European Hosting Is Still Cheap. But Only If You Buy the Right Tier.

Hetzner raised prices three times in 2026. OVHcloud raised VPS prices up to 67% in April. Scaleway and IONOS followed with adjustments of their own. We covered each of these increases in detail as they happened. The question now is different: after all of them, does European hosting still offer the price advantage it was known for?

The answer depends on which tier you buy. For shared vCPU instances, European providers remain 60 to 75% cheaper than their US counterparts. For dedicated vCPU cloud servers, the gap has largely closed. After Hetzner’s June 15 adjustment, its dedicated-resource instances now cost roughly the same as equivalent configurations from DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Linode. The European price advantage has not disappeared. It has split.

The Comparison: Shared vs Dedicated, Europe vs US

The table below compares the lowest 2-vCPU tier from each provider across shared and dedicated resource types, as of late June 2026. All prices are monthly. Hetzner and OVHcloud prices reflect post-increase levels.

Prices are approximate and based on publicly listed rates as of June 2026. Specifications vary by plan; RAM shown in parentheses. Hetzner prices converted from EUR at ~$1.09/EUR.

Two Tiers, Two Stories

The table tells two distinct stories. Shared vCPU absorbed increases of 30 to 38% and remains a quarter of the price of US equivalents. For development, staging, and light production workloads, Europe is still the budget choice by a wide margin.

Dedicated vCPU is a different picture. Hetzner’s CCX13 went from ~$13/mo in January 2026 to ~$47/mo by June – a 3.6x increase across two rounds. At that price, it sits within a few dollars of Vultr, Linode, and DigitalOcean. The CPX Intel line in the US saw even steeper increases, with some configurations rising over 200%. The CPX41 went from $46.49 to $141.49 per month, placing it above comparable US offerings.

What Drove the Convergence

The underlying cause is the same across every European provider that raised prices in 2026: DRAM. Server RAM in Germany costs roughly four times what it cost a year ago. The three major memory manufacturers, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, have shifted production capacity from standard DDR5 toward High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) for AI accelerator chips. HBM commands a price premium of more than four times conventional DDR5, so manufacturers prioritize it. The result is a structural supply squeeze on the server RAM that hosting providers like Hetzner and OVHcloud buy.

Dedicated vCPU instances are hit hardest because they allocate physical resources to a single tenant. When RAM prices quadruple, the per-instance cost of dedicated hardware absorbs the full increase. Shared instances distribute the cost across multiple tenants, which limits the per-unit impact. That is why CX/CAX (shared) rose 30-38% while CCX (dedicated) rose 113-173%. Same supplier, same RAM crisis, different exposure.

One signal worth watching: after prices more than quadrupled between September 2025 and January 2026, DRAM prices have largely plateaued in June 2026. If that stabilization holds, the current pricing may represent the peak rather than a step on the way up. But neither Hetzner nor OVHcloud has signaled any intention to reduce prices if component costs ease.

What Buyers Should Consider Now

For teams evaluating hosting in the second half of 2026: check which tier you actually need before assuming European hosting is the budget option. On shared vCPU, Hetzner and OVHcloud remain the best value by a wide margin. On dedicated resources, the decision should be made on features, compliance, and geography rather than cost alone.

Even at dedicated price parity, European providers hold advantages that do not appear in a per-vCPU comparison. Data sovereignty and GDPR compliance are non-negotiable for many European businesses. Latency from Frankfurt or Helsinki to European end users is lower than from US data centers. And Hetzner’s 20 TB bandwidth allowance is 4 to 5 times what US providers include at comparable tiers – for bandwidth-heavy workloads, that alone can tip the total cost back toward Europe.

Existing customers on pre-increase Hetzner contracts are in a different position entirely. Hetzner’s June 15 changes apply to new orders only. A pre-2026 Hetzner dedicated contract is now a significantly underpriced asset, and the cost of migrating away from it has gone up, not down.