Hetzner Cloud vs Railway
Pricing
Hetzner Cloud: Servers from EUR 5.49/mo excl. VAT and IPv4, billed hourly
Railway: Free tier, usage-based from $5/mo
Description
Hetzner Cloud: German cloud provider renting virtual servers by the hour from data centres in Germany, Finland, the US and Singapore
Railway: Deploy apps, databases, and services with zero configuration
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
- One-click Postgres, Redis, and MySQL: databases ready in seconds
- Auto-detects your framework and sets up the build pipeline
- Usage-based pricing means you only pay for what you actually use
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
- Always-on services can cost $20-50/month or more, not cheap for background workers
- Less control over infrastructure than a VPS
- Newer platform with occasional growing pains
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.
Railway removes the DevOps from deploying full-stack apps. Connect your repo, it detects your framework, provisions databases, and handles environment variables. You go from code to production in minutes without touching a Dockerfile.
The usage-based pricing is a double-edged sword. A side project that gets light traffic costs almost nothing. A production app with background workers and a database can easily run $30-50/month. Great for quick deploys and prototypes; keep an eye on costs if your app runs 24/7.
Hetzner Cloud verified
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