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

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-availability/price-adjustment/

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.

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.

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.

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 very 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 clearly 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-availability/price-adjustment/

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.