Hetzner’s Cheap Cloud Tier Is Unavailable After Two Price Increases

Hetzner used to be the obvious cheap cloud option in my mind. On September 7, 2026, I checked its public catalog and found every model in its Cost-Optimized tier marked unavailable. The advertised 4 GB server still costs €5.99 a month. The 4 GB option in its Regular Performance tier costs €19.99. For developers who need to deploy a new server and cannot get the cheaper one, that is 3.34 times the monthly budget, after Hetzner has already raised prices twice this year.

The unavailable models are all of the CX and CAX ranges on the Cost-Optimized page: four x86 server sizes and four Arm server sizes. Choosing a different processor architecture does not avoid the unavailable labels. The regular CPX models have active Create buttons. The same labels were still present when I checked again on September 8. I checked the public listings, not whether a specific account could complete an order.

Hetzner’s English Cloud overview, captured September 9, 2026, with VAT excluded. The two starting prices buy different amounts of memory.

Twice the price, half the RAM

The overview lists €5.99 next to €11.99. The €11.99 server has half the memory, so paying twice as much does not buy the same amount of RAM.

The cheapest regular plan, CPX12, has 1 vCPU, or one virtual CPU, and 2 GB of RAM. The cheaper CX23 has 2 vCPUs and 4 GB. Both have 40 GB of storage. Hetzner added CPX12 to its European locations on July 7.

To get 4 GB of memory in the regular tier, you need CPX22. It has 2 vCPUs, 4 GB of RAM, and 80 GB of storage for €19.99. Here is how the two shared-server families compare at three memory sizes:

These monthly prices are for Germany and Finland, including IPv4 and excluding VAT. Each regular plan has the same virtual-CPU count, twice the storage, and newer processor generations. Hetzner says those newer CPUs are faster; both tiers still share CPU resources. This compares the cost of keeping the same memory, not equal CPU performance.

Two hikes already

The split itself dates to October 16, 2025. The first price increase took effect on April 1, 2026, affecting existing products and new orders.

Then, on June 15, 2026, the European CPX22 rose from €7.99 to €19.49 a month, excluding VAT and IPv4: 2.44 times its previous price, or about 144% more. CX23 rose from €3.99 to €5.49, up 37.6%.

That June increase compares the same plan before and after. Today's 3.34× gap compares two different plans. I found no new September price announcement, just cheap plans marked unavailable after those earlier hikes.

What can you actually buy?

Hetzner's capacity notice, open since June 26, cites high demand and limited hardware components. It says restrictions affect new customers and some randomly selected existing customers, and that capacity is being expanded. This does not establish permanent withdrawal or a block on every account.

The June announcement says unchanged existing rentals keep their terms; new orders and changes to the server plan use the new prices. Check before deleting or resizing an instance.

For a small app that mainly needs RAM, I would struggle to justify paying more for a faster CPU and extra disk I don't need. If I can't order the cheap plan, the shortage acts like another price increase. For my next 4 GB deployment, I'd compare other providers against Hetzner's €19.99 option, rather than budget for a €5.99 server I may not be able to get.

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