Hetzner Cloud: I host nine small business sites on one seven dollar box

Two Januarys ago, Carol's tax office got a link in the local paper and the site fell over. Shared hosting, fifteen dollars a month, the kind where your site lives in an apartment building with two hundred rowdy neighbors. Traffic came in, the neighbors were loud, the machine ran out of room, and Brubaker Tax Service showed an error page on the busiest week of its year. I called the host. They upgraded me to a bigger apartment in the same building.

Here's the thing I finally understood. A VPS is not a bigger apartment. It is your own building. One rented computer, guaranteed, where nobody's Pinterest recipe blog can starve your pages for air. I moved all nine client sites to a single Hetzner cloud server and the problem has not come back.

What it is and what it costs

A cloud VPS is a rented slice of a real computer in a data center. You pick a size, a location, and an hourly rate with a monthly cap. Nobody answers the phone, because there is no phone. It is a machine, not a babysitter.

Current prices, from their site and from a pricing breakdown I checked this September, because Hetzner's famous cheap tiers got less famous this year.

1. CX23: 2 CPUs, 4 GB of memory, 40 GB of disk. About $7 a month now. This one holds all nine of my sites with room to spare.
2. CX32: 4 CPUs, 8 GB. Roughly double. I have not needed it.
3. The ARM line (CAX) runs even cheaper. About $4.35 a month for 4 GB. Great value if your software runs on ARM servers, which mine does.
4. Traffic: 20 TB a month on the European locations, 1 TB on the US ones. Overages run near a dollar a terabyte in Europe and more here.

My setup: one CX23 in Ashburn, Virginia, close enough to Ohio that pages load fast, running Ubuntu, hosting nine sites and my own. The bill is about $7 a month, call it $85 a year, against the $180 the shared host wanted for one apartment with worse neighbors. Hetzner bills by the hour with a monthly cap, so a test server I ran for a week cost me about a dollar seventy.

The 2026 part you should know

Hetzner raised prices on April 1, 2026, on new orders and existing subscriptions, and the hikes were not decorative. Reporting at the time put the cloud increases at 30 to 37 percent on the German and Finnish tiers, blaming memory costs. The entry CX23 plan went from about 4 euros to about 6. I have been a customer since 2023, and my bill went up with everyone's. It is still the cheapest serious machine I can rent, so I stayed. But if you read a 2023 blog post about $4 servers, that post is a museum now.

The setup, honest version

Numbered, because the order saves you a support ticket.

1. Sign up and expect a wait. They asked me for a photo ID before activating the account, and the approval took about a day. That is their fraud filter, and it catches bots, not people.
2. Pick the location closest to your customers. Ashburn for the East Coast and the Midwest. If your people are in Europe, the German locations are the deal of the century.
3. Install Ubuntu, then a web server, then point the domains at it. This is the part that requires you. There is no cPanel on this thing and nobody is coming to help.
4. Move one cheap site first, run it a week, then move the rest. That is how I did it after practicing on my own blog, which I broke twice.
5. Turn on backups and set a calendar reminder to test a restore twice a year. An untested backup is a hope, not a backup.

Total: $85 a year, one evening of setup, and one very quiet year since. The 500 errors during tax season are gone.

What will annoy you

The price hikes are the headline gripe and the community was loud about them. Read anything written before 2026 with suspicion, because the numbers moved under everyone's feet.

It is unmanaged. Support is tickets, hours to answer, no phone, no cPanel, and if your site breaks because of your own configuration, that is your configuration. I am self-taught and I have paid for that in evenings. If you want somebody to answer when WordPress hiccups, a managed host is worth its markup. There is no shame in it. There is shame in paying Hetzner prices and also needing cPanel, because you are not getting either cheap.

Locations are limited. Germany, Finland, two US corners, and Singapore. If you need Australia or Brazil, look elsewhere.

The furnace version

Shared hosting is one furnace serving six apartments. When the neighbor downstairs cranks the heat, your radiator bangs and nobody can fix it from your side. A VPS is your own furnace in your own basement. You pay for the whole burner, you can open every valve, and when it runs hot you have nobody to blame but the guy who set it, which is also you.

What to do Monday

Find your hosting invoice and write down what you pay per year and how many sites sit on that plan. If one site is paying more than $10 a month for shared space, price a CX23 next to it and read what the cheap tier actually includes. If you cannot stomach the setup, that number tells you what a managed host is really charging you, and now you know it on purpose.