Hetzner is the price-per-core leader, by a wide margin. UpCloud is storage performance as the headline feature. This page puts the two side by side — the live configurations and prices from our catalogue, then the differences that actually decide the choice.
| In our catalogue | Hetzner | UpCloud |
|---|---|---|
| Product | Buy Hetzner Account | Buy UpCloud Account |
| Configurations in stock | 3 | 5 |
| Lowest price | $55 | $30 |
| Highest price | $250 | $35 |
| Example options | 5 Server Account / 10 Server Account / Hetzner Cloud Server | FT $500 / India / FT $500 / USA / FT $500 / Ukraine |
| View options | View options |
Prices and configuration counts are read from the live catalogue. Specifications are listed exactly as supplied; nothing here is estimated.
Different categories, so compare the burden rather than the features
Hetzner is a European infrastructure provider; UpCloud is a developer-focused VPS platform. Comparing their feature lists is misleading, because one of them expects to run things for you and the other expects you to run them.
The honest question is operational: every managed service you adopt is work you are not doing, and every raw virtual machine is work you are. If the answer to who patches this, who watches it, who gets paged is “me, in the evenings”, optimise for fewer moving parts. Managed services on a more expensive platform can be cheaper than self-managed services on a cheap one once your own time is priced in.
Where Hetzner is the stronger choice
Economics. For a given amount of CPU and RAM, Hetzner is routinely a fraction of a hyperscaler’s price, with a bandwidth allowance that makes egress a non-issue for most workloads.
Best suited to: teams that need raw compute and are happy to operate it themselves.
Regions: Germany and Finland, with a US presence — the European sites are the core of the offering.
Worth knowing: The acceptable-use rules are enforced, and the support model is efficient rather than hand-holding. It suits teams that already know what they are doing.
Where UpCloud is the stronger choice
I/O. The MaxIOPS storage platform is the differentiator, and it shows on write-heavy and latency-sensitive workloads that feel sluggish on commodity block storage.
Best suited to: workloads where disk latency, not CPU, is the limiting factor — databases above all.
Regions: A compact global set covering Europe, North America, Asia-Pacific and Australia.
Worth knowing: The storage advantage only pays off if storage is actually your bottleneck — measure before choosing on this basis.
The trade-offs, stated plainly
Hetzner: Almost no managed services. You get excellent servers and a competent network; databases, queues, backups and monitoring are yours to run.
UpCloud: A smaller provider with a correspondingly smaller ecosystem and service catalogue; you are buying infrastructure quality, not breadth.
How to choose between them
- Choose Hetzner if your workload is Self-managed workloads, build farms, batch processing and anything where the bill is dominated by CPU hours
- Choose UpCloud if your workload is Database servers, transactional workloads, and anything previously diagnosed as disk-bound
- Choose neither if the shape of the work does not match either — the full catalogue has eight other platforms, and the comparison tool will hold four of them side by side.
Related reading
- Buy Hetzner Account – every Hetzner configuration in stock
- Buy UpCloud Account – every UpCloud configuration in stock
- How to choose a cloud provider – the framework behind this comparison
- How cloud billing works – why the billing model matters more than the sticker price
- Compare up to four accounts side by side
Questions
Common questions about this comparison
Is Hetzner cheaper than UpCloud?
The prices in the table above are the live catalogue prices for the accounts we stock, so you can compare those directly. Running cost is a separate question and depends on the billing model: Hetzner bills a fixed monthly figure and UpCloud bills a fixed monthly figure, which means the cheaper account is not always the cheaper month.
Can I run the same workload on both?
For ordinary Linux servers, databases and web applications, yes. The divergence starts when you adopt a platform's proprietary managed services — a specific queue, function runtime or identity model — because those are what make a migration expensive later.
Which one is better for Self-managed workloads?
That is Hetzner's stated strength, so it is the natural starting point. It is still worth checking region availability and the billing model against your own constraints before committing.
What do I actually get when I buy an account here?
The configuration named on the product page and nothing beyond it — the vCPU figure, region, account age or credit exactly as listed. Both product pages set out every option in stock with its own price.