OVH vs Hetzner: which European host fits your workload (2026)

In short: OVHcloud is the bigger network: VPS in eleven data centres on four continents, anti-DDoS on every product, VPS prices that drop when you pay a year upfront, and support plans you can buy up to 24/7. Hetzner is the leaner cloud: six locations, billing by the hour, dedicated-vCPU plans and a fixed traffic allowance. Which one fits depends less on the headline price than on where your users are and how long your servers live.

The short answer, by use case

OVH vs Hetzner at a glance

Each row sums up the pages cited in the sections below. Hetzner’s cloud pages show hourly and monthly prices for the currency and country (VAT) you choose; a script fills them in, they are not written into the pages, so we quote none.

Price and billing

OVHcloud VPS. Its VPS page lists four plans, each with NVMe storage, a daily backup of the previous 24 hours and anti-DDoS included:

Prices are per month before VAT. The page advertises the 12-month rate as “from”; the configurator also offers month-to-month billing and a 6-month term, and charges no installation fee on any of them.

OVHcloud dedicated. Its bare-metal price page starts the Advance range at €114.99 a month before VAT, with an installation fee of the same amount; in the configurator’s catalogue that fee falls away on 12- or 24-month terms. The same price page filters its dedicated servers by location across Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific, from Beauharnois and Hillsboro to Mumbai and Sydney. The budget brand Kimsufi lists servers from €9.99 a month, again with an installation fee equal to a month.

Hetzner. Cloud servers are billed by the hour, and per its billing FAQ you pay the lower of the hourly total and the monthly price cap. A server you delete after a weekend costs a weekend; one you only switch off keeps costing, because Hetzner bills every server until it is deleted. There is no annual or semi-annual billing and no prepayment: usage is billed on the next month’s invoice, per its support FAQ.

Prices in the US and Singapore differ from those in Germany and Finland, per its documentation. Its cloud page splits plans into Cost-Optimized and Regular Performance (shared resources) and General Purpose (dedicated vCPUs), and showed Cost-Optimized as “currently not available” on 11 October 2026; its own page marked every plan “not available”. The same documentation says dedicated root servers cannot be ordered in Ashburn, Hillsboro or Singapore, and the menu on its dedicated page lists a Server Auction of refurbished servers.

So the billing models differ more than the sticker prices: OVHcloud rewards commitment, Hetzner rewards servers that come and go. For one server kept for years, compare OVHcloud’s 12-month price with Hetzner’s monthly cap for the same size. For anything created by scripts or kept for days, the hourly model wins.

Network, locations and DDoS

Locations. OVHcloud’s VPS configurator offers Gravelines, Roubaix and Strasbourg in France, Frankfurt, Warsaw, Milan, London, Beauharnois in Canada, Singapore, Sydney and Mumbai. Its infrastructure page counts 46 data centres on four continents, 31 Local Zones and 100 Tbps of network capacity. Local Zone VPS run Linux only and lack options such as additional IPs and the load balancer, per the VPS page. Hetzner’s cloud runs in Falkenstein, Nuremberg, Helsinki, Ashburn, Hillsboro and Singapore, and its documentation says Ashburn, Hillsboro and Singapore are currently available only for cloud products.

Traffic. OVHcloud VPS traffic is unlimited at the plan’s bandwidth, except in Mumbai, Singapore and Sydney, where a monthly quota applies (500 GB on VPS-1, 1 TB on VPS-2 and VPS-3, 3 TB on VPS-4) and bandwidth then drops to 10 Mbps, per the footnote on its VPS page. Hetzner includes at least 20 TB per cloud server in the EU, 1 TB in the US and 0.5 TB in Singapore, more on larger plans, and charges for each additional TB, per its plan pages; its billing FAQ adds that only outgoing traffic is billed and that it notifies you at 75 % and at 100 % of the allowance, without capping it.

DDoS. Both protect every customer at no extra cost. OVHcloud’s anti-DDoS page says every product is covered by default, that detection is always on, and that its network has mitigated attacks of up to 1.3 Tbit/s. Hetzner’s DDoS protection page describes automated filtering of known attack patterns, available to all customers, free of charge. OVHcloud publishes far more detail, including over 17 Tbit/s of filtering capacity, and offers game-specific protection on top; if DDoS resilience is the deciding factor, its pages give you more to go on.

Control panel, API and support

For root and cloud servers, Hetzner’s terms (5.1) leave managing and securing them to you. Its cloud page lists a REST API, a CLI and integrations for Terraform, Ansible and Kubernetes, stateful firewalls at no cost, a 99.9 % uptime SLA with credits, and 24/7 support by email.

Its support page lists a customer-service phone line for cloud and billing questions, Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm CET, and its dedicated page promises data-centre technicians by phone and email around the clock; the support page adds that the data-centre phone lines are only for dedicated servers with a telephone password or one-time password.

OVHcloud sells support in four levels on its support page, the first of which, Standard, is included with every product. Incidents are handled 24/7 on every level, but Standard and Premium reach a person by phone or ticket during business hours only, and 24/7 phone support starts at Business. Its goal for a first response ranges from 15 minutes to 8 business hours, depending on the level.

Signup and identity checks

• OVHcloud: per its guide to orders, an order in the “Confirmation” status is being verified manually, on working days only. If the check cannot be completed, it emails you a request for supporting documents.
• Hetzner: per section 4.6.1 of its privacy policy, every new account goes through a risk assessment and an employee decides whether it is activated. In individual cases it may ask for a valid identity document, checked by its staff or by iDenfy. Its terms let it accept or reject an order within five working days (2.4).

Neither says it asks every customer for a document, and both reserve the right to. If that is a deal-breaker, our guide on what is actually possible with private hosting covers the realistic options.

Payment methods

OVHcloud’s payment page lists credit and debit cards, PayPal and bank transfer, and says transfers are acknowledged within three working days. Hetzner’s privacy policy (4.6) says you enter card details directly with its external payment provider, Computop; the Hetzner pages we checked name no other method. Neither names a cryptocurrency as a payment method on the pages we checked.

Where each one is weak

• OVHcloud: the advertised VPS price needs a year paid upfront; month-to-month dedicated servers carry a setup fee as large as the first month; on the included Standard support level you reach a person by phone or ticket only in business hours; APAC VPS bandwidth is throttled after the quota; Local Zone VPS are Linux-only and lack some options.
• Hetzner: six cloud locations, and dedicated servers cannot be ordered in Ashburn, Hillsboro or Singapore, per its documentation; smaller traffic allowances in the US and Singapore; its Cost-Optimized line was marked unavailable on 11 October; phone support for cloud only on weekdays; a new account waits for an employee’s decision, and an order up to five working days; its terms forbid mining cryptocurrencies (8.3).

The short verdict

For servers that come and go, steady CPU on dedicated vCPUs, or a fixed traffic allowance in Europe, Hetzner. For reach beyond central Europe, a year-long commitment at a lower price, or a VPS with support you can phone at any hour, OVHcloud. Both are solid; the “better” one is whichever matches your region and how long your servers live. If your other candidate is a budget host with large plans, our Contabo vs Hetzner comparison puts Hetzner against that kind of offer.

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