Kamatera vs Hetzner after the 2026 price rise

Hetzner is still the cheapest way to rent shared CPU in Europe, and after June 2026 it is no longer the cheapest way to rent a dedicated one. Hetzner's own price-adjustment notice lists CCX13 moving from €15.99 to €42.99 a month, and CPX22 from €7.99 to €19.49, effective 15 June 2026. Entry CX plans moved far less — CX23 went from €3.99 to €5.49. That split is the whole story of this comparison.

If you only ever buy the cheapest shared instance, nothing much has changed and Hetzner still wins. If you buy dedicated vCPU, or you need Windows, or your users are not in Germany, Kamatera is now a serious candidate where a year ago it was an also-ran.

Kamatera vs Hetzner at a glance

Shared vCPU: Hetzner, and it is not close

A Hetzner CX23 is two shared Intel cores, 4 GB of RAM, 40 GB of NVMe and 20 TB of traffic for €5.49 a month excluding VAT. To approach that memory and disk on Kamatera you are well past $20. On raw hardware per unit of currency, nothing in this market beats Hetzner's cost-optimised line, and pretending otherwise would be silly.

The traffic allowance matters as much as the hardware. Hetzner includes 20 TB in its EU locations; Kamatera includes 5 TB and charges $0.01 per GB after that. For a media-heavy site that is a meaningful difference — 10 TB of overage on Kamatera is $100 a month, which dwarfs the server.

Where Kamatera claws something back at this end is the shape. Hetzner sells you 2 vCPU with 4 GB bolted to it; if your workload wants 1 core and 8 GB, Hetzner's answer is a bigger plan. Kamatera's answer is to move one slider. That is worth real money on a cache or a search index, and nothing at all on a general web server.

Dedicated vCPU: the part that changed in June

Hetzner's CCX line is dedicated-core instances, and it took the steepest increase in the June 2026 adjustment — Hetzner's own figures put CCX13 at €42.99, up from €15.99. CPX22 went from €7.99 to €19.49. For anyone whose workload actually needs consistent CPU — a database under sustained load, a CI runner, video transcoding — the European bargain is considerably less of one than it was.

Kamatera's Type D is dedicated CPU offered as a choice on the same configurator as everything else, rather than a separate premium family with its own price list. You pick dedicated, you pick how many cores, you pick the memory separately. For the specific case of "I need two reliable cores and not much else", that now prices better than CCX13 does, which was not true in 2025.

Geography, and who you are actually serving

Hetzner runs Germany, Finland, two US sites and Singapore. That is enough for a European business and workable for a North American one. It is not enough if your users are in Israel, Romania, Spain, Italy, Australia or Hong Kong, all of which Kamatera covers among its 18 locations.

This is the least arguable difference in the comparison. Physics beats benchmarks: a modest server 20 ms away serves a user better than a fast one 200 ms away, and no amount of CPU fixes the round trip. If your market is one Hetzner does not have a site in, the hardware comparison above is mostly irrelevant.

The balancing fact is that Hetzner's network inside its own regions is excellent, and its private networking and load balancers are well built and cheap. Within Germany or Finland, a Hetzner cluster is both faster and easier to wire up than the equivalent on Kamatera.

Windows and commercial software

Hetzner does not offer Windows images. Kamatera does, with licensing included, which makes it one of a short list of hosts where a legitimately licensed Windows Server costs under $30 a month. If any part of your stack is a Windows application, this ends the comparison on its own — see our Windows VPS review for sensible sizing, because the Linux entry price does not carry over.

Backups, snapshots and getting the data back

Both hosts charge for snapshots and both bill them by stored size, so the difference is not the price. It is what happens around them.

Hetzner has scheduled automatic backups as a per-server option, priced as a percentage of the server cost, with a rolling set of restore points you do not have to think about. That is the better default for someone who will otherwise forget. Kamatera's snapshots are manual unless you script them, which means they are exactly as reliable as the cron job you wrote and never tested.

Neither one is a backup strategy on its own, and this is worth saying plainly because it catches people on both platforms: a snapshot stored by your host survives your mistake and does not survive your host's. Account suspension, a billing dispute, a region incident — in all three cases the snapshot is on the wrong side of the problem. Something offsite, restored at least once to prove it works, is the actual requirement, and it is identical work on either provider.

Support, and who you can reach

Kamatera answers the phone. Reviewers consistently describe reaching an engineer who can act on routing, DNS and firewall questions, which at this price is unusual — we went through what customers report in our look at Kamatera's public reviews.

Hetzner is ticket-only and the responses are competent, terse and sometimes slow. For a self-sufficient team that is fine; most Hetzner problems are solved by reading rather than asking. If you expect to need a human in a hurry, that is a real difference and it favours Kamatera.

Both draw the same boundary on unmanaged plans: they will help with the platform, not with your server. Neither will log in and fix your nginx config.

Getting an account open

Hetzner screens new accounts hard, and a first signup held for manual identity review is a common enough experience to be worth planning around. It usually clears within a day, but "usually" is uncomfortable when you are trying to ship something.

Kamatera's path is generally smoother, though it has its own version of this: a fully refundable $10 deposit is sometimes requested during the free trial in place of card verification, and customers who cannot complete 3D Secure can start on a prepaid account instead. Refundable and documented, but still a step nobody expects on a free trial — our trial guide covers it.

Which host should you choose?

• A European site on a budget, shared CPU, lots of bandwidth. Hetzner. The CX line is the best hardware-per-euro on the market and the 20 TB allowance is generous.
• Anything needing dedicated cores. Kamatera, post-June-2026. Type D reaches dedicated CPU for less than CCX13 now costs.
• Windows, in any form. Kamatera, because Hetzner does not sell it.
• Users outside Germany, Finland, Virginia, Oregon or Singapore. Kamatera, for the location list.
• An unusual memory-to-core ratio. Kamatera, because Hetzner's plans are fixed.
• Infrastructure as code, with a mature provider and clean APIs. Hetzner. Its tooling is the better-built of the two.

Both are honest products that are upfront about being unmanaged. If your answer landed on Kamatera, the 30-day trial covers one server up to $100 and 1 TB of traffic. The full review explains the billing rules worth knowing first, and Kamatera vs DigitalOcean is the comparison to read if managed databases matter more to you than the price per core.