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Hetzner (European hosting provider) to increase prices by up to 38%

393 pointsby doenertoday at 11:44 AM361 commentsview on HN

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octoclawtoday at 2:04 PM

Running a small project on Hetzner from Germany. Got the email this morning. Honestly, even after the increase their dedicated boxes are still absurdly cheap compared to what you'd pay at AWS or GCP for equivalent specs.

The real story here isn't Hetzner being greedy. It's that AI companies are vacuuming up every DRAM chip on the planet and the rest of us get to pay the tax. I priced out a RAM upgrade for my home server last week. Same kit I bought 8 months ago for 90 EUR is now 400+. That's not normal market dynamics.

What worries me more is the second-order effects. Startups that would normally spin up cheap VPS instances to prototype and iterate now face meaningfully higher costs at the exact stage where every euro matters. The "just deploy it" culture that made European indie dev scene so productive was built on sub-10 EUR/month boxes. Those days might be over for a while.

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embedding-shapetoday at 12:22 PM

The post seems to indicate this is just for VPSs, which doesn't seem true, the email I just received from Hetzner mentions price increases for dedicated servers too.

The ones I'm affected by seemingly:

  Product -> previous price -> New price as of 1 April 2026
  EX42-NVMe (FSN1) -> € 49.65 -> € 51.13
  AX41 (FSN1) -> € 49.73 -> € 51.22
  AX41-NVMe (FSN1) -> € 49.73 -> € 51.18
  Server Auction -> € 65.22 -> € 67.18
Still cheap compared to the performance + unmetered bandwidth, so I'm personally not super upset about it, my monthly bill in total goes up maybe 40-50 EUR in total, not that outrageous.

Here is the full list of the updated prices: https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availabi...

Seems it's because of increased cost of hardware, and they seemingly tried to avoid increasing the prices but they couldn't. From the email:

> The underlying causes of the increased costs are, among others, the exploding demand for AI-related computing power and for cloud services. In addition, raw material prices and production costs have also generally risen for manufacturers. The costs for RAM and SSDs especially have risen by a large amount. For example, the cost for DRAM memory has increased up to 500% since September 2025. And according to market researchers like TrendForce, this price trend will continue throughout the year.

> We have genuinely tried hard to optimize our costs and to prevent increasing our prices for as long as possible. But we can no longer compensate for the strain that it has placed on our operations. We want to continue to deliver quality products that meet both our standards and your expectations, so we must take this step.

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bootsmanntoday at 12:29 PM

A significant part of this is probably just the hockey-stick growth in the price of memory we have seen in the past 6 months. Would be surprised if this wasn't impacting their bottom line for maintenance.

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Betelbuddytoday at 12:36 PM

It seems we will run out of hardware by March?

"Hard drives already sold out for this year" - https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/20/ai_blamed_again_as_ha...

Time for an AI tax on the hyperscalers.

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ozgunetoday at 12:27 PM

These changes are effective April 1st for existing and new customers. The price increase ratios are also different across product lines.

* Cloud (VMs): 38%

* Bare metal: 15%

* Memory add-on for bare metal: 575% (effective immediately)

It feels like memory add-on is intentionally set high to discourage customers from adding more memory.

AX102 (128 GB RAM) costs €124, AX162 (256 GB RAM) costs €244, but the 128 GB memory add-on alone costs €264. If we ignore the setup fee, it’s more cost-effective to provision additional servers instead of adding RAM to bare metal instances.

Here's the link to cloud and bare metal pricing changes: https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availabi...

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jsheardtoday at 12:03 PM

This was already discussed, but that post got dumped onto page 5 after just a couple of hours for some reason.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120145

someguyornotidktoday at 6:45 PM

Hetzner is currently cheaper than getting a static IP from my ISP + electricity, but just barely. I have a ton of local compute and can easily allocate one or two servers to take over if sufficiently motivated.

I wonder how many of Hetzner's customers are like me. I hope DRAM doesn't kill off cheap VPS providers like this one.

devops000today at 12:26 PM

Still cheaper than US cloud computing.

In EU there are: Hetzner, OVH and Seeweb.

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flowerthoughtstoday at 12:54 PM

I really love that their notification email includes applicable price change for my specific servers.

The worst counter example of this was Mercedes sending me an email saying "the terms and conditions have been updated, please read them at this link". It linked to the 52 page document I was supposed to read through in its entirety and manually diff against previous! Good thing they started adding a change log in the emails after some customer push back.

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huijzertoday at 2:06 PM

I just bought a Raspberry Pi 4 1 GB memory with aluminum case, aluminum NVME adapter, and a 64 GB SSD for about 80 euros. With microsd it’s even cheaper. 4 GB RAM would be about 120 euros.

The 1 GB RAM replaces one Forgejo runner that was in Hetzner. With €5 per month, I will earn this investment back in less than two years. After the price increase, this period will only shorten!

I also wrote about this at https://huijzer.xyz/posts/148/raspberry-pi-as-forgejo-runner

earthnailtoday at 2:39 PM

Somewhat weirdly I’m very happy about this price increase as a customer. The messaging is clear and completely understandable. Well done.

volkadavtoday at 2:24 PM

Doesn't seem to apply to older/deprecated gen instances. I've got a CX22 there for personal screw-around projects and it's the same £3.95/mo (pre-VAT) afaict. So maybe not much help to folks ordering new or running on the current gen as the older kit isn't something you can order now, but a small boon for us laggards.

FlamingMoetoday at 12:41 PM

I am confused why the announcement page says CCX33 in USA "Old price" is €59.49 but their main pricing page shows €50.49 for CCX33 in USA

Announcement page: http://docs.hetzner.com/de/general/infrastructure-and-availa...

Pricing page: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/

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Shoreltoday at 4:19 PM

Good. This means the market is healthy.

Hopefully this also means new providers appear in Europe, to handle the increase in demand.

chasd00today at 12:46 PM

If you just want an app server pick up an hp elitedesk off ebay and a ups and run it on your home inet connection.

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hnroo99today at 4:40 PM

Hm the pricing increase stresses me out out less than the server shortages. My impulse reaction is to buy a few cheap cloud VPS instances even though I don't need them right now... Anyone have any wisdom to encourage/discourage this?

rm30today at 2:32 PM

Western memory manufacturers decided to chase the AI bubble, abandoning the consumer and low-requirement markets entirely.

Chinese manufacturers are now capturing that entire segment with full vertical integration. When this bubble stabilizes, because it will (it's not going to grow to infinite), Western companies won't recapture those markets.

They've already ceded competitive advantage for the next decade. This is a structural shift, not a cyclical shortage.

It's another step in the transformation of Western industry that began in the '80s: the shift from real economy and human-centric production to financialized operations.

ilakshtoday at 4:27 PM

For some reason I didn't get an email from them about this, even though one of my VPSs is in Helsinki.

Anyway, let's all please pretend that Hetzner is now way overpriced if anyone asks about it. :P

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Havoctoday at 12:20 PM

This comes after OVH sent emails with really spicy increases too. Like north of 50

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iSlothtoday at 1:42 PM

Still a fraction of the cost of most other providers, and wouldn't shock me if we see the others all doing something similar.

xslvrxslwttoday at 3:07 PM

They're using Arbor, they were cheap for that exact reason.

Now that people don't care about Anti DDoS - this happens.

In the past everyone was leaving Hetzner for the OVH/Voxility due to terrible latency and nonexistent protection.

antonyhtoday at 12:38 PM

On one hand this is not good but predictable. I'm on longer-term commitments with OVH, so it will be interesting to see how they follow. I'm still keeping Hetzner on my shopping list, even with the increase the bare-metal offerings are within my budget, and now that prices have increases they should be stable for a while (also import for budget management).

dizhntoday at 12:54 PM

They've only ever increased the ipv4 prices for already existing customers before if I am not mistaken. This is quite big.

EDIT: It's not a huge increase for dedicated servers. I already can't find anything comparable for more than the increased end price.

> AX51 (FSN1) € 63.10 € 64.99

> AX101 (FSN1) € 107.10 € 110.31

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faverintoday at 2:12 PM

I moved from paying 24.50 a month to 25.39 a month for my little VPS plus storagebox.

CPX31 Cloud Server (Germany): €13.10 → €13.99/month (+€0.89, ~+6.8%) BX21 Storage Box: Unchanged Primary IPv4: Stays at €0.50/month

xinaydertoday at 2:14 PM

I haven't received this email, and I have one x64 server that costs around 4 EUR/mo, and an ARM server that costs about 6 EUR/mo. I wonder if I'll still be affected by the price increase.

Stevvotoday at 4:33 PM

It's not just Hetzner cloud; got an email about increase prices on my dedicated server.

nickandbrotoday at 3:46 PM

Hetzner had the best prices out of any cloud I’ve used. Sad to see that they are raising prices, but was due to happen.

layer8today at 3:31 PM

36% as per the linked post, 38% was a typo.

littlecranky67today at 1:54 PM

My CCX13 (dedicated cores) went from 15€ to 20€ now. Looking at Netcup as alternative, more cores and more RAM for 12€ - anybody has experience with their root (kvm'ed) servers?

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klodolphtoday at 1:09 PM

This mirrors the increased costs of people who already space + power in a DC, and want to buy new machines to fill their racks. Everybody is being hit.

Roark66today at 4:48 PM

This excuse "we need to raise prices because we have more demand" is BS. They should be truthful and say "we can increase prices and people will pay it because they want to be EU based"

To be honest for anything more serious than a personal Minecraft server hetzner has been beaten by ovh for ages (on bandwidth - you get all you can eat data limited by speed from ovh - for example 500mbit, instead of 20tb from hetzner).

For this reason hetzner is always a "backup DC" in my eyes and never the primary.

Also I heard they are extremely sensitive regarding abuse allegations so don't even think of hosting something someone may not like seeing...

They get a lot of hype, but there are many competitors worth looking at.

andixtoday at 2:17 PM

With the recent price spikes in memory and storage, this was just a matter of time.

keepamovintoday at 1:25 PM

Wow. That sucks. hcloud was great for ages and highly competitively priced.

Vultr may be a good alternative. If you want to search VPS prices across the 6 major clouds (gcloud, aws-cli, hcloud, az, doctl, and vultr-cli) I made a wrapper TUI that lets you search, sort, and rent VPS.

See it here: https://tui.bluedot.ink

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hyperionultratoday at 2:00 PM

This will be as a shockwave in web hosting industry, the same as it was with electricity price. There is nowhere to run. Everyone will increase their prices, unless hardware crysis ends up.

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Aldipowertoday at 1:50 PM

Even my more then 11 years old server increases by 80 Eurocent! Dare you!

CodeComposttoday at 1:14 PM

How much is the cost for Storage Boxes increasing?

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superzetoday at 1:49 PM

Surely that means that as soon as prices of ram drop, Hetzner will also drop the prices, right? RIGHT?

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dwedgetoday at 1:05 PM

My increases were around 4%

dakollitoday at 12:59 PM

I recommend Netcup as a solid EU budget alternative to Hetzner, zero complaints from me.

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ChrisArchitecttoday at 3:25 PM

[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120145

HelloUsernametoday at 1:11 PM

"Edit: It's 36% ! Can't edit the title typo of 38%"

jedisct1today at 1:11 PM

Ouch. OVH are also going to increase their prices.

singpolyma3today at 1:05 PM

... more customers so they must increase prices? This seems backwards from how scale usually works.

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lnsrutoday at 12:59 PM

Can anybody predict this craze? The classical memory manufacturers are not yet adding additional manufacturing capacity. They learned this hard way in the past. That means, the demand is here to stay for years without typical bubble burst. Is this a point where Chinese companies will rise worldwide?

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pmdrtoday at 5:09 PM

Ah yes, the abundance of AI that keeps on giving.

vduprastoday at 12:30 PM

Silver lining: can you imagine how dirt cheap RAM will be after that bubble has popped? Oh my...

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seydortoday at 1:25 PM

... and still remain far too cost-effective. Frankly this says more about the rest of the industry than for hetzner

T3RMINATEDtoday at 12:42 PM

[dead]

ReptileMantoday at 12:46 PM

BuyFromEU is the funniest subreddit there is right now. Unintentionally but still entertaining. EU has managed to paint itself into unenviable corner. I can't buy from EU even thought I want to because for physical goods - cross country shipping costs are prohibitive and for digital - they are either subpar, more expensive or both.

Try this as experiment - try to buy something like precision dowel pins from Poland or DOLD Mechatronik with shipping to Greece, Bulgaria or Romania vs the same thing from Aliexpress or Temu. Chinese costs are cheaper even if they have to fly here.

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