Hetzner's $40 → $103 Hike Broke US Math: Hetzner US vs OVHcloud vs Domestic VPS, Line by Line

On June 15, 2026, Hetzner published a price table that reads like a typo: CCX23 — its workhorse 4 vCPU / 16 GB dedicated box — went from $39.99 to $102.99 a month in US regions. In EU regions the same SKU went from €31.49 to €85.99.

That is not 10%, not 30%. It is +157.5% in dollars, +173% in euros, on the exact instance most small production fleets actually run.

If you are a US team that picked Hetzner because it was cheap and bandwidth-included, the question is no longer "is Hetzner still cheap?" It is "which Hetzner, in which region, against which alternative, at how much egress?" — and the answer changes at 1 TB, 5 TB, and 20 TB. This post recomputes it.

The answer up front: one workload, three invoices​

Same workload: one node, 4 vCPU / 16 GB RAM (Hetzner CCX23 class), serving a US audience. Three egress scenarios a real app hits in a year: 1 TB (light API), 5 TB (image-heavy SaaS), 20 TB (media, large downloads). Instance + bandwidth overage = total you pay that month.

Prices are Hetzner's official June 15, 2026 table (ex-VAT, ex-IPv4), OVHcloud's March 2026 VPS price evolution, and a domestic-VPS baseline (DigitalOcean Regular 4 vCPU / 16 GB at ~$96/mo). Bandwidth overage is shown side by side because it is the line the headline hides.

Delta vs pre-hike (same CCX23): pre-hike US was $39.99 — you are paying +$63.00/mo (+$756/yr) per node before moving a single extra byte. On a three-node HA fleet that is +$2,268/yr for the same machines with no additional capacity.

Two things pop immediately:

• At 1 TB, Hetzner US is now the most expensive of the four for a single node — OVHcloud undercuts it by 6× even after the hike, and a domestic Droplet ties it. Hetzner's EU fleet still looks cheaper, but it serves US users from 100 ms away.
• At 20 TB, the domestic VPS collapses. Hetzner's €1/TB overage and OVHcloud's unlimited line are 10× cheaper per terabyte than $0.01/GiB. That single line — not the instance — decides the bill for anything media-heavy.

A note on the "155%" in the TODO: DEV.to's "Affordable Alternative to Hetzner for US Companies" rounded the CCX23 US move ($39.99 → $102.99) to 155–158%; the exact increase is +157.5% — (102.99 - 39.99) / 39.99. In euros the same SKU is +173% (€31.49 → €85.99). Both numbers are in Hetzner's official price-adjustment doc. This post uses the dollar figure because the comparison is US latency.

What actually hiked on June 15 — and why it was not just CCX23​

June 15 was Hetzner's second price move in 2026, and the bigger one. On April 1, shared CX/CAX rose ~30–37% and memory add-ons jumped ~575%; even then Hetzner flagged "extremely high procurement costs for new hardware." By late May, Hetzner warned another adjustment was coming June 15. The June table made the split explicit:

* US CPX/CAX pricing follows the same table; cheapest CX/CAX Intel/Arm lines remain EU-exclusive — you cannot buy a €5.49 CAX11 in Ashburn or Hillsboro.

Why: the same DRAM shortage every DCD and The Register piece tracked since February. TrendForce revised Q1 2026 DRAM contract prices +90–95% quarter-over-quarter, NAND +55–60%, with another +70% flagged for Q2; Omdia's Vlad Galabov called Hetzner's move "the brutal reality of the current hardware supply chain." Hetzner buys hardware, it does not resell someone else's AWS — when HBM demand from AI swallows DRAM output, a €3.79 box cannot stay €3.79. OVHcloud's own founder warned of a 5–10% cloud price move in 2026 for the same reason; its March VPS evolution (+~15-20% on low tiers) was that warning arriving.

For a Cluster API fleet this matters twice: the instance family string in your HetznerMachineTemplate now selects a price band, not just a size, and the June catalog rotation (CPX Gen2 / CAX Arm64 naming — more on that in the checklist below) means a hardcoded server_type: cpx31 from February may not even exist at the new price. Pin the generation, not just the family.

The US-region bandwidth trap most calculators miss​

Hetzner's most quoted number — "20 TB included" — is true only in three places: Nuremberg, Falkenstein, and Helsinki. Every US-region pricing page and every community comparison says the same footnote in smaller type: US (Ashburn, Hillsboro) and Singapore include 1 TB, not 20 TB. Singapore is worse (0.5–8 TB depending on SKU, €7.40/TB overage — 7× EU/US). EU overage is €1.00/TB in both EU and US; US overage is not $0 — it is the same €1/TB (~$1.08).

That means a US team that moved to Ashburn "for latency" traded 19 TB of included transfer for ~75 ms of RTT. At low egress you never notice; at 5 TB you pay $4 extra — noise. At 20 TB you pay $20 extra on Hetzner US vs $0 extra on Hetzner EU, which is still noise compared to the domestic-VPS number below. But until you look, the calculator still shows 20 TB because you copied the EU row.

The counterpart:

• OVHcloud: every VPS tier (VPS-1 through VPS-6) ships unlimited traffic — VPS-1 is $6.46/mo (1 vCPU / 2 GB class) up to VPS-4 at ~$23/mo (roughly 4 vCPU / 12–16 GB, 80–160 GB NVMe). Unlimited is not literally unmetered at line rate: VPS-1 is capped at 100 Mbps, VPS-3+ at 400 Mbps–1 Gbps, and sustained abuse falls under fair-use and anti-DDoS throttling (OVH bundles Tbps-class anti-DDoS on every VPS). For a typical API or app server under ~30 TB/mo you never hit that ceiling; for sustained 10 Gbps you would.
• Domestic VPS (DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode): a Regular 4 vCPU / 16 GB Droplet is ~$96/mo with 5–6 TB included; overage is $0.01/GiB. One terabyte is 1,024 GiB, so $10.24/TB — 9.5× Hetzner's €1/TB. That is the number that inverts the bill at 20 TB: $96 + 14 × $10.24 = $239/mo for the same egress Hetzner EU does for $93.

Put side by side, €1/TB-free is not marketing. It is the difference between budgeting bandwidth as a rounding error and budgeting it as a second instance.

Latency, measured rather than marketed: community speedtests against all five Hetzner locations and Mosco CRM's 2026 TTFB table put it plainly — Hetzner EU → US-East is ~88–110 ms TTFB, Hetzner Ashburn → US-East is ~14 ms, Hetzner Hillsboro → US-West is ~40 ms, OVHcloud US (via US Local Zones in 15+ cities since late 2025) is ~12–20 ms to the nearest zone, and a domestic NYC/SFO Droplet is ~10–25 ms to the same coast. If your p95 matters (checkout, multiplayer, real-time), EU latency is not free just because the bandwidth is.

Line by line: where each alternative wins​

The table at the top normalized to 4 vCPU / 16 GB. That matters because comparing a Hetzner 4/16 dedicated box to a $48 4/8 domestic Droplet — or to OVH's $6.46 starter with 2 GB — makes Hetzner look artificially expensive or artificially cheap depending which direction you cherry-pick. All four columns are now the same class. Within that parity:

If you serve US users and push <1 TB/mo (light API, admin tools, internal services)

Hetzner EU is still cheapest on paper ($93 vs $103 US), but you pay in latency. For a US latency SLO, Hetzner US ($103) ties a domestic VPS (~$96) — the 155% hike erased the old 60% discount. OVHcloud at ~$16 is the outlier: one third the price, unlimited traffic, and US latency without the €1/TB footnote. For light egress, OVHcloud is the cost winner and Hetzner US is no longer an obvious default.

If you serve US users and push ~5 TB/mo (typical SaaS with images, API with webhooks)

This is where the included-traffic math lands. Hetzner US at $107, Hetzner EU at $93, OVHcloud at $16, domestic VPS at $96. The $14 gap between Hetzner US and EU is still just overage. OVHcloud's lead widens not because it is fast (it is ~20 ms slower than Ashburn for East-coast users) but because its unlimited line stays flat while Hetzner US starts metering. A US team on Hetzner US that never checked egress before June now checks it every month — not because €1/TB is expensive, but because 1 TB included is small enough to exceed by accident.

If you serve US users and push ~20 TB/mo (media, large file distribution, high-traffic APIs)

Domestic VPS loses outright: $239/mo vs $123 (Hetzner US) vs $93 (Hetzner EU) vs $16 (OVHcloud). At this volume the instance price is the minority of the bill on per-GiB metering. Two notes: Hetzner EU's 20 TB included means 20 TB is still $93 — genuinely flat. OVHcloud's unlimited at ~$16 is an order of magnitude cheaper, but verify throughput: at 20 TB/mo (~60 Mbps sustained, ~200 Mbps burstable) you are well within OVH VPS-3's 400 Mbps fair-use — but you are not going to push 20 TB at 10 Gbps on a $16 VPS. For the fleet that hates per-GB surprises, either Hetzner EU with a CDN in front or OVHcloud US is the predictable number; the domestic VPS is the variable one.

The US-region footnote you should copy into your runbook

Hetzner Ashburn and Hillsboro price CCX/CPX identically (both $102.99 for CCX23 today) and both include 1 TB. The difference is inventory: the small CPX11 is stocked only in Hillsboro, so the sub-$100 US HA floor is West-only; Ashburn's floor starts at CPX21. Cheap CX/CAX Intel/Arm stays EU-only — there is no $5.49 CAX11 in the US at any price. If your HetznerMachineTemplate says cax11, it does not fail over to Ashburn; it fails to provision. "Stay in the EU unless you need US latency — and if you do, pick the West for the cheapest HA" is still the right heuristic from the boilerplate guides, hike included.

Where owning the box still wins after a 157% hike​

The hike did not make self-hosting expensive. It made not looking expensive.

• A three-node HA fleet on Hetzner US CCX23 is now ~$309/mo (3 × $102.99) before bandwidth. Before June it was ~$120/mo. The same shape on a domestic VPS (3 × ~$96) is ~$288/mo before overage — now essentially parity, not a 60% discount. If you needed US latency and your argument was purely "Hetzner is cheapest" — before June you were right; after June you are tying.
• The same three-node fleet on Hetzner EU is €257.97/mo ($279) with 60 TB pooled traffic (3 × 20 TB). A domestic three-node fleet at 20 TB total egress would be ~$431/mo just for the extra 14 TB beyond its 6 TB included (14 × $10.24 + $288). The EU fleet wins on bandwidth the moment egress grows, latency penalty included — put a CDN in front and the 100 ms matters less than the $150/mo not spent.
• OVHcloud's three-node VPS fleet at ~$49/mo (3 × $16.48) with unlimited traffic is the cheapest US-latency fleet you can assemble without building your own. The trade is operational: fewer managed add-ons than Hetzner's Cloud Console, slower raw I/O per VPSBenchmarks (Hetzner stream copy ~105 GiB/s vs OVH ~47 GiB/s), and a network that caps low-tier VPS at 100–200 Mbps. For a git-push PaaS fleet that needs predictable cost above all, that trade is often worth it — which is exactly why Hetzner's old pitch ("cheap + 20 TB") stung less for US-EU hybrid teams than the new one ("cheap only if you stay in Falkenstein").

So: after June 15, a US team that can tolerate EU origin + a CDN still saves the most on Hetzner EU. A US team that needs genuine US latency and moderate egress saves the most on OVHcloud today. A US team that stays on Hetzner US still saves over a domestic VPS only once egress makes $10.24/TB bite — roughly beyond the 6 TB domestic included. Below that, "owning a Hetzner box" is no longer a cost argument; it is a control argument.

What to do before your next renew​

Three checks, fifteen minutes, no vendor call:

1. Pull your last 90 days of egress, by region. Hetzner Console → Project → Usage → Traffic shows per-server out. OVHcloud → Control Panel → VPS → Traffic. If you are on Hetzner US today, note how many months exceeded 1 TB. That single number decides whether June 15 cost you $0 or $20/mo before the instance hike.

2. Measure RTT from your users, not from your laptop. Run hetzner-speedtest-bash (or plain ping / time_connect TCP fallback) against all five Hetzner locations — fsn1, nbg1, hel1, ash, hil — from a US-East and US-West probe (or use Mosco CRM's 2026 TTFB table as a proxy: 88 ms EU, 14 ms Ashburn). If your p95 is checkout or auth, 90 ms from Falkenstein is not "close enough."

3. Audit your machine templates, not just your invoice. grep -r server_type across your HetznerMachineTemplate fleet — any cx22, cax11, or cpx31 that assumed EU-only SKUs or pre-hike prices will either 404 or silently land on a next-gen SKU at a different price. Hetzner's June rotation to generation-named CPX Gen2 / CAX Arm64 is deliberate; pin server_type to a type that exists in the region you schedule to, or let Cluster API fail at create time the morning you add a US node pool.

For teams running a self-hosted PaaS — especially a Cluster API fleet where the machine lifecycle is declarative — the hike is also a templates-and-policy moment. Hetzner US CCX13 at $50.99 and CCX23 at $102.99 versus OVHcloud VPS at ~$16 means the "default pool" choice you made last year now picks a 3–6× price band. That default belongs in Git, with a comment citing the June 15 doc, not as a forgotten string in a Terraform variable.

Bex.co is the open-source, AI-native Render alternative — push a git repo, get a running HTTPS service on machines you own. If Hetzner's new US math made you re-evaluate your fleet, Bex's Cluster API backend lets you declare which region and which instance family each environment lands on — EU for 20 TB headroom, Ashburn or OVHcloud US for latency — without re-platforming the PaaS.

Sources

• Hetzner Docs, "Price Adjustment 15 June 2026" — CCX23 $39.99 → $102.99 (US), €31.49 → €85.99 (EU), CCX13 $19.99 → $50.99; effective June 15. docs.hetzner.com
• DEV.to, "Affordable Alternative to Hetzner for US Companies" — CCX23 155–158% increase framing for US production instances. dev.to
• The Stack, "Hosting firm Hetzner hikes prices sharply amid supply chain pain" — US some plans +107–204%, flagged May 27, published June 15. thestack.technology
• The Register, "Hetzner: 50% price hike, no fooling, from April 1st" / DCD coverage — April 1 +30–37% cloud, +575% memory add-ons; June as second 2026 hike; Omdia quote on DRAM supply chain. theregister.com datacenterdynamics.com
• byteiota, "Hetzner June 2026 Price Shock" — CCX/CPX more than doubled (CCX23 +173% EU). byteiota.com
• Privatedevops, "Hetzner More Than Doubled Some Cloud Prices Today" — EU table with % increases. privatedevops.com
• Better Stack, "DigitalOcean vs Hetzner Cloud: side-by-side comparison for 2026" — Hetzner US only 1 TB included, €1/TB overage. betterstack.com
• Costgoat, "Hetzner Cloud VPS Pricing Calculator (Jul 2026)" — US Ashburn/Hillsboro 1–8 TB included, €1.00/TB overage, CX/CAX EU-only. costgoat.com
• k0s-hetzner-boilerplate docs — US 1 TB vs EU 20 TB, CPX11 Hillsboro-only, cheap CX/CAX EU-exclusive. github.com/prehoy/k0s-hetzner-boilerplate
• k0s-hetzner-boilerplate-multizone — same US/EU bandwidth and inventory notes. github.com/prehoy/k0s-hetzner-boilerplate-multizone
• DEV.to, "Hetzner vs OVHcloud vs DigitalOcean in 2026" — starting prices and bandwidth (Hetzner 20 TB, OVH unlimited, DO 4 TB). dev.to
• learnwithhasan, "Hetzner Cloud VPS Review (2026)" — US/Singapore tiny allowances, €1/TB EU/US, €7.40/TB Singapore. learnwithhasan.com
• learnwithhasan, "OVHcloud VPS Review (2026)" — VPS-1 $6.46 after March 2026 evolution, unlimited EU traffic, anti-DDoS. learnwithhasan.com
• OVHcloud US VPS product page — unlimited bandwidth, Local Zones in 15+ cities. us.ovhcloud.com
• Mosco CRM, "Best VPS Hosting of 2026" — latency-first advice, region TTFB table (Hetzner 88 ms / 14 ms Ashburn). moscocrm.com
• akdrag/hetzner-speedtest-bash — five-location download + latency/jitter test (FSN, HEL, NBG, ASH, HIL). github.com/akdrag/hetzner-speedtest-bash