Hetzner Cloud vs Namecheap
Pricing
Hetzner Cloud: Servers from EUR 5.49/mo excl. VAT and IPv4, billed hourly
Namecheap: .com from $10.98 for the first year on sale ($14.98 regular), renews at $18.48/yr
Description
Hetzner Cloud: German cloud provider renting virtual servers by the hour from data centres in Germany, Finland, the US and Singapore
Namecheap: Domain registrar for .com, .io, .co and other domains, with free WHOIS privacy and DNS management
Pros
- Servers in the EU include 20 TB of traffic a month
- Hourly billing with a monthly cap: delete a server mid-month and you pay only for the hours used
- Firewalls at no extra cost, private networks, a REST API, a CLI and Terraform support
- Free domain privacy for life on eligible domains, which keeps your contact details out of WHOIS lookups
- New customers can get a first-year .com for $6.79 (one per household)
- About 30 days' grace after expiry to renew at the normal rate
Cons
- The cheapest Cost-Optimized servers (from EUR 5.49/mo) are marked as not available on Hetzner's site
- Prices rose on 15 June 2026: the 2 vCPU, 4 GB CPX22 went from EUR 7.99 to EUR 19.49 a month in Germany and Finland
- Servers come unmanaged: you install, update and secure them yourself
- Renewals cost more than the first year: a .com renews at $18.48 a year
- ICANN's $0.20 fee is added at checkout for some domains
- Some country domains, such as .de, .eu and .fr, must be set to auto-renew several days before expiry or they go straight into redemption
Details
Hetzner rents virtual servers by the hour from data centres in Falkenstein and Nuremberg (Germany), Helsinki, two US locations and Singapore. You pick a size and an operating system such as Ubuntu or Debian, and the server is ready in seconds. You can run a self-hosting tool such as Coolify on top of it.
It suits founders who are comfortable running a Linux server. There are three lines: Cost-Optimized (shared CPUs, the cheapest), Regular Performance (shared AMD CPUs on newer hardware) and General Purpose (dedicated vCPUs).
Read the prices carefully. Hetzner’s June 2026 price list puts the CX23 (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB disk) at EUR 5.49 a month and the CPX22 at EUR 19.49, both excluding VAT and the IPv4 address, and the Cost-Optimized line is currently shown as not available. Singapore servers cost more and include only 0.5 TB of traffic.
Namecheap sells domain names and the services around them, such as DNS and SSL certificates. Every founder needs at least one domain, and a registrar like this keeps it separate from your hosting, so you can move hosts without moving the domain.
The prices on the search page are first-year prices. A .com is $10.98 for the first year during the current sale ($14.98 normally) and $18.48 a year after that, so check the renewal price before you buy any extension.
Turn on auto-renew as soon as you register. If a domain expires, your site and email stop working, though a .com gets a grace period of around 30 days to renew at the normal price.
Verified
