Hetzner vs Azure (2026): Prices, Egress and a Worked Monthly Cost

How this was checked

Hetzner figures come from Hetzner's own Price Adjustment 15 June 2026 page (last changed July 8, 2026) and the plan pages on hetzner.com/cloud, read on October 15, 2026 through a US-based fetch. Azure figures come from Microsoft's Linux virtual machines pricing page, its bandwidth pricing page and Microsoft's public Azure Retail Prices API, which I used for reservation totals, disks and public IPs because the pricing page does not list them as plain numbers. Azure rates are East US, Linux, pay-as-you-go, 730 hours a month. Reserved totals are the one-time term price divided by 12 or 36.

I did not benchmark Azure, and I have not benchmarked these exact Hetzner plans against Azure sizes. Every performance statement below is about what each vendor documents. Hetzner prices exclude VAT and exclude the IPv4 address, which Hetzner bills separately. Hetzner publishes both euro and dollar columns, so both appear. We earn nothing on Hetzner or Azure; every link to them is a plain link. See the disclosure.

Check first: can you order a Hetzner server right now?

On October 15, 2026, Hetzner's public Cloud product pages showed a disabled Create button, "This product is currently unavailable", on every plan we opened in the CX, CPX and CCX lines. Hetzner's status page has carried an open notice since June 26, 2026, "Limited availability of cloud instances", which says Hetzner is restricting the creation of new cloud servers for new customers and for some existing customers, chosen at random. We did not try to place an order, so we can't say which sizes or locations your own account can create. Check the Hetzner Console before you plan around any Hetzner price on this page, and keep a second provider on your shortlist.

The Hetzner figures below are Hetzner's published list prices. Whether a given size can be created for you is a separate question that only the Console answers, so treat the comparison as a price comparison, not a promise of stock.

Hetzner's June 15, 2026 price changes

The adjustment took effect for new orders and rescales on June 15, 2026 at 8 AM CEST. Hetzner notes that certain changes to servers on legacy pricing can switch them to current pricing, so a resize is not free of risk. Prices below are Germany and Finland, per month, excluding VAT and IPv4, from Hetzner's table.

Prices from docs.hetzner.com (price adjustment page), specs from the hetzner.com/cloud plan pages, both checked October 15, 2026. Percentages are my arithmetic on Hetzner's published figures. Euro and dollar columns are both Hetzner's.

Plan for plan: Hetzner against Azure

I matched on vCPU and RAM, and on dedicated against shared where Hetzner draws that line. Azure's D-series is general purpose, so the nearest Hetzner match is the dedicated CCX line. The Azure column is compute only. Azure bills the OS disk and bandwidth separately, while every Hetzner plan includes local NVMe and traffic.

Hetzner: docs.hetzner.com price adjustment page. Azure: azure.microsoft.com Linux virtual machines pricing page and Retail Prices API (D4s v5 is $0.192 an hour, 730 hours is $140.16). Checked October 15, 2026. Ratios are my division of the dollar figures. A vCPU is not the same unit on both platforms and I have not measured the two against each other.

If you could still order CX, the D4s v5 at $140.16 would sit against a CX43 at $18.49, a 7.6x gap. That is the gap the CX line implies, and it is the reason this page leads with availability. Azure's B-series is burstable: Microsoft documents a CPU credit model where the VM accumulates credits while idle and spends them to run above baseline, so it fits servers that sit mostly idle, not sustained load.

Where Azure closes the gap: commitment pricing

Hetzner has no term discount in the pages I read; the listed monthly price is the price. Azure does. From Microsoft's Retail Prices API on October 15, 2026 (East US, Linux):

Reservation totals are the one-time term prices from the Retail Prices API; monthly figures are my division by 12 or 36. That is 38% off for one year and 60% off for three on the D4s v5. Microsoft's pricing page also lists savings plans (about 31% off for one year, 54% for three).

Against Hetzner's CCX23 at $101.49 a month, a three-year D4s v5 reservation at $55.36 is cheaper on compute. Add a 128 GB Premium SSD disk at $19.71 a month and it is still $75.07, and bandwidth comes on top. You also pay for 36 months up front or commit to them, and Hetzner lets you delete a server and stop paying the same hour. If you know the workload will run for three years, price Azure with the reservation before you decide it loses.

Egress: still the widest gap

Microsoft's bandwidth page lists the first 100 GB a month of internet egress as free, then $0.087 per GB for the next 10 TB and $0.083 per GB for the next 40 TB when the traffic leaves North America or Europe over Microsoft's network. A cheaper routing-preference option starts at $0.08 per GB. Microsoft counts 1 TB as 1,000 GB. Hetzner's plan pages list 20 TB of included traffic on servers in its European locations; the CCX33 includes 30 TB.

Azure figures are my arithmetic on the bandwidth page's rates: (volume minus 100 GB free) times $0.087 for the first 10,000 GB, $0.083 after. Hetzner allowances are from the hetzner.com/cloud plan pages, October 15, 2026.

The Hetzner advantage is a European one. The same pages list only 1 TB included on a CCX13 in the US locations and 2 TB on a CCX23, and as little as 0.5 TB on Singapore CPX plans. Hetzner's docs have long quoted about €1 per extra terabyte, but the docs page that says so is old and I could not read the current per-terabyte rate from the plan pages, so check it for a US or Singapore workload. Azure also waives the egress fee when you take your data out to leave Azure, which its bandwidth page describes; claim it if you migrate.

A worked monthly cost: three servers and 2 TB out

The build: two application servers with 2 vCPU and 8 GB, one database server with 4 vCPU and 16 GB, three public IPv4 addresses and 2 TB of outbound traffic a month. Both builds run the database on a plain server, and backups and load balancing are left out of the totals. Dollar figures throughout.

Hetzner: docs.hetzner.com price adjustment page and the Primary IP docs (IPv4 at €0.50 or $0.60 a month). Azure: Linux VM pricing page plus the Retail Prices API for P10 disks ($19.71) and Standard static IPv4 ($0.005 an hour). Checked October 15, 2026. Hetzner's euro total for the CCX column is €173.47 with IPv4 at €0.50. Backups are left out on both sides.

Azure is 2.5x the CCX build and 3.1x the CPX build. With CX plans, which would bring Hetzner to about $40, the ratio would be 12.8x, but that build cannot be ordered today. Put a one-year reservation on the Azure compute and the total falls to about $408; a three-year reservation brings it to about $346. The disk, IP and egress lines do not shrink, and 2 TB of egress alone is $165 of that. At 2.5x to 3x, Hetzner is still the cheaper bill, and the egress line is why.

Where Azure is the right call

• Managed services. Azure SQL, Service Bus, Functions and the rest are operated by Microsoft. Hetzner Cloud's page lists servers, networks, firewalls, images and one-click apps, and I found no managed database or serverless product there. Every managed dependency you leave on Azure is software you would run yourself on Hetzner.
• Regulated workloads. Microsoft publishes a HIPAA compliance offering page. I found no equivalent from Hetzner, which documents GDPR handling and ISO/IEC 27001 certification for its Germany and Finland sites. If you handle protected health information, get a signed business associate agreement from the provider before any data moves. Ask Hetzner in writing, because I could not confirm either way.
• Microsoft identity. If your company runs on Microsoft 365, Entra ID sign-in, conditional access and single sign-on across your servers are native on Azure.
• Regions and failover. Hetzner's cloud runs from six sites: Falkenstein, Nuremberg, Helsinki, Hillsboro, Ashburn and Singapore. Azure has far more regions, and availability zones and region pairs are products rather than something you build.
• Credits. Microsoft for Startups advertises up to $150,000 in credits on startups.microsoft.com. If you qualify, the first bill is not the real comparison. Model the bill after the credits end.

Where Hetzner is the right call

• Predictable bills. Hetzner's page states a server's bill never exceeds its monthly price cap, and deleting a server mid-month bills the hourly rate. Compute, disk and traffic are in one number. Azure splits the same server across compute, disks, IPs and bandwidth.
• Bandwidth-heavy work in Europe. Downloads, media and API traffic are where the egress table above bites hardest.
• Simple infrastructure. Hetzner documents a REST API, a CLI, and Terraform and Ansible integrations. There is also a 99.9% uptime SLA with credits, per its cloud page.
• Local NVMe included. Every plan lists NVMe storage in the price, where Azure bills each managed disk by size and tier.

Skip this comparison if

• You want a WordPress or small business site on managed hosting. A VPS from either company means you run the server. Start at best WordPress hosting.
• Your data is protected health information or falls under US federal compliance rules. The decision is about contracts and attestations, not price.
• You want a cheaper VPS between Hetzner and a mid-priced provider. See Hetzner vs DigitalOcean and Contabo vs Hetzner.

Moving from Azure to Hetzner

The virtual machines are the easy part. List every managed dependency first: databases, queues, blob storage calls, functions and Entra-based sign-in. For each, decide whether you will run it yourself, buy a third-party service or leave that piece on Azure. Then build the Hetzner servers, restore your database, copy storage, run both sides in parallel and lower your DNS TTL a day before the switch. Keep the Azure environment until the new side has run cleanly for a week, then delete it. For other VPS options, see our VPS section.

Hetzner vs Azure FAQ

Is Hetzner cheaper than Azure?

Yes. On Hetzner's dedicated CCX line against Azure D-series pay-as-you-go in East US, Azure costs about 1.4x to 1.7x more for compute, checked October 15, 2026. On a three-server build with 2 TB of egress, Azure is about $516 a month against about $204 on Hetzner CCX. A three-year Azure reservation narrows the compute gap and can undercut CCX23 on compute alone.

Did Hetzner raise prices in 2026?

Yes. Hetzner's price adjustment took effect on June 15, 2026 for new orders and rescales. Shared CX plans rose 31% to 38%, CPX plans 144% to 175% and CCX plans 113% to 173%, according to the figures on Hetzner's own price adjustment page.

Can I order Hetzner's cheapest CX plans?

On October 15, 2026, Hetzner's cost-optimized page showed the CX, CPX and CCX plans as unavailable, and a status notice about limited cloud instance availability has been open since June 26, 2026. I did not attempt an order, so check the Hetzner Console for your project and location.

How much is Azure bandwidth compared with Hetzner?

Azure includes 100 GB a month of internet egress, then charges $0.087 per GB for the next 10 TB from North America or Europe, so 5 TB costs about $426. Hetzner includes 20 TB per server in its European locations. US locations include 1 TB or more depending on the plan.

Does Hetzner offer managed databases like Azure SQL?

I found no managed database or serverless product on Hetzner Cloud's pages. It sells servers, networks, firewalls, load balancers, volumes and object storage, so databases, queues and backups are yours to run or to buy elsewhere.

Can I use Hetzner for HIPAA workloads?

I could not confirm that Hetzner offers a HIPAA business associate agreement, and Microsoft publishes a HIPAA compliance offering page for Azure. For protected health information, get a signed agreement from the provider before moving data.

What to read next

• VPS hosting guide, the full section.
• Hetzner vs DigitalOcean, the mid-market version of this trade.
• Contabo vs Hetzner, the budget comparison.
• Our real hosting performance numbers, including a Hetzner site we run.