Hetzner Alternatives After the 2026 Price Increase: Stay, Move, or Move Only Your Balkan Workloads

If the Hetzner price increase of 2026 pushed you to look for Hetzner alternatives, first check which part of it actually reaches you. A cloud server you never resize still costs what it cost after 1 April 2026. What got expensive is everything new: since 15 June 2026 a new or rescaled CPX22 costs €19.49 a month instead of €7.99, and the cheapest Cost-Optimized line was still marked "Currently not available" on Hetzner's cloud page when we checked on 24 October 2026. So there are three honest options: stay and avoid rescaling, move everything, or move only the part of your setup whose users sit far from Germany and Finland, which for readers in Kosovo, Albania, North Macedonia and Serbia is usually the part they care about most.

This page is about that choice. The full history of the two price rounds, plan by plan, and a lab-tested migration runbook are in our Hetzner price increase and migration guide; here we compare where else to go, measure what Balkan users wait for, and size the move.

What we could verify on 24 October 2026:

• Hetzner raised prices for "both new orders and existing products" from 1 April 2026 (Hetzner statement, 23 February 2026). The statement gives reasons (infrastructure and hardware costs) but no percentages; the 30% to 37% cloud figures come from Hetzner's price table at the time.
• The second round took effect "for new orders and cloud instance rescales" on 15 June 2026 at 8 AM CEST (Hetzner price adjustment page). Hetzner's press release of 27 May 2026 says "currently rented servers are not affected" and lists IPs, storage products, Volumes, Snapshots, Load Balancers and Object Storage as left out.
• IPv4 did not go up. Hetzner's IP pricing page still lists €0.50 a month for a cloud Primary IPv4 and €1.70 for a dedicated server's, and its last recorded change is from April 2023.
• We found no third Hetzner price round after June. A blog table that mentions "1 October 2026" refers to OVHcloud renewals, not Hetzner.
• The Hetzner status page still shows "Limited availability of cloud instances", open since 26 June 2026.

Hetzner alternatives cost more in 2026 too

Moving does not take you out of the memory market. Hetzner, OVHcloud and netcup all point at the same cause: RAM and NVMe drives that cost several times what they did in 2025. Before you compare any two price lists, look at what each provider changed this year and who it applies to:

The Register reports OVHcloud's memory costs rose six times in the year to June 2026 and that its CEO expects the situation to last until 2028. Two lessons follow. A quote you get today can change at renewal, so ask every provider in writing whether a running server's price can go up and with how much notice. And a server you already pay for is worth something: do not cancel a Hetzner server you are happy with because of a headline about new orders.

Three ways out, and when each one wins

The third option is the one most comparison articles skip, because most of them are written from Germany or the US. It is also the one where the numbers below matter.

What a Balkan user waits for: measured from Prishtina

We ran these tests on 24 October 2026 from our Debian 13 test server in Prishtina, on our own network (AS213900). The targets are the providers' public speed test hosts; the hostnames name the site, and for Falkenstein the trace confirmed it, ending at core24.fsn1.hetzner.com. Each line is 20 pings.

The route to Falkenstein ran Prishtina, Skopje, Belgrade, Bratislava, Vienna, Prague, Falkenstein, on Hurricane Electric until Vienna. The gateway line is a ping from a virtual server to its own router, so it includes the VM's own overhead; a user on a fixed line in the same city sees a few milliseconds. Prishtina to Skopje is about 3 ms on our network.

A ping is one round trip. Opening a web page over HTTPS costs at least three before the first byte arrives: one for the TCP connection, one for TLS 1.3, one for the request. That is what curl measured against Falkenstein:

# on any Linux machine with curl, as any user
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "tcp %{time_connect}s tls %{time_appconnect}s first-byte %{time_starttransfer}s\n" https://fsn1-speed.hetzner.com/

tcp 0.041243s tls 0.089837s first-byte 0.124833s

Three runs gave 125, 125 and 141 ms to the first byte, for a page that is almost empty. On a server in the same city the same three round trips cost well under 20 ms. A browser reuses the connection afterwards, so the gap shows up most on the first page view, on API clients that open a new connection per call, and on anything interactive: game servers, VoIP, remote desktop, trading tools.

Run it yourself from where your users are, not from your office VPN. On a Debian or Ubuntu machine:

# as root, once
apt install -y mtr-tiny bind9-dnsutils

# as any user: 20 pings, then the route with AS numbers
ping -c 20 -i 0.3 -q nbg1-speed.hetzner.com
mtr -rwzbc 30 fsn1-speed.hetzner.com

The last line of the ping is the summary, for example rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 32.713/34.007/40.718/1.764 ms. In the mtr report, a hop with 100% loss and ??? is a router that does not answer pings; only loss that continues to the last line is real. For more tests on CPU, disk and network of a candidate server, use our VPS benchmark commands, and for how Balkan networks connect to each other, our Balkan internet exchanges overview.

Splitting the setup: what to move and what to keep

Distance multiplies when one request triggers many. A PHP page that runs 20 database queries one after another spends nearly nothing on them when the database is on the same server. Put the database 35 ms away and the same page waits 20 x 35 = 700 ms before it can answer. So move whole services, not halves of them.

• Good candidates to move closer to Balkan users: the website or shop with its database, game servers, VoIP and PBX, remote desktops, chat and support tools, APIs that local apps call, a DNS resolver or VPN endpoint for a local office.
• Fine to leave in Germany or Finland: backups and archives, build servers and CI runners, batch jobs, large object storage, anything whose users are in Western Europe.
• Watch the boundary: if a service you move still has to call one you keep, measure that call. A nightly sync across 35 ms is harmless; a session store that every page reads is not.

A split also spreads risk: two providers, two networks and two cities mean one bad day at either does not take everything down, as long as your backups live on the other side.

Hetzner alternatives compared on the specs that matter

Prices change too often this year to be worth printing, so this table sticks to terms. Every row comes from the provider's own pages on 24 October 2026; check them again before you order.

Read the vCPU column first. Shared vCPUs are fine for websites that sit idle most of the time; dedicated vCPUs are for databases, game servers and long builds that keep cores busy. If you are leaving a Hetzner CCX, compare it with a dedicated-vCPU plan, not with the cheapest shared one, or the benchmark will mislead you. Our VPS, VDS and dedicated server comparison explains the difference in plain terms.

Then ask every provider the same questions: uptime promise (ours is 99% monthly, with service credits below that), whether outbound port 25 is open for mail (blocked on our new servers, opened on request), who you talk to when something breaks (Telegram and email with us), and whether a running server's price can change at renewal.

How long the move takes

Downtime comes from the final sync only; copying happens while the old server keeps running. What sets the timetable is how fast data travels between the two sites. We downloaded Hetzner's 100 MB test file from Falkenstein to Prishtina in one stream:

# as any user
curl -s -o 100MB.bin -w "%{size_download} bytes in %{time_total}s, %{speed_download} bytes/s\n" https://fsn1-speed.hetzner.com/100MB.bin
rm 100MB.bin

104857600 bytes in 3.440670s, 30475924 bytes/s

That is about 30 MB/s, or 244 Mbit/s, for a single connection over 1,000 km. At that rate:

rsync only sends what changed, so the copy you make on day one is the slow one. In our earlier lab migration, a site with a 1.05 million row database froze writes for 24 seconds during the final switch; the database dump, not the files, set that length.

Lower the DNS TTL a day before. The TTL is how many seconds other resolvers may keep the old answer. Read it straight from your authoritative name server:

# as any user
dig +short NS rscomputers-ks.com
dig +noall +answer rscomputers-ks.com A @anastasia.ns.cloudflare.com

rscomputers-ks.com.	300	IN	A	104.26.14.247

Put your own domain and name server in place of ours. The number after the name is the TTL in seconds; 300 means visitors follow a change within five minutes. If yours shows 3600 or 86400, set it to 300 and wait at least the old value before switching. The step-by-step commands for keys, rsync, databases, Docker volumes, the freeze and rollback are in the Hetzner migration runbook. If you prefer to bring the whole disk, we import a converted .qcow2 or .raw image on request, quoted like other setup work.

Frequently asked questions

Did Hetzner raise prices again after June 2026?

Not that we could find. As of 24 October 2026, Hetzner's price adjustment page covers only the 15 June 2026 round, last edited on 8 July, and its IPv4 price page has not changed since April 2023.

Did Hetzner raise IPv4 prices in 2026?

No. A cloud Primary IPv4 still costs €0.50 a month and a dedicated server's primary IPv4 €1.70. The June 2026 press release lists IPs among the products not affected.

What is the best Hetzner alternative in Europe?

The one closest to your users with terms you can live with. For users in Germany, Austria or Poland, netcup, OVHcloud and Scaleway all have nearby sites. For users in Kosovo, Albania, North Macedonia or Serbia, a server in the region cuts each round trip from about 35 ms to a few milliseconds.

Is it cheaper to stay with Hetzner?

Often, if you never rescale. A server running since before 15 June keeps its April price. It stops being cheaper the moment you need a bigger plan, a new server, or a plan Hetzner currently cannot deliver.

Will other providers raise prices too?

Several already have in 2026, including OVHcloud, netcup and Leaseweb, for the same reason: memory and NVMe drive prices. Ask any provider whether a running server's price can change and how much notice you get.

How much latency is there from the Balkans to Hetzner?

From Prishtina we measured 34.0 ms to Nuremberg, 35.6 ms to Falkenstein and 57.1 ms to Helsinki on average, and 125 ms to the first byte of a small HTTPS page in Falkenstein.

Where to start

Keep the Hetzner servers that work and do not need to grow. For the next server, or for the services your Southeast European users wait on, measure from their side first, then compare terms rather than headlines. RS Computers runs KVM servers in Prishtina, Amsterdam and Dublin, with shared-vCPU VPS and dedicated-vCPU VDS plans, unmetered traffic and IPv4 and IPv6 included; plans and prices for every city are on the VPS plans page. Questions about a move? Ask us on Telegram.

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