthly cap and there is no setup fee. These figures reflect the 15 June 2026 adjustment, which raised prices notably and renamed the x86 line - the old CX22 is now CX23 - so price it fresh rather than trusting a figure from earlier in the year.

What they don’t tell you

“EUR 5.49” is not what leaves your account. Three add-ons the sticker hides:

• VAT. Prices exclude it. An EU consumer pays it on top - German 19% takes the CX23 to about EUR 6.53. An EU business with a valid VAT ID reverse-charges it, and a customer outside the EU pays no German VAT. Know which one you are before you budget.
• IPv4. A public IPv4 address is now billed separately at EUR 0.50/mo per server. You can run IPv6-only to skip it, but most people want the v4.
• Traffic outside the EU. The generous 20 TB included is an EU-location number. US and Singapore locations include as little as 1 TB, with overage at EUR 1/TB (EUR 7.40/TB in Singapore). If your users are in the US, price the US region’s allowance, not Germany’s.

Backups are off by default and add 20% of the instance price when you turn them on. And the big one: Hetzner is unmanaged. You get a Linux box and an excellent console; the updates, security, backups, and the app itself are yours, including the 11pm outage.

Who should skip it

Non-technical owners who want to click and forget. There is no managed layer, no support that logs into your app, no cPanel hand-holding. If you would be learning Linux on your business’s critical path, the money you save on the box you will lose in your own hours - use Cloudways or Kinsta instead.

On the affiliate program

There isn’t one, and that is the point. Hetzner runs no cash affiliate program, so we earn nothing for putting it here. We include it anyway because on pure value it is the honest answer for self-hosting, and a review site that only recommended hosts that pay it would never tell you that.

Bottom line

Green, for the technical. If you or your developer can run a Linux server, Hetzner is the cheapest credible way to host apps and to replace recurring SaaS with software you own. Just add VAT, the EUR 0.50 IPv4, and backups to the real number, and check the traffic allowance for your region. If you cannot run a box, a managed option will serve you better.