Hetzner Alternatives: OVHcloud, netcup, Contabo, or IONOS?

This comparison was checked on August 31, 2026. It starts with a practical baseline—about 2 vCPU or vCore and 4 GB RAM—but it does not treat a VPS bill as a complete apples-to-apples specification. Storage class, traffic policy, backups, IPv4, support, location, VAT, and renewal terms can matter more than a small difference in the headline price.

Direct answer: If you are leaving Hetzner and want the closest low-cost replacement, shortlist OVHcloud first for the clearest included services, netcup for storage-per-euro, Contabo for raw disk capacity, and IONOS for support and platform features. The supplied comparison is directionally useful, but two important corrections are needed: the old €5.99 Hetzner figure is stale, and IONOS’s $4 price is promotional rather than the normal long-term cost.

The verified baseline

The table is intentionally honest about uncertainty. Provider pricing pages are often localized, JavaScript-rendered, promotion-aware, or account-specific. A screenshot or search snippet can confirm a product exists, but it is not a substitute for the final checkout total.

What changed about Hetzner?

The €5.99 number was the attractive historical reference for a 2-vCPU, 4 GB Cloud server. Hetzner’s current Regular Performance page still identifies CPX22 as the 2-vCPU / 4 GB option and lists 80 GB NVMe storage. It also says EU servers include at least 20 TB of traffic, while Singapore locations have a much smaller allowance.

The price field on the public page is dynamically rendered, so it should not be copied from an old comparison article. Current 2026 search results and industry price-change reporting place the EU CPX22 around €19.99/month, after 2026 price adjustments. That makes the strategic question different: Hetzner alternatives are no longer merely competing against €5.99. They are competing against a provider whose value proposition now includes a mature API, predictable hourly billing with a monthly cap, strong EU traffic inclusion, and a familiar developer workflow.

That also changes the recommendation. If your only reason for moving is storage, migrating may be worthwhile. If your workload is already stable on Hetzner and migration has operational risk, calculate the cost of downtime, IP changes, backups, DNS work, and testing before treating a lower monthly number as automatic savings.

OVHcloud: the cleanest direct replacement

OVHcloud’s current US VPS page lists VPS-1 at $4.54/month with 2 vCores, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB SSD NVMe, daily backup of the previous 24 hours, unlimited traffic, and 500 Mbps public bandwidth. It also advertises anti-DDoS protection and a 99.9% SLA for the VPS range.

That package is unusually easy to compare with the old Hetzner baseline. It gives up some disk space versus the current CPX22, but it adds a daily system-disk backup in the listed configuration. The trade-off is that “unlimited traffic” does not mean unlimited peak throughput: the advertised public port is 500 Mbps. OVHcloud also distinguishes ordinary data-center VPS products from Local Zone products, where feature availability can differ.

Best for: websites, APIs, VPNs, staging environments, and teams that value included backup and a broad global footprint.

Watch: region-specific pricing, taxes, extra IPs, premium backup, and the difference between upgrading and downgrading. OVHcloud says upgrades can be made from the control panel, while downgrading normally requires moving to a new plan and transferring data.

netcup: the most interesting value match

netcup’s VPS 500 G12 is the closest match to the supplied “nearly the same price, much more NVMe” argument: 2 x86 vCores, 4 GB DDR5 ECC RAM, and 128 GB NVMe. The public product page also lists included traffic, copy-on-write snapshots, and a remote console.

At €5.91, it is close to the old Hetzner price reference while offering more than three times the listed CPX22 storage. That makes netcup compelling for self-hosted applications, container images, small databases, development environments, and backups that fit comfortably on local NVMe.

There is an important qualification: netcup explicitly says VPS resources are shared. Its VPS products do not include the dedicated CPU cores, satisfaction guarantee, or the same 99.9% minimum availability guarantee associated with its root-server line. In other words, the specification is excellent, but the vCore label is not equivalent to a dedicated physical CPU core.

Best for: cost-sensitive European users who want high local storage, snapshots, a remote console, and flexible VPS resources.

Watch: traffic wording, VAT treatment, minimum-term selection, shared CPU behavior, and data-center location. €5.91 may be the VAT-inclusive figure shown to an EU customer; business customers and other regions can see different totals.

Contabo: maximum disk, not automatically maximum performance

Contabo’s Storage VPS 20 is built around disk capacity: the checked product listing describes 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 300 GB SSD, a 200 Mbit/s port, and unlimited traffic. That is the largest storage allocation in this comparison by a wide margin.

The supplied $5.28/month should not be presented as a universal price because the official Contabo page was protected by a security check during this verification pass. The product and specification were corroborated by the provider’s indexed result, but the final amount should be checked after selecting a billing term, location, currency, and any options.

The bigger mistake would be to read 300 GB as “three times the performance.” Storage VPS plans optimize for capacity. They can be a strong fit for media, archives, mirrors, backups, and storage-heavy services, but disk size does not tell you latency, IOPS under contention, CPU consistency, or support responsiveness.

Best for: users who genuinely need hundreds of gigabytes and can accept a 200 Mbit/s port.

Watch: storage technology wording, backup pricing, provisioning location, performance variability, and the difference between monthly and longer-term billing. If your workload is CPU-bound or database-heavy, benchmark before migrating.

IONOS: attractive promotion, higher steady-state cost

IONOS advertises VPS+ from $4/month on its US page and lists a feature set that is stronger than a bare VPS: full virtualization, unlimited traffic over a 1 Gbps connection, active DDoS protection, full root access, customizable firewall controls, IPv4 and IPv6 dual stack, high-speed images, and free 24/7 support. The platform also advertises VM cloning, load balancing, private networking, block storage, and object storage.

The supplied configuration—2 vCores, 4 GB RAM, and 120 GB NVMe—is the useful reference point, but the $4 number is not a fair lifetime price. IONOS promotions commonly depend on an initial term and can renew at a higher monthly rate. The supplied $11/month is therefore more useful for a long-term budget, while $4 is useful only when explicitly labeled as an introductory offer.

Best for: small businesses and operators who value support, networking features, and a more platform-like experience than a minimalist VPS.

Watch: renewal price, term length, taxes, setup-fee language on regional offers, and exactly which VPS+ tier contains the 120 GB configuration. Always capture the checkout summary, not just the landing-page banner.

A better shortlist than a price-only ranking

The original order—OVHcloud → netcup → Contabo → IONOS—is defensible for a buyer optimizing for low recurring cost. My workload-based ranking is slightly different:

1. OVHcloud for the safest general-purpose replacement: clear 2-vCore / 4 GB specs, daily backup listed, unlimited traffic, anti-DDoS, and 500 Mbps bandwidth.
2. netcup for European storage-per-euro: 128 GB NVMe, ECC memory, snapshots, and a price close to the old Hetzner reference, with shared-vCore caveats.
3. IONOS when support, 1 Gbps networking, IPv4/IPv6, private networking, and platform features matter more than the renewal price.
4. Contabo when 300 GB of storage is the actual requirement—not merely a nice-looking number in a comparison table.

For a production migration, run the same containerized workload on two candidates for at least several days. Measure p95 response time, disk latency, CPU steal time, memory pressure, backup restore time, IPv4 delivery, and egress behavior. A five-minute benchmark is useful for catching obvious mismatches; it is not a reliability study.

diagram

Migration checklist

• Export the current server inventory: OS version, Docker images, volumes, cron jobs, firewall rules, DNS records, and secrets references.
• Confirm whether the new provider supplies IPv4, IPv6, reverse DNS, backups, snapshots, and a rescue or remote-console path.
• Restore a recent backup into the candidate VPS before changing DNS.
• Test TLS renewal, outbound SMTP restrictions, webhooks, object-storage access, and third-party allowlists.
• Lower DNS TTL ahead of the cutover, then keep the old server available until logs and health checks are clean.
• Recalculate the monthly total with VAT, backup, extra IP, block storage, snapshots, and renewal pricing included.

This is especially important for self-hosted AI and automation stacks. The VPS is only the substrate: isolation, patching, secrets handling, backups, and least-privilege container design still determine whether the deployment is safe. For adjacent context, see the guide on running OpenClaw securely in Docker sandboxes and the research note on Hetzner Inference’s OpenAI-compatible EU API.

FAQ

Which Hetzner alternative is cheapest?

On the checked landing pages, OVHcloud VPS-1 starts at $4.54/month and IONOS advertises $4/month. The IONOS figure is promotional, while OVHcloud’s total remains region- and tax-dependent. netcup is close to €5.91 in common EU pricing, and Contabo’s storage configuration is similarly positioned but needs checkout verification.

Is netcup better than Hetzner?

It can be better for storage-per-euro: the VPS 500 G12 lists 128 GB NVMe versus 80 GB for Hetzner CPX22. Hetzner may still be preferable for a familiar cloud API, traffic allowance, locations, or workload consistency. “Better” depends on the workload and the measured service, not storage alone.

Is Contabo good for production?

It can be, but the 300 GB plan should be selected for a real capacity need and tested under realistic load. Storage capacity, unlimited traffic, and a low price do not prove CPU consistency, disk I/O behavior, or incident response quality.

What should I verify before ordering?

Verify the exact region, recurring price, VAT or sales tax, billing term, setup fee, IPv4 charge, backup/snapshot charge, traffic policy, port speed, SLA, and renewal terms at checkout. Save the order summary as the source of truth.

Sources

• Hetzner Cloud Regular Performance pricing and specifications
• OVHcloud VPS pricing and VPS-1 specification
• IONOS VPS hosting and VPS+ features
• Contabo VPS pricing
• Contabo Storage VPS
• netcup VPS plans and VPS 500 G12 specification

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