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.
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...
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.
I assume this is a symptom of the wider ai hardware issue.
This is starting to feel a bit like universal paperclips to me, and we are on the verge of the next stage of industrialisation multiplication.
I guess its either quantum computing or the hypnodrones which will get us out of this mess one way or another...
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.
I just started the process of migrating to them yesterday. They are still very affordable. But a bit less. I'm estimating that our quite lean GCP setup cost is going to be cut to about 20-25% when I'm done. So, it doesn't affect my decision to go with them literally yesterday morning.
It's all a bit barebones and primitive but I don't mind. I spent yesterday tweaking some ansible scripts with codex to setup stuff like bastion hosts and nat networking. I expect I have most of the rest ready in a few days.
The benefits of having an uncomplicated docker compose and boring tech stack. No microservices. Just a monolith.
One issue that I don't have a solution for yet is disk encryption and encrypted bucket content. Probably solvable but not natively supported. Might trigger compliance issues with some of our customers.
For alternative European providers, I recommend OVH. Some euros pricier, but good.
Been running a handful of dedicated boxes on Hetzner for about 5 years now. Even with the increase, the price/performance ratio is still way better than anything comparable from the big three US clouds. Their AX-series auction servers especially.
What concerns me more than the price hike itself is the trend. Memory prices spiking, hard drives selling out, and now this. If you're running anything with serious storage or RAM needs, it's worth locking in what you can now. I grabbed an extra auction server last month just because the specs were good and I figured prices were only going up.
For anyone panicking about alternatives: OVH and Netcup are decent in Europe but have their own tradeoffs. OVH's network has been flaky for me, and Netcup's support is basically nonexistent. Hetzner's support has been solid every time I've needed it, which is worth something.
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
As a customer, I am OK with most increases but not the object storage one. This one has some quality issues and is no longer competitive in price either. I'm thinking of moving S3 part to OVH.
Still cheaper than US cloud computing.
In EU there are: Hetzner, OVH and Seeweb.
I understand that the market for hardware is insane right now, so it’s logical for prices to increase. But in a few years, when hardware prices are hopefully at a more reasonable level, will these providers reduce prices again or will we be eating these costs forever?
Why are they increasing the prices on already existing infrastructure? Is that a way to "subsidize" the new purchases?
Somewhat weirdly I’m very happy about this price increase as a customer. The messaging is clear and completely understandable. Well done.
There's no mention of RAM upgrades. If we bought RAM already at the old prices, are they being increased as well? The current pricing for RAM has more than quadrupled since January.
This comes after OVH sent emails with really spicy increases too. Like north of 50
Good. This means the market is healthy.
Hopefully this also means new providers appear in Europe, to handle the increase in demand.
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.
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/
Server auction didn't change at all, the lowest price server is still around 33€.
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.
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.
the 500% DRAM cost jump makes more sense when you factor in that Samsung and SK Hynix have been shifting capacity from commodity DRAM to HBM for AI accelerators. same fabs, different product mix. so consumer/server DRAM supply contracts right when everyone is spinning up new cloud infra to run inference workloads. supply squeeze from both sides.
Hardware market has become very unpredictable, I have had vendors rejecting my replacement orders because new orders where 20% more expensive 15 days after I initially ordered the DRAM.
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).
Still a fraction of the cost of most other providers, and wouldn't shock me if we see the others all doing something similar.
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.
The main benefit seems to be avoiding dealing with the US. A
I got an email from OVH yesterday, they're putting the prices up on a VPS I span up last month by 20% ish.
May or may not be related to a surge in VPS hosting of OpenClaws on Hetzner. It’s a very popular option right now.
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
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.
How long before we invent a currency pegged to compute cycles
I have been buying older servers by the truckloads. Older being a year or so. It will be enough to host whatever outside AI that we need for the coming 15-20 years. And the all were great deals, will have them paid for within a month per server. I have my own cage full with empty racks bought from a bankrupt company in AMS.
It's not just Hetzner cloud; got an email about increase prices on my dedicated server.
TL;DR Monthly prices for VPSes up around 30% on average, for dedicated servers 14% on average, based on the stated old and new prices in EUR.
Location/type, Average increase: Germany Dedi 14,1 % Finland Dedi 14,8 % USA VPS 30,9 % Singapore VPS 30,8 % Germany/Finland VPS 32,0 % Grand Average 23,8 %
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
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?
Thanks, AI.
Netcup cancelled their winter sale as well
I have a "server auction" system. Thankfully price increase for these is limited to 3%.
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.
Just for info, this is the big hike i received for my dedi.
Previous price: € 31.90
New price as of 1 April 2026: € 32.86
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
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.
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.
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?
This is likely just the first wave. If this component hoarding by AI continues, and it likely will, at some point, it will be just OpenAI and Anthropic who can afford to have compute.
This has affected SSDs first, then RAM, then HDD and it doesn't look like even HDD manufacturers are going to increase production. So unless groups of people suddenly learn how to manufacture all of this hardware and open factories quickly, it's going to be a very fun next few years.
People have been predicting SaaS will die for all the wrong reasons. It's not that anyone can ship a SaaS clone by prompting an AI, it's that nobody is going to have access to the hardware required.
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:
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.