Hetzner vs netcup (2026): Prices, Performance and Contracts Compared Honestly

Hetzner vs netcup is the question almost everyone asks when they rent their first server in Europe. The short answer: netcup is far cheaper for the same specs, but ties you to monthly or multi-year contracts. Hetzner costs more, but bills by the hour, can be driven entirely through an API and advertises a 99.9% SLA for its cloud. If you want one server to just run for a few years, netcup saves you real money. If you create, test and delete servers automatically, Hetzner is the better fit.

That’s the summary. So it isn’t just repeated forum wisdom, on October 9, 2026 we pulled every price directly from both providers: from the pricing file Hetzner’s own website loads, and from netcup’s individual product pages. We also benchmarked the two Hetzner servers we run ourselves, one of which serves this blog. Three findings up front:

1. For 2 vCPUs and 4 GB of RAM, a German customer on October 9 paid €23.79 a month at Hetzner (CPX22 plus IPv4, incl. 19% VAT) and €9.50 with monthly cancellation at netcup (VPS 500 G12.5), or €7.03 on a 24-month term. That’s a factor of 2.5 to 3.4.

2. The netcup price on the overview page applies to “No preference Europe”: your server lands in Austria, Germany or the Netherlands and you don’t get a say. Pinning it to Nuremberg costs €1.04 more per month on the VPS 500 and €5.78 on the VPS 4000.

3. Hetzner’s cheapest line (“Cost-Optimized”, with CX and Arm servers) was marked “not available” on the website for all eight plans on the day we checked. If you read a comparison using Hetzner’s old entry price, you are comparing against something you currently can’t order.

Hetzner vs netcup: who the two providers are

Both are German hosting companies with their own data centers, both target people who are comfortable on a Linux shell, and both have been the default forum answer to “cheap server in Germany” for years. They still sell different products.

Hetzner (Hetzner Online GmbH, Gunzenhausen) runs its own data center parks in Falkenstein, Nuremberg and Helsinki, and offers cloud servers in Ashburn (Virginia), Hillsboro (Oregon) and Singapore as well. Beyond the cloud, Hetzner sells classic dedicated servers, a server auction with refurbished hardware, Storage Boxes, object storage and web hosting. The cloud product is built for automation: API, Terraform provider, a command-line tool and hourly billing.

netcup (netcup GmbH, Karlsruhe) has belonged to the Austrian Anexia group for several years. It says so at the foot of every netcup page (“a company by Anexia”), and you can see it in the network too: when we traced a route from our Nuremberg Hetzner server to www.netcup.de, the second-to-last hop ran through routers named bbr01.anx84.nue.de.anexia-it.net. netcup offers virtual servers in Nuremberg, Vienna, Amsterdam, Manassas (USA) and Singapore. Its core business is more traditional: web hosting, domains, VPS and “root servers” with minimum contract terms.

That already names the most important difference before we talk about euros: Hetzner sells compute time, netcup sells contracts. Everything else follows from that.

What we measured and what we didn’t

Being upfront so you can weigh the numbers: we run our own servers at Hetzner, one in Nuremberg (12 vCPUs, 24 GB RAM) and one in Helsinki (4 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM). We did not rent a netcup server for this article. The netcup side of this comparison is based on the official plan details from October 9, 2026 and on network measurements from the outside. Where we only know something from the provider’s own claims, we say so.

A short walkthrough comparing both providers’ offers. Prices in videos age fast, so use the tables below (or, better, the providers’ own pages on the day you order) for numbers.

Prices on October 9, 2026: Hetzner vs netcup side by side

The biggest mistake in price comparisons is mixing net and gross prices. Hetzner shows net prices; netcup shows German customers gross prices including 19% VAT. On top of that, Hetzner does not include the public IPv4 address in the server price (€0.50 net per month), while netcup does. We therefore converted everything to gross including IPv4, i.e. what a private customer in Germany actually pays. If you are a business with a VAT ID, divide both columns by 1.19; the ratio stays the same.

Sources: Hetzner prices from hetzner.com/_resources/app/data/bench/cloud_data.json, location NBG1, retrieved October 9, 2026, 07:02 UTC. netcup prices from netcup.com/de/server/vps and the individual product pages, retrieved the same morning, location “No preference Europe”.

Shared cores: Hetzner CPX vs netcup VPS

Hetzner: net price × 1.19 + IPv4 (€0.50 net = €0.60 gross). netcup: gross prices from the product page, IPv4 and IPv6 included, setup fee €0.00. As of October 9, 2026.

The gap is bigger than most people expect. Even if you book netcup with monthly cancellation, the 4-core machine costs €16.68 there and €42.83 at Hetzner. On a 24-month term the factor grows further.

Two things put this into perspective, and both come up in the next sections: what “vCPU” means at each provider, and which conditions are attached to netcup’s prices.

Dedicated cores: Hetzner CCX vs netcup root servers

If you need guaranteed compute, you need dedicated cores. Hetzner calls that line “General Purpose” (CCX); netcup calls it “Root Server” (RS).

netcup lists the “AMD EPYC 9645” for all G12.5 root servers. Hetzner only says “AMD” in its plan overview. As of October 9, 2026.

This is where it gets almost absurd: four dedicated cores cost roughly four times as much at Hetzner. To be fair, a CCX23 has twice the RAM of an RS 1000. Compared at equal memory, a CCX13 with 2 cores and 8 GB at €51.76 faces an RS 1000 with 4 cores and 8 GB at €25.00. netcup delivers twice the dedicated cores for half the money.

Contract terms and billing: the real difference

If netcup is that much cheaper, why does anyone still use Hetzner Cloud? The answer is in the billing.

Hetzner bills by the hour, with a monthly cap. According to the pricing file, a CPX22 costs €0.0312 net per hour, capped at €19.49 per month. Delete the server after three days and you pay for three days. That’s why Hetzner cloud servers are so popular in CI pipelines, for load tests, for short-lived test environments and for anything that Terraform creates and destroys.

netcup bills in contract terms: 1, 12 or 24 months. The discount is significant: according to netcup’s own page you save 13% on 12 months and 26 to 27% on 24 months compared to the monthly option. In exchange, a server you only need for two days is paid for at least one month at netcup.

Here are two typical cases, each in the 2-core/4 GB class:

If you run a server permanently, netcup saves you between €340 and €400 per machine over two years in this class. If you frequently need servers for a short time, Hetzner comes out ahead, often clearly.

What to keep in mind with long terms

A 24-month contract sounds like a bargain but has two side effects that rarely appear in comparisons:

1. You buy today’s hardware generation for two years. netcup’s own FAQ says a direct upgrade from generation G12 to G12.5 is not possible: you order the new plan, cancel the old one at the end of its term and migrate your data. With a 24-month commitment you may still be paying for the old generation while the new one is already better and cheaper.
2. Your needs change. A project that needs 4 GB of RAM today might need 16 next year, or be shut down. We measured how much memory servers really need in a separate article: How much RAM does a server need? Short version: often less than you think, which argues for small plans.

Our rule of thumb: monthly cancellation is almost always the better deal at netcup unless you’re certain nothing about the project will change for two years. The €2.47 difference between 1 and 24 months on the VPS 500 is usually worth the flexibility.

Performance: what “vCPU” means at Hetzner and netcup

A vCPU is a compute thread the hypervisor assigns to your virtual machine. Both providers run their shared plans on KVM, and at both you share the physical cores with other customers. We explain what a VPS is and how virtualization works in detail in What is a VPS?.

The decisive sentence is right there on netcup’s VPS page (translated from German): VPS are “similarly equipped to our root servers. However, the dedicated CPU cores, the satisfaction guarantee and the very high guaranteed minimum availability of 99.9% on an annual average are not included with the VPS.” In plain terms: netcup’s VPS come with no contractual availability commitment and no guaranteed CPU share. In return, netcup says, it guarantees “the best price in the world”.

Hetzner describes its own shared plans as “Inexpensive due to shared resources, low to medium CPU usage” and advertises an SLA with 99.9% uptime and defined credits on its cloud overview page. Check the current SLA terms before ordering to see exactly which plans it covers; the overview page doesn’t limit it to particular lines.

Our measurements on two Hetzner servers

We ran the same simple tests on both of our machines. They are not lab benchmarks, but anyone can repeat them on their own server:

# CPU and virtualization
lscpu | grep -E "Model name|Hypervisor"
cat /sys/class/dmi/id/sys_vendor /sys/class/dmi/id/product_name

# Steal time since boot (share of time the VM wanted to run but wasn't allowed)
awk '/^cpu /{t=0;for(i=2;i<=NF;i++)t+=$i; printf "steal %.4f%%\n",$9/t*100}' /proc/stat

# Compute: SHA-256, one core and all cores
openssl speed -seconds 3 sha256
openssl speed -seconds 3 -multi $(nproc) sha256

# Disk: sequential write/read without cache, then 4k writes with fsync
dd if=/dev/zero of=t bs=1M count=1024 oflag=direct
dd if=t of=/dev/null bs=1M iflag=direct
dd if=/dev/zero of=s bs=4k count=2000 oflag=dsync

Results from October 9, 2026:

Three things stand out:

Per-core performance is practically identical at both locations. 1.7 GB/s of SHA-256 per core, and the multi-core numbers scale almost linearly (18.3 / 12 ≈ 1.5, 6.9 / 4 ≈ 1.7). On the compute side, Hetzner delivers what’s on the label.

Disk performance differs by a factor of 2 to 4, despite the same provider and the same CPU generation. The fsync numbers in particular, which matter most for databases, are four times worse in Helsinki. That’s not a criticism of Hetzner, it’s a warning for every comparison: a single server tells you little about a provider. Two machines from the same host can differ more than two machines from different hosts.

Steal time is exactly zero on both, on the Nuremberg server over 100 days. That sounds wonderful but is suspicious: a value that never moves from 0.0000% for months more likely means the hypervisor doesn’t report it to the VM at all. We already saw this in our VPS article. For you that means you can’t rely on st in top to detect noisy neighbors on Hetzner cloud servers. Watch your own application’s response times instead.

And netcup?

We did not measure netcup from the inside. What we know from the provider’s own information: netcup explicitly lists the AMD EPYC 9645 for its G12.5 root servers, a Zen 5 (“Turin”) CPU one generation newer than the Genoa cores in our Hetzner machines. For the VPS plans, the overview page doesn’t name a processor. Independent measurements (for example on VPSBenchmarks or in user reports) regularly show netcup VPS with very strong single-core performance, but also with more variation over the day, which is what you’d expect from overcommittable cores without a guarantee.

Our take: for web servers, small databases, Docker stacks and the usual self-hosted services, both providers’ shared cores are enough. If your application produces constant high CPU load (builds, video transcoding, game servers, large databases), netcup’s root servers are by far the cheapest dedicated-core offer in this comparison.

Traffic: 20 TB included vs 2 TB per day

Both are generous with traffic, but by completely different rules.

Hetzner works with monthly allowances. In Nuremberg, Falkenstein and Helsinki, the pricing file shows 20 TB per month included with the CPX plans and 30 to 60 TB with the larger CCX plans. Each additional terabyte costs €1.00 net. Careful with the US locations: in Ashburn and Hillsboro the same plan classes include only 1 to 8 TB. If you put your server in the US, do the math.

netcup has no monthly allowance but a throttling rule. The VPS 500 product page says (translated): “If the average network traffic over the last 24 hours exceeds 2 TB, bandwidth is temporarily throttled to 200 Mbit/s. The throttle is lifted as soon as the condition no longer applies.” The network interface itself is listed at 2.5 Gbit/s.

What does that mean in practice? 2 TB per day is roughly 185 Mbit/s sustained. The rule only kicks in if you push close to 200 Mbit/s more or less non-stop for a whole day. Even throttled you still have 200 Mbit/s, which is plenty for nearly every website. A blog like this one delivered just 1.16 GB in eight days, as we measured in What is a CDN?. For normal web projects, traffic is simply a non-issue at both providers.

It becomes relevant for download mirrors, video, large backups over the public internet or proxy services. There, Hetzner’s 20 TB plus €1 per extra TB is predictable, while netcup caps bandwidth in extreme cases but never bills you extra.

Network and locations

Both providers have their German locations in Nuremberg, and you can tell. Our measurements on October 9 with ping and mtr:

Less than a millisecond separates the two companies’ Nuremberg data centers. If you spread services across both, say a server at Hetzner and a backup target at netcup, you get practically LAN latency within Nuremberg. That’s interesting for the 3-2-1 backup strategy: a second provider is a genuine second failure domain, and the copy is still fast.

netcup’s location trap

This is the surprise of the comparison. The price on netcup’s overview page applies to the location option “No preference Europe”. The product page explains that this means your server “will be hosted at any European location (AT, DE or NL)”. If you want a specific location, you pay extra:

Monthly gross surcharges from the configurator on each product page, 24-month term, as of October 9, 2026.

For many projects the location doesn’t matter. But if you want or need to host in Germany for data protection reasons, or your server should sit close to another server in Nuremberg, the surcharge belongs in the comparison. The netcup VPS 500 on a 24-month term then costs €8.07 instead of €7.03. Still less than half of Hetzner’s price, but not the number on the overview.

At Hetzner you choose the location for free when you create a server. Differences only exist between regions: in Singapore a CPX22 is about 36% more expensive than in Nuremberg (€26.49 instead of €19.49 net).

Control panel, API and extras

The interfaces differ significantly, and in practice that often matters more than a few euros.

The Hetzner Cloud Console is a modern web panel with projects, teams and permissions. Everything you click there can also be done via REST API, the official hcloud command-line tool and Terraform. On top come load balancers, private networks, network-level firewalls, floating IPs, volumes (block storage) and automatic backups. According to Hetzner’s documentation, every server has seven backup slots; backups run daily and the oldest is overwritten automatically. Snapshots are created manually, by default up to 30 per account.

netcup splits management across two interfaces: the Customer Control Panel (CCP) for contracts, invoices and domains, and the Server Control Panel (SCP) for the servers themselves. The SCP offers a remote console, mounting your own ISO files, image import, copy-on-write snapshots and reinstalls from prebuilt images. There is also an SCP web service interface, but it’s far less widely used than Hetzner’s API, and tools like Terraform aren’t officially supported there. User reports (for example on LowEndTalk) say netcup’s panel is well behind Hetzner’s, which matches our impression from screenshots and videos.

A detail for tinkerers: at netcup you can mount your own ISO files and install practically any operating system, including exotic ones. At Hetzner Cloud you pick ISOs from a provider-maintained list; in exchange there’s a set of official images, one-click apps and a rescue system at the push of a button.

Extra costs people overlook

One point that comes up again and again in forums: Hetzner vets new customers strictly and sometimes asks for ID or rejects accounts. Some users report netcup being less complicated in such cases; there’s no hard data on it. If you live outside the EU or don’t have a card Hetzner accepts, that can genuinely decide it for you.

A tour of the Hetzner Cloud Console: creating a server, firewall, snapshots. The video is from 2025 and contains a sponsored segment; the prices shown are out of date, the interface is not.

Availability: what the websites showed on the day

One last finding from October 9 that doesn’t appear in any comparison, because it keeps changing: on Hetzner’s page for the Cost-Optimized line (CX23, CX33, CX43, CX53 with Intel/AMD and CAX11, CAX21, CAX31, CAX41 with Ampere Arm processors), every plan was marked “not available”. In the pricing file the website loads its prices from, they didn’t appear at all.

That matters because many older comparisons rate Hetzner on exactly these entry plans, which were several times cheaper than today’s CPX prices. If you read “but Hetzner is cheap too”, check whether the quoted plan can be ordered today. On the day we checked, the cheapest orderable Hetzner cloud servers were the CPX plans starting at €5.99 net (CPX02 with 1 vCPU and 1 GB RAM).

This is a problem in our own articles too: Hetzner kept the plan names, but the specs behind them changed. According to today’s plan page, a CPX22 has 2 vCPUs and 4 GB RAM. Read prices in blog posts (ours included) as snapshots, and double-check on the provider’s page before you order.

Hetzner vs netcup: who should pick which

Pick netcup if …

• your server should simply run permanently: website, Nextcloud, mail server, Docker stack, a game server for friends.
• you want as much RAM and CPU per euro as possible. Hetzner wasn’t cheaper in any plan class in this comparison.
• you need dedicated cores but don’t have a corporate budget. The root servers are the strongest offer in this comparison.
• an older-looking web panel doesn’t bother you and you don’t automate your servers via API.

Pick Hetzner if …

• you create and delete servers automatically (CI, test environments, Terraform, Kubernetes nodes).
• you want an advertised SLA and the full cloud toolbox.
• you want load balancers, private networks, firewalls and volumes from one place.
• you don’t want a contract term and prefer paying by the hour.
• you already use other Hetzner products (Storage Box, dedicated servers), since much of it can live in the same account.

And the most honest answer: many experienced admins use both. The permanent, boring server at netcup, the automated and short-lived infrastructure at Hetzner, and backups at the other provider respectively. We’re entirely on Hetzner ourselves, because our infrastructure grew there and we use the API. If we needed a single server for five years today, we’d take the numbers above very seriously.

Before you order, have a look at our guide to setting up a Linux server: the first steps (updates, SSH keys, firewall, Fail2ban) are identical at both providers.

Checklist: Hetzner or netcup in five questions

1. How long do you need the server? Under a month or unclear: Hetzner. Permanently: netcup.
2. Do you automate via API or Terraform? Yes: Hetzner. No: doesn’t matter.
3. Do you need guaranteed CPU performance? Yes: netcup root servers, almost unbeatable on a small budget. Hetzner CCX if you need the API and cloud extras.
4. Does the server have to be in Germany? At netcup, add the surcharge for Nuremberg. At Hetzner, choose Nuremberg or Falkenstein for free.
5. Do you push more than 150 Mbit/s sustained? Then compare Hetzner’s 20 TB model against netcup’s throttling rule.

Frequently asked questions about Hetzner vs netcup

Is netcup really cheaper than Hetzner?

Yes, on October 9, 2026 in every plan class we compared. For 2 vCPUs and 4 GB RAM a German customer paid €9.50 per month at netcup (monthly cancellation) or €7.03 (24 months), and €23.79 at Hetzner including IPv4. With dedicated cores the gap is even larger.

Why is Hetzner more expensive if the hardware is similar?

Because at Hetzner you pay for flexibility: hourly billing without a term, a complete API, cloud building blocks such as load balancers and private networks, and an advertised 99.9% SLA. For its VPS, netcup does without an availability commitment and guaranteed CPU shares, and gives you a discount for long terms.

Which provider is better for beginners?

For your first own server, Hetzner is more pleasant to use: modern panel, lots of tutorials, servers created in seconds and deleted without leftover costs if something goes wrong. netcup is cheaper once you know you’ll keep the server longer. For learning itself the provider matters less than a suitable distribution; see Best Linux for beginners.

Can I cancel netcup monthly?

Yes. VPS and root servers come with 1, 12 or 24 months minimum term. The monthly option on the VPS 500 is €2.47 more expensive than the 24-month option, but still less than half the price of the comparable Hetzner server.

Does Hetzner really bill by the hour?

Yes. Every cloud server has an hourly price and a monthly cap. If you delete the server before the end of the month, you only pay for the hours used. Important: a server that is switched off still costs money; only a deleted one doesn’t.

Does netcup have a traffic limit?

No monthly limit, but a throttling rule: if the average network traffic over the last 24 hours exceeds 2 TB, bandwidth is temporarily throttled to 200 Mbit/s. For websites, Nextcloud or mail servers this practically never matters.

How much traffic is included at Hetzner?

In Germany and Finland, 20 TB per month with CPX plans and 20 to 60 TB with CCX plans. Each extra TB costs €1 net. US locations include only 1 to 8 TB.

Where are Hetzner’s and netcup’s servers located?

Hetzner: Nuremberg, Falkenstein, Helsinki, Ashburn, Hillsboro and Singapore. netcup: Nuremberg, Vienna, Amsterdam, Manassas and Singapore. At netcup a fixed location costs extra; without a choice your server ends up somewhere in Austria, Germany or the Netherlands.

Are both providers GDPR compliant?

Both are German companies with data centers in the EU and offer a data processing agreement. At netcup, check whether “No preference Europe” works for you, and at both, avoid non-EU locations if you don’t want them. Responsibility for configuring the server is yours in either case.

Can I move from netcup to Hetzner (or the other way round)?

Yes, but not at the push of a button. You create the new server, copy data and configuration (for example with rsync or a backup tool like restic), switch the DNS records and cancel the old server. If you run your services with Docker Compose, it’s easiest.

Which is better for Nextcloud, Hetzner or netcup?

For a self-hosted Nextcloud with a few users, the small to medium class at either provider is enough. We measured how much performance you need for how many users in our Nextcloud hosting comparison. If you don’t want to maintain a server, Hetzner also offers its managed Storage Share.

Conclusion

Hetzner vs netcup is less about quality than about philosophy. netcup sells a lot of hardware for little money, as long as you accept contract terms and a plainer panel. Hetzner sells a cloud you rent by the hour and control with code, and on October 9, 2026 it charged two to four times the price for that.

For a single server that runs for years, netcup is the more economical offer by a wide margin. For anything automated, short-lived or part of a larger cloud architecture, Hetzner remains the more convenient choice. And if you take resilience seriously, spread across both: less than a millisecond separates their Nuremberg data centers.

Whatever you choose: check the prices on the provider’s page on the day you order. The numbers in this article were measured carefully, but they’re from October 9, 2026.