Hetzner Cloud vs Render
Pricing
Hetzner Cloud: Servers from EUR 5.49/mo excl. VAT and IPv4, billed hourly
Render: Free tier, from $7/mo
Description
Hetzner Cloud: German cloud provider renting virtual servers by the hour from data centres in Germany, Finland, the US and Singapore
Render: Cloud hosting that is simpler than AWS but more capable than static hosts
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
- Clear, predictable pricing: no surprise bills
- Free tier for static sites works well
- One-click database provisioning for Postgres and Redis
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
- Free tier web services spin down after 15 minutes of inactivity
- Fewer regions than competitors, which can mean higher latency for some users
- Build times and deploy speeds are slower than Vercel
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.
Render sits in the sweet spot between “I need more than static hosting” and “I do not want to learn AWS.” Deploy web services, databases, background workers, and cron jobs with a clean interface and predictable pricing. No surprise bills, no complex dashboards.
The free tier is fine for static sites but limited for web services: they spin down after inactivity, meaning the first request after idle time is slow. For paid services starting at $7/month, you get always-on hosting that handles real production traffic. If you have outgrown Heroku’s free tier (which no longer exists) and want something similar but modern, Render is the natural landing spot.
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