Four gigabytes of RAM for less than four euros is not a loss leader. It is a set of deliberate decisions about hardware, buildings and what not to sell you.
A Hetzner CX22 gives you 2 vCPU, 4 GB of RAM and 40 GB of NVMe for around €3.79/month. The nearest equivalent from DigitalOcean or AWS Lightsail costs roughly three times that for a third of the machine. People assume something is wrong with it. Nothing is — the difference is structural.
Five reasons the price works
1. It builds its own hardware and its own buildings. Hetzner assembles servers from components rather than buying branded chassis at enterprise markup, and it constructs and owns its data centres in Falkenstein and Nuremberg. No landlord margin, no OEM margin. Very few hosts at any price point do both.
2. German industrial power, and cold air. Falkenstein uses direct free cooling for much of the year — outside air rather than mechanical chillers — which is a large fraction of a data centre's operating cost eliminated by geography. The Helsinki site takes this further.
3. It sells one thing. There is no marketing department pushing website builders, no domain upsell funnel, no bundled SSL you already get free, no affiliate programme paying £100 a signup. The customer acquisition cost is close to zero because engineers recommend it to each other.
4. Support is deliberately narrow. Ticket-based, business hours, and scoped to the infrastructure. They will not debug your nginx config. That is a genuine limitation and it is also perhaps a third of the cost of a hosting business removed.
5. Density and honest overselling. Shared vCPU plans are contended, as they are everywhere. Hetzner is unusually clear about which plans are shared and which are dedicated-core, and prices them separately rather than pretending.
What you give up
- No UK data centre. Falkenstein and Helsinki are 25–40ms from London. Fine behind a CDN for a cached site, noticeable in wp-admin and at checkout.
- No phone support, no 24/7. If a production outage at 2am on Sunday is unacceptable, this is the wrong provider — Akamai gives you a phone number at a similar price.
- Nothing is managed. No control panel, no WordPress installer, no backups unless you enable and pay for them, and outbound port 25 blocked by default.
- Account verification can be strict. New accounts, particularly from outside the EU, are sometimes asked for identity documents. Irritating, and a reason they have less abuse than most.
The dedicated auction is the real bargain
Hetzner's server auction sells ex-lease bare metal — a machine with 64 GB of RAM and NVMe storage for around €30–40/month. That is genuinely more compute than a £200/month managed plan, from a company that has been trading since 1997. The catch is that stock is one-off, the drives have hours on them, and you own every aspect of running it. Our low-end boxes page covers that market properly.
When it is the right answer, and when it is not
Right: development and staging, CI runners, self-hosted services, backup targets, anything where you enjoy running servers, and any workload that needs a lot of RAM cheaply.
Wrong: a UK business site where you are the only person who can fix it and you do not actually want the job. The £25/month saved against managed hosting is real; so is the Sunday you spend on it. Our cost comparison does that arithmetic honestly, and for a lot of people £6/month shared hosting is the better purchase.
Hetzner is not cheap because it is cutting corners you cannot see. It is cheap because it owns its buildings, builds its own servers, sells no add-ons, and does not employ anyone to answer the phone. Every one of those is visible in what you get.
Published 10 April 2026. Prices and ownership change — check the comparison table for current figures, and the provider's own site before buying. No affiliate links anywhere on this site.