is*hosting as a Hetzner Alternative: Multi-Region VPS Compared [2026]

Hetzner Cloud is: its own data centers, minimal middlemen, maximum compute per euro. That works well as long as your infrastructure fits inside Germany, Finland, and the US. Step outside those three countries, and Hetzner has nowhere to physically deploy a server except in one data center in Singapore.

is*hosting solves a different problem, aiming less at the cheapest compute and more at presence close to the user, whether that’s Brazil, Kazakhstan, or the UAE, where data also has to stay inside the right jurisdiction (GDPR, local data-protection laws). If you’re weighing a Hetzner alternative for exactly that reason, this comparison is built for the decision.

We compare both approaches on geographic coverage, real plan cost, and traffic terms.

TL;DR: Hetzner vs is*hosting

• is*hosting wins on global coverage with 45 locations compared to Hetzner’s 6. If you need presence in the Middle East or Asia, ishosting covers 9 countries, whereas Hetzner is limited to Singapore.
• Hardware & Pricing (mid-tier comparison): at first glance, Hetzner offers more raw hardware for less—its CX33 plan delivers 4 vCPU / 8 GB RAM / 80 GB NVMe for €8.49/mo (+€0.50 for an IPv4 address). is*hosting's mid-tier starts at $21.24/mo for 3 vCPU / 4 GB RAM / 40 GB NVMe, though the price gap is balanced out by bundled services and unmetered traffic.
• Starting from the Medium plan, is*hosting provides unmetered traffic across all locations worldwide. Hetzner enforces monthly transfer caps: 20 TB in Europe, 1–5 TB in the US, and 0.5–8 TB in Asia.
• is*hosting delivers a hands-off experience—24/7 technical support, site migration, and regular backups are built into the price. Hetzner is strictly self-managed, meaning server setup and maintenance fall entirely on you, with backups adding +20% to your monthly bill.
• is*hosting relies on standard monthly or annual billing cycles. Hetzner Cloud uses flexible hourly billing with a monthly cap.

Why Developers Look for a Hetzner Alternative

Hetzner covers its job well while your project fits inside Germany, Finland, and the US. The reasons people still start looking elsewhere come down to four, and the same ones show up whenever a Hetzner review turns critical.

Prices went up. Across 2024-2025 Hetzner raised plan prices and broke the primary IPv4 out into a separate paid line item (€0.50/mo). For anyone who picked the provider on its old compute-per-euro number, that was reason enough to recheck the budget. The query “Hetzner alternative” has been a regular on Reddit ever since.

The bill is in euros, the budget is in dollars. Hetzner charges in EUR. For a US team that’s currency risk: the dollar total drifts with the exchange rate, and planning it a year out is harder than with a fixed USD price.

No native Windows. Hetzner has no ready Windows image, only manual installation through a Custom ISO. If your stack depends on Windows Server, that’s extra work on every deployment instead of picking an image from a list.

Only two US locations. Ashburn and Hillsboro cover the east and west coasts, but past those points Hetzner has nothing in North America. Canada and Mexico aren’t available, and for a project with an audience spread across the continent two data centers can fall short.

Below we cover where is*hosting fills these gaps, and where Hetzner stays the sensible choice.

Geographic Coverage: Concentration vs Reach

How Hetzner’s review in terms of coverage

Hetzner Cloud builds its own high-density, energy-efficient data centers, which keeps compute costs low but tightly limits geographic coverage. All six locations are Nuremberg and Falkenstein in Germany, Helsinki in Finland, Ashburn and Hillsboro in the US, and one data center in Singapore.

How is*hosting’s coverage works

is*hosting bets on maximum geographic diversification: 40 countries, 45 cities, 5 continents. Behind that are direct peering links with Tier 3+ data centers (Equinix, Telehouse, Serverius, EdgeUno, Digital Realty, M247) and regional last-mile providers.

Region-by-region comparison

Even in Europe the difference shows immediately: 22 countries against two (Germany and Finland). In North America Hetzner sticks to the US, with no Canada or Mexico. Beyond those two macro-regions Hetzner has only Singapore.

If your project fits inside Germany, Finland, and the US, the gap in overall scale (45 against 6) may not matter much. But wherever you need a broader network of presence points, Hetzner physically has no options.

The Price on the Site and the Price on the Invoice

What makes up a Hetzner plan

With Hetzner, the price on the site is the price of bare compute, and almost everything else sells separately: IPv4 isn’t included in the plan in any form, backups are a separate line, and migration doesn’t exist at all, paid or free. 

This is a fundamentally different model from most providers, where at least the first IPv4 comes bundled. Read Hetzner pricing as the compute floor rather than the total.

How an is*hosting plan is put together

is*hosting folds into the base price what Hetzner lists separately or leaves out entirely: the first IPv4, weekly backups, and data migration by engineers on request. 

The Medium plan, for example, starts at $21.24, and everything just listed sits inside that price rather than appearing on the invoice later. We compare it against a similar Hetzner plan below.

Criterion-by-criterion comparison

The entry plan on both providers costs a few dollars a month, but for real load that can turn out to be too little. Next we compare Hetzner’s mid-tier plans, CX33 (Cost-Optimized) and CPX22 (Regular Performance), against the Medium VPS on is*hosting. This is where Hetzner cloud pricing gets easier to read side by side.

Even with the IPv4 surcharge (+€0.50), CX33 stays noticeably cheaper than is*hosting per unit of compute: 4 vCPU and 8 GB RAM for just under €9 against 3 vCPU and 4 GB for $21+.

Traffic: Which Regions Cost More

Hetzner traffic: generous Europe, modest everywhere else

In the European data centers (Germany, Finland) Hetzner includes 20 TB in the plan, more generous than most is*hosting plans apart from Medium and up. But in the US the pool drops to 1-5 TB, and in Singapore to 0.5-8 TB, depending on the plan. Overage in Europe and the US costs €1.00/TB, while in Singapore it’s €7.40/TB, seven times higher.

is*hosting traffic: no regional differences

On is*hosting, traffic doesn’t depend on the region where the server runs. On Medium plans and up it’s unmetered everywhere, with no difference between Latin America, Asia, or Europe. Bandwidth limits apply only on the Lite and Start plans, at 2 and 3 TB respectively.

Plan-and-region comparison

If all your traffic stays in Europe, Hetzner’s 20 TB is generous to the point of overkill, and you’ll most likely never see an overage charge.

Tools and Support: What Hetzner and is*hosting Offer

What Hetzner gives you

Hetzner hands you the tools (a Terraform provider, CLI (hcloud), prebuilt images) and leaves the rest to you, with no line of paid support on top. Unmanaged means Hetzner checks only network and hardware availability.

What is*hosting gives you

is*hosting supplies the same set of tools and adds a team ready to take part of the work off your hands for free, from administration to data migration.

Feature-by-feature comparison

If you already have a Terraform IaC pipeline and your own team for support, Hetzner has everything you need for it. 

If ready Windows/macOS support and the option to hand administration off for free matter more, is*hosting comes out ahead.

Hetzner vs is*hosting: Real-World Cost Scenarios

One scenario won’t show the whole picture, since Hetzner’s economics depend heavily on what you run and where. Let’s work through three situations. Together they explain Hetzner VPS pricing better than any single number.

Scenario 1: raw compute, no add-ons

If all you need is a server, with no managed backups, no migration, no support, the comparison comes down to bare performance-per-dollar figures.

• Hetzner CX33 (4 vCPU / 8 GB, with IPv4): (€8.49 + €0.50) × 1.14 ≈ $10.24/mo → $2.56 per vCPU, $1.28 per GB RAM
• is*hosting Medium (3 vCPU / 4 GB): $21.24/mo → $7.08 per vCPU, $5.31 per GB RAM

Here Hetzner wins by 3-4× on raw price per resource. (EUR converted at roughly 1.14; the live rate will shift the dollar figures.)

Scenario 2: an edge node with typical add-ons, in Europe

The same server, but with real needs: one additional IPv4, weekly backups, traffic running 3 TB past the included pool to compare Hetzner pricing with is*hosting.

is*hosting Medium VPS:

• Base plan (Medium): $21.24/month on annual billing
• Extra IPv4: $4.00
• Backups: included (free)
• Traffic overage (unmetered): $0
• Total: ~$25.24/month

Hetzner Cloud (CPX22, EU region, closer to is*hosting on RAM than CX33):

• Base plan: €19.49/month
• Primary IPv4: €0.50
• Additional Floating IPv4: €3.00
• Backups (+20%): €3.90
• Traffic overage (3 TB past the 20 TB pool, €1.00/TB): €3.00
• Total: ~€29.89/mo (~$34.07)

In Europe, with its generous traffic pool, Hetzner loses on the final invoice, though the gap isn’t critical.

Scenario 3: the same edge node, but in Singapore

The same CPX22, the same set of add-ons, but the server sits in Singapore, where the traffic pool is small and overage is expensive.

Hetzner Cloud pricing (CPX22, Singapore region):

• Base plan: €19.49/month
• Primary IPv4: €0.50
• Additional Floating IPv4: €3.00
• Backups (+20%): €3.90
• Traffic overage (3 TB past the pool, €7.40/TB): €22.20
• Total: ~€49.09/mo (~$55.96)

is*hosting (same scenario, any region) stays unchanged at ~$25.24/mo, because the price doesn’t depend on where the server sits.

So, on Hetzner, the same workload costs differently depending on location. On is*hosting that risk doesn’t exist at all.

Who Hetzner Suits, and Who is*hosting Suits

Take Hetzner if the core of your system (databases, heavy compute, staging) can live in the European data centers, and maximum compute per euro spent matters more to you than geography.

Choose is*hosting if you need edge nodes, traffic routers, SSL terminators, or local API proxies in high-latency regions: Latin America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, Africa. Hetzner is physically unavailable to you there.

For a distributed system that has to cover both at once, running both providers, a core on Hetzner in Europe plus edge nodes on is*hosting where Hetzner doesn’t reach, can work out more efficient.

Data verified against Hetzner's public pricing on September 3, 2026.

FAQ

Does Hetzner really offer no help with administration?

Yes. Unmanaged services mean Hetzner checks only network and hardware availability, and everything else (updates, configuration, monitoring, migration) is on you or your team. On is*hosting, standard administration is included in the plan for free when you have a control panel. You can also add VIP administration.

Can I run is*hosting and Hetzner together?

Yes, and for a distributed system that's often the stronger setup. Keep the core (databases, heavy compute, staging) on Hetzner in Europe, where compute per euro is lowest, and put edge nodes on is*hosting in the regions Hetzner can't reach: Latin America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Africa. The two don't conflict, since each covers the part of the map the other leaves open. You pay Hetzner prices for the heavy European workload and is*hosting for local presence, instead of stretching one provider onto a job it isn't built for.

If GDPR matters to me, will my data definitely stay in the EU with Hetzner?

Only if you choose the Germany or Finland region. Those are Hetzner's only EU data centers, so anything deployed in Ashburn, Hillsboro, or Singapore sits outside EU jurisdiction and GDPR's data-residency rules. There's no setting that keeps data in the EU automatically, it follows the location you pick, and choosing the right one is on you. With is*hosting the logic is the same (data stays where the server is), but the choice of EU jurisdictions is wider: 22 European countries against Hetzner's two.

Why does Hetzner charge for IPv4 when other providers include it?

Because of the IPv4 address shortage, Hetzner has billed the primary IPv4 as a separate paid line since 2024, at €0.50/mo. Additional (Floating) IPs cost more, €3.00/mo each, since that’s a separate product for attaching flexibly to any server in the region. It’s the provider’s general policy, not a markup on a specific plan.

Does is*hosting really migrate data for free, or is that a marketing move?

It’s a real option: is*hosting engineers move the data themselves at no charge. It isn’t the only path, though. Self-migration stays as available as with any provider if you’d rather keep the process under your own control. If you order a server without a control panel, initial setup and the transfer of all your data can be done for a separate fee ($35/hour).

If is*hosting costs more than Hetzner on base price, what am I paying the difference for?

For what Hetzner lists separately or leaves out entirely: bundled IPv4, free backups, free migration. Plus geography (45 locations against 6) and traffic that doesn’t depend on the region.

How does Hetzner compare to Contabo?

The Hetzner vs Contabo question comes up a lot, since both sell cheap European compute. Contabo tends to advertise more RAM and disk per euro, while Hetzner leans on NVMe performance, cleaner networking, and a more polished API. 

Both share Hetzner’s core limits for a global setup: a short list of regions and no region-independent traffic. 

If your problem is reach rather than price per gigabyte, comparing Hetzner vs Contabo misses the point; a wider network is what to look at.

How does Hetzner compare to AWS?

The Hetzner vs AWS comparison is really two different products. AWS sells a deep managed ecosystem (dozens of regions, managed databases, load balancers, IAM, and the rest) at a price that reflects it. Hetzner sells cheap raw compute in a handful of locations with almost none of that around it. 

Teams usually leave Hetzner for AWS when they need managed services and global regions, and leave AWS for Hetzner when the bill outgrows what those services are worth to them. 

is*hosting sits in between the Hetzner vs AWS geography: far more locations than Hetzner, without the pricing and complexity that come with a full AWS-style stack.

How does DigitalOcean fit into this comparison?

DigitalOcean has backup logic similar to Hetzner’s (the same +20% for weekly), but a fundamentally different billing model: per-second since 2026 rather than hourly, with IPv4 free when attached to a server. Details are in the separate is*hosting and DigitalOcean comparison.