Hetzner Is Hiking Prices Up to 38% in April — What It Means for Your Game Servers

If you run a Minecraft server, a FiveM roleplay community, or any self-hosted game server on Hetzner, you'll want to sit down for this one. Starting 1 April 2026, the German hosting provider is pushing through price increases of up to 38% across its cloud and dedicated server product lines. Both new orders and existing products get hit. No exceptions for long-term customers this time around, which is a change from how Hetzner handled its 2022 energy-driven price adjustments.

The reason? Hetzner points to drastically increased operating expenses and significantly higher procurement costs for new hardware, with RAM and SSD prices being particularly significant. The RAM market in particular, dominated by just a handful of manufacturers, is something Hetzner itself describes as having a "hardly comprehensible" pricing policy. AI infrastructure demand is widely seen as a key driver behind the memory crunch, and it's trickling down to anyone renting a server.

For game server operators, Hetzner has long been the go-to. The price-to-performance ratio on their ARM-based CAX line and Ryzen-powered dedicated boxes made them almost unfair value. That era is ending.

Cloud Servers (Germany & Finland) — New Prices

These are the plans most commonly used for smaller Minecraft setups, FiveM server instances, Valheim, and similar games.

Load balancers are going up too — the LB11 moves from €5.39/mo to €7.49/mo, and Object Storage base pricing rises from €4.99/mo to €6.49/mo.

Dedicated Servers (Germany) — New Prices

These are the boxes that serious game server communities typically run. A full FiveM server or a heavily modded Minecraft network lives here.

Worth noting: all "Server Auction" listings are getting a blanket 3% price bump. If you've been hunting for bargain dedicated hardware through the auction, that pipeline gets a little pricier too.

What This Actually Means

For smaller communities running a shared Minecraft server on a CX33, you're looking at an extra €1.50 a month. Manageable. Not the end of the world.

But if you're running a mid-to-large FiveM server on something like an AX42-U, you just absorbed an extra €10 per month. That's €120 a year, and that's before whatever you're spending on a database server, object storage, load balancing, or backups. Those are all going up too.

The Hacker News community flagged this within hours of the announcement going live, with plenty of people pointing to AI infrastructure demand as the root cause. Hardware procurement costs, specifically RAM, have been squeezed by the same AI buildout that's been consuming every spare DIMM on the planet. Hetzner's costs go up, your bill follows.

Hetzner remains one of the better-value options for European game server hosting, even after the increases. The official price adjustment page has the full breakdown if you want to dig into every SKU, including Singapore and US datacenter pricing.

If you're looking at alternatives, OVH's Game Server line comes up often as a comparison, particularly for DDoS protection on game traffic, though their pricing sits higher to begin with. The trade-offs between the two have always been a topic of debate in the game server community. For now though, Hetzner at the new prices is still competitive enough that most admins won't be jumping ship in April.

Review your current plan. Do the maths. And maybe have a chat with your community about covering the difference if you've been running things out of pocket.