You can rent a server with a handful of modern CPU cores and 16 GB of RAM for less than a managed Postgres add-on costs on a US platform-as-a-service. That gap is why indie developers keep drifting back to the two European hosts that have undercut the hyperscalers for years: Hetzner, based in Germany, and OVHcloud, based in France. Both sell raw compute at prices that make a side project's hosting line item round to zero. The interesting question is not which is cheaper in the abstract — it's which one fits the way you actually deploy.
We pulled apart both providers' 2026 lineups, the parts that are stable enough to plan around, and the parts where the marketing page hides a footnote you only find after your card is charged.
What you actually get for the money
Hetzner's reputation rests on its cloud line and its dedicated-server auction. The smallest Arm-based cloud instance, the CAX11 (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB SSD), sits under €4 per month, and the Ampere Arm cores punch noticeably above x86 instances at the same price. If you want a real dedicated box rather than a slice of one, Hetzner's Server Auction lists used hardware — older Xeon and Core i7 machines with 32 to 64 GB of RAM — that routinely lands in the €30–€45 range. You are buying last-generation silicon, but for a side project that is mostly idle, the price-to-RAM ratio is hard to beat anywhere.
OVHcloud comes at the same problem from a wider catalog. Its budget brands — Kimsufi and So You Start — and the Eco dedicated line give you new (not auctioned) entry-level dedicated servers, often with unmetered network ports. The trade-off is that OVH's cheapest tiers can sell out, and provisioning a fresh dedicated box sometimes takes longer than spinning up a Hetzner cloud VM, which is near-instant.
The honest summary: Hetzner usually wins on cloud VPS value and on cheap RAM-per-euro; OVH wins on catalog breadth, new-hardware dedicated options, and geographic reach.
| Hetzner | OVHcloud | |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest cloud VPS | ~€4/mo (CAX11, Arm) | Low single-digit € VPS tiers |
| Dedicated entry point | Server Auction (used hardware) | Kimsufi / Eco (new hardware) |
| Included cloud traffic | 20 TB on EU instances, then €1/TB | Often unmetered on dedicated |
| DDoS protection | Included | Included (and heavily marketed) |
| Data-center regions | Germany, Finland, US | Europe, Canada, US, Asia-Pacific |
Latency is the one thing money can't fully fix after the fact. If your side project's users are mostly in North America, OVH's Beauharnois (Canada) and US regions, or Hetzner's Ashburn and Hillsboro cloud locations, will feel meaningfully snappier than a box in Falkenstein or Gravelines. Pick the region first; optimize the spec second.
Bandwidth, network, and the fine print
This is where the two diverge in a way that matters for anything that serves media or large responses. Hetzner cloud instances in the EU include 20 TB of outbound traffic per month, and overage is billed at €1 per TB — cheap and predictable, but metered. OVH leans the other way: many of its dedicated plans advertise unmetered bandwidth on a capped port speed (commonly 500 Mbit/s to 1 Gbit/s). "Unmetered" means you won't get a surprise egress bill; it does not mean unlimited throughput, because the port speed is the real ceiling.
For a typical side project — an API, a small SaaS, a blog with a CDN in front — neither limit will ever bite. If you're hosting your own object storage, a Mastodon instance, or anything that pushes video, model OVH's unmetered-but-capped port against Hetzner's metered-but-fast one before you commit.
Both providers include DDoS mitigation at no extra charge, which removes a line item that AWS and GCP quietly meter. OVH historically markets its anti-DDoS hardest, but in practice both will absorb the kind of low-effort flood a side project might attract.
In March 2021, a fire destroyed OVH's SBG2 data center in Strasbourg, and customers who had treated a single dedicated server as their only copy lost data permanently. The lesson isn't "avoid OVH" — it's that a cheap dedicated box gives you no managed redundancy. Whichever provider you pick, run automated off-site backups (a second provider, or object storage in another region) from day one. The €5/month you save versus a managed platform is exactly the budget for this.
The deeper point: both hosts hand you an unmanaged machine. There is no automatic failover, no managed database snapshotting, no one paged at 3 a.m. but you. That is the actual price of the low sticker — you are trading operational convenience for cost, and a side project is usually the right place to make that trade, as long as you make it deliberately.
Which one fits your side project
Reach for Hetzner if you want the fastest path from signup to a running VM, the best RAM-per-euro on Arm, and a console that gets out of your way. Its cloud API and snapshots make it pleasant to script, and the auction is a genuinely fun way to over-spec a hobby box for the price of two coffees a month.
Reach for OVH if you need a presence outside Europe, want new dedicated hardware rather than auctioned units, or value unmetered bandwidth for a media-heavy workload. Its catalog is broader and its global footprint is larger, at the cost of a slightly heavier signup and provisioning experience.
Whichever you choose, the work that follows is the same: provision the box, harden SSH, set up a reverse proxy, and write the deploy script you'll run a hundred times. That last part is where most side-project momentum leaks away.
If you're undecided and your users are in Europe or you don't care where the box lives, start with a Hetzner CAX cloud instance. It's the lowest-commitment, lowest-cost way to get something real running, and you can graduate to a dedicated auction box — or migrate to OVH for geography — once the project earns the upgrade.
The broader truth about both: they are infrastructure for people who like infrastructure. If managing a Linux box sounds like the part of the project you'd rather skip, a managed platform is worth its premium. If it sounds like half the fun, Hetzner and OVH will give you more machine per euro than almost anything else on the market in 2026.
Originally published at pickuma.com. Subscribe to the RSS or follow @pickuma.bsky.social for new reviews.
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