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Milica Maksimovic
Milica Maksimovic

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Affordable Alternative to Hetzner for US Companies

On June 15, 2026, Hetzner published a price adjustment for their cloud instances. The CCX13, their entry dedicated CPU instance in US regions, went from $19.99/mo to $50.99/mo. The CCX23 went from $39.99 to $102.99.

That's a 155-158% increase on the instances most of us run production on.

Hetzner was well-priced, with a solid network and no billing surprises. After seeing these numbers, I think a better alternative today is 3HCloud.

What Hetzner's CCX pricing looks like now in the US

These are the new Hetzner US (Ashburn/Hillsboro) dedicated CPU prices, effective June 15:

Instance Old price/mo New price/mo Increase
CCX13 (2 vCPU / 8 GB) $19.99 $50.99 +155%
CCX23 (4 vCPU / 16 GB) $39.99 $102.99 +158%
CCX33 (8 vCPU / 32 GB) $76.99 $165.99 +116%
CCX43 (16 vCPU / 64 GB) $153.49 $329.49 +115%
CCX53 (32 vCPU) $306.99 $635.49 +107%

If you're running 10-20 of these across staging, workers, and production services, a cluster that cost $1,200/mo in May costs roughly $3,000/mo today on the same specs.

The shared CX line saw more modest increases (around 35-38%), and the Arm-based CAX line around 33%. CCX is where most production compute sits for teams that care about CPU isolation.

3HCloud's dedicated CPU pricing

3HCloud is a US-based provider with data centers in Miami, Dallas, and San Francisco. Their dedicated vCPU instances bill storage separately, which I'll account for below.

Specs Hetzner CCX (new, US) 3HCloud Dedicated Difference
2 vCPU / 8 GB $50.99/mo $16.00/mo 69% less
4 vCPU / 16 GB $102.99/mo $32.00/mo 69% less
8 vCPU / 32 GB $165.99/mo $64.00/mo 61% less
16 vCPU / 64 GB $329.49/mo $128.00/mo 61% less
32 vCPU / 128 GB N/A $256.00/mo n/a

Storage at 3HCloud runs $0.01-$0.05/GB/month depending on IOPS tier. A 40 GB Linux system disk on their SSD lite tier is $0.40/mo. Even with 200 GB of SSD smart storage attached ($0.03/GB), that's $6/mo added to the bill and doesn't change the comparison materially.

The shared tier is worth calling out too: 4 GB / 2 vCPU for $6/mo, 8 GB / 4 vCPU for $12/mo. Good for dev and staging environments where you'd previously have reached for Hetzner's shared CX line.

What this costs a real team over a year

Here's a concrete scenario: a mid-size production setup with 5 app nodes, 2 background workers, 1 DB replica, and 4 dev/staging instances.

On new Hetzner US pricing:

  • 5 x CCX23 (app nodes): $514.95/mo
  • 2 x CCX13 (workers): $101.98/mo
  • 1 x CCX23 (DB replica): $102.99/mo
  • 4 x CX33 (dev/staging): $39.96/mo
  • Total: ~$759/mo or $9,108/year

On 3HCloud with equivalent specs:

  • 5 x 16 GB 4 vCPU dedicated: $160/mo
  • 2 x 8 GB 2 vCPU dedicated: $32/mo
  • 1 x 16 GB 4 vCPU dedicated: $32/mo
  • 4 x 4 GB 2 vCPU shared: $24/mo
  • Storage ~250 GB total (SSD smart): ~$7.50/mo
  • Total: ~$255/mo or $3,066/year

That's $6,042/year on a setup most teams would consider modest. At 3x the nodes it's closer to $18K annually.

What you're giving up

Here's what 3HCloud doesn't have that Hetzner does.

EU data centers. 3HCloud covers US, Poland, and the Philippines. If you have data residency requirements in Germany or Finland, Hetzner is the right call there and 3HCloud doesn't have an equivalent region.

ARM instances. Hetzner's CAX Ampere line is good value if your containers are already multi-arch. 3HCloud has no ARM offering yet.

Ecosystem depth. Hetzner has managed load balancers, managed databases, Kubernetes, and object storage. 3HCloud has load balancers, block storage, private networks, and firewall options. Enough for most workloads, but a smaller surface area overall.

On network pricing, they're essentially the same: IPv4 is $1/mo extra at both providers, IPv6 is free, and 3HCloud includes 1 Gbit/s free per VM so egress isn't something you think about for typical workloads.

Who should look at this

If you're a US-based team running dedicated CPU workloads and your current bill is anchored to Hetzner's CCX or CPX instances in Ashburn or Hillsboro, 3HCloud is worth a look before your next capacity planning cycle.

If you have EU users, GDPR obligations tied to specific data center locations, or ARM-compiled workloads, Hetzner remains the better fit for those constraints.

Run 3HCloud's pricing page against your current Hetzner invoice. The math for me is pretty clear.

Prices sourced from Hetzner's official price adjustment page and 3HCloud's public pricing page, both current as of June 16, 2026. All prices exclude VAT.

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