Hetzner dominates on price in EU and US locations. Vultr counters with 32 global cities. Which provider fits your infrastructure — and where does each actually fall short?
Closest equivalent tiers between Hetzner and Vultr. Monthly USD pricing.
| Specs | Hetzner Plan | Hetzner Price | Vultr Plan | Vultr Price | Savings w/ Hetzner |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 vCPU / 2 GB | CX11 (approx) | ~$3.50/moBEST | Cloud Compute | $12/mo | 71% cheaper |
| 2 vCPU / 4 GB | CX22 | ~$4.50/moBEST | Cloud Compute | $24/mo | 81% cheaper |
| 4 vCPU / 8 GB | CX32 | ~$8.80/moBEST | Cloud Compute | $48/mo | 82% cheaper |
| 8 vCPU / 16 GB | CX42 | ~$19.90/moBEST | 6 vCPU / 16 GB | $96/mo | 79% cheaper |
| 16 vCPU / 32 GB | CX52 | ~$37.60/mo | High Frequency | ~$192/mo | 80% cheaper |
Hetzner includes 20 TB outbound bandwidth on all plans. Vultr includes 1–5 TB depending on tier and charges ~$0.01/GB beyond that. Both use NVMe SSDs.
From solo developer to growth-stage startup — where each provider lands on the monthly bill.
These savings apply when deploying in EU or US regions where both providers operate. If you need APAC or LATAM presence, Vultr is the only option — Hetzner does not have locations in those regions, so the comparison becomes moot.
Network reach, storage, object storage, load balancers, and when each provider wins.
Vultr operates compute infrastructure in 32 cities across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, South America, Africa, and the Middle East. This is not just a marketing stat — it is the core architectural reason to choose Vultr over Hetzner. If you are building a product with users in Tokyo, Singapore, Mumbai, São Paulo, or Johannesburg, being able to deploy a node in those cities means measurably lower latency and a better end-user experience. Hetzner's five locations (Falkenstein, Nuremberg, Helsinki, Ashburn, and Hillsboro) serve EU and US users well, but they cannot cover APAC or LATAM with acceptable round-trip times.
For a globally distributed CDN edge network, a gaming platform with regional matchmaking servers, or a SaaS product sold in multiple continents simultaneously, Vultr's location coverage is not a nice-to-have — it is a technical requirement. No amount of Hetzner's pricing advantage compensates for deploying infrastructure that is geographically too far from your users.
Developers sometimes assume Hetzner's prices are introductory or that performance is sacrificed to hit those numbers. Neither is true. Hetzner has been operating at these price points for years, and the reason is architectural: they own and operate their own facilities in lower-cost European markets, run a lean business model without a large enterprise sales organization, and do not offer the broad ecosystem of managed services that other providers bundle into their compute pricing. What you are buying is raw compute — and you get a lot of it per dollar. The CX42 at roughly $19.90/month delivers 8 vCPUs and 16 GB RAM with 160 GB local NVMe. Vultr's equivalent is $96/month for 6 vCPUs and 16 GB.
Both providers offer network-attached block storage billed per gigabyte per month. Hetzner Volumes are priced at approximately €0.0476 per GB/month (roughly $0.05/GB). Vultr Block Storage is similarly priced at $0.10/GB/month, making Hetzner meaningfully cheaper here as well. For applications requiring large persistent volumes — databases, media files, log archives — this price difference compounds quickly. A 500 GB volume costs about $25/month on Hetzner versus $50/month on Vultr.
Vultr offers S3-compatible Object Storage starting at $5/month for 250 GB with built-in egress included at reasonable usage levels. It is a clean, developer-friendly offering that integrates well with existing S3 tooling. Hetzner Object Storage is priced per GB stored (approximately €0.0119/GB/month) plus outbound transfer charges. At small volumes under 100 GB, Vultr's flat rate is simpler; at larger scales, Hetzner's per-GB model can be cheaper depending on how much data you egress each month. Both are viable alternatives to AWS S3 and substantially cheaper than comparable AWS pricing.
Vultr's Marketplace lets you launch pre-configured one-click applications — WordPress, Ghost, Plesk, cPanel, various database stacks, and development environments — without writing any setup scripts. This is genuinely useful for teams that want to spin up a production application quickly without DevOps investment. Hetzner has no equivalent marketplace; their offering is a clean Linux instance that you configure yourself. Hetzner does publish community guides and their Cloud documentation is thorough, but you are expected to handle your own application layer setup.
Both Hetzner and Vultr offer managed load balancers as separate billed services. Hetzner's load balancers start at approximately €5.83/month (LB11 tier) and support HTTP, HTTPS, and TCP with health checking and SSL termination. Vultr's load balancers are priced at $10/month at the entry level. Neither provider offers the deeply integrated load balancer experience that DigitalOcean provides with its native Droplet networking, but both are operationally straightforward and integrate with their respective control planes.
Hetzner is one of the few cloud providers that was built from the ground up with IPv6 as a first-class citizen. Every server gets a routable IPv6 /64 subnet included at no charge, and Hetzner's network architecture has been IPv6-native since before most North American providers took it seriously. This matters if you are building applications that need to communicate natively over IPv6, serve IPv6-only clients, or participate in internet routing infrastructure. Vultr also supports IPv6 but charges for additional IPv4 addresses, which is industry standard.
Vultr offers bare metal servers at competitive prices — starting around $120/month for a dedicated physical machine with no hypervisor overhead. These are popular for high-throughput database workloads, compute-intensive ML inference, or applications that cannot tolerate the "noisy neighbor" variability of shared hypervisors. Hetzner also offers dedicated servers through their Robot division (separate from Hetzner Cloud) with root server options starting at similarly competitive prices, and their EX and AX series offer exceptionally strong CPU-to-price ratios for dedicated hardware. For bare metal at scale, Hetzner's Robot platform is often cheaper than Vultr's bare metal tiers, especially for European deployments.
If your infrastructure is EU-primary or US-primary and you do not need more than five geographic locations, Hetzner wins on price every single time. There is no Vultr tier at any specification level where Vultr is cheaper than the equivalent Hetzner offering in overlapping regions. The savings are substantial enough that a solo developer or bootstrapped startup running on Hetzner can reallocate budget to paid tooling, monitoring, or external managed services and still come out ahead financially.
If your product serves users across Asia-Pacific, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, or the Middle East, and latency to those regions materially affects your product quality, Vultr is worth the premium. The ability to run a node in Tokyo, Mumbai, São Paulo, and Johannesburg simultaneously — and manage all of them through a single control plane — is a genuine operational advantage that Hetzner cannot match today. For multi-region architectures that span continents, Vultr's network is the technical enabler and the price difference becomes the cost of global reach.
Category-by-category summary — quick reference before you commit.
Vultr's pricing at identical spec tiers is consistently 5–8× higher than Hetzner in the same region. If all your users are in Europe or the US, there is no technical argument for paying Vultr's prices over Hetzner's. The location advantage only matters when you actually need those locations.
Neither provider is universally faster — it depends entirely on where your users are. Vultr operates in 32 cities across six continents, which means it can place compute physically closer to users in Tokyo, Seoul, São Paulo, or Sydney. Hetzner has five locations. For North American and European workloads, the networks are comparable in raw throughput and CPU performance. For APAC or LATAM audiences, Vultr's geographic reach makes a measurable latency difference that Hetzner simply cannot match today.
Yes. Hetzner added two US locations in 2023: Ashburn, Virginia (US East) and Hillsboro, Oregon (US West). These locations offer the same CX and CCX series shared and dedicated compute as the European data centers, at equivalent pricing. The US locations also include 20 TB of outbound bandwidth per month. Availability of some instance types may be more limited in the US locations compared to the established European facilities.
For game servers where your player base is spread globally, Vultr is typically the stronger choice because you can spin up nodes in Tokyo, Warsaw, Atlanta, São Paulo, and Los Angeles simultaneously. Hetzner is excellent for EU-focused gaming communities, and their high-core dedicated root servers offer exceptional CPU-to-price ratios for CPU-heavy game engines. If you need multi-region coverage, Vultr's 32-location network gives you more flexibility.
Vultr Object Storage starts at $5/month for 250 GB with S3-compatible API access and reasonable egress included. Hetzner Object Storage is priced at approximately €0.0119 per GB stored plus €0.01 per GB for outbound traffic. At small scale (under 250 GB) Vultr's flat-rate plan is more predictable. At larger scales, Hetzner's per-GB model can be cheaper depending on egress volume. Both are dramatically cheaper than AWS S3 or DigitalOcean Spaces.
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