Blog · 2026-06-03
An EU-sovereign Hetzner alternative: Unio Cloud compared
Hetzner is the price-performance benchmark of European hosting, and any honest comparison starts there. The family-owned German company has run data centers for over two decades, and its cloud line made "2 vCPU and 4 GB for the price of a coffee" a normal expectation. If you just need a cheap, reliable VM today, Hetzner is a fine answer.
So why does an alternative make sense? Three reasons come up again and again: the dedicated-vCPU lines are priced far above the shared ones, the API is proprietary rather than a standard, and Hetzner's growing US footprint muddies the water for teams that want their infrastructure to answer to European law only. Unio Cloud is built around exactly those three gaps.
Hetzner at a glance
- Jurisdiction
- Hetzner Online GmbH, Germany (privately held). EU data centers in Falkenstein, Nuremberg and Helsinki, plus US locations (Ashburn, Hillsboro) and Singapore.
- Comparable plan
- CX33: 4 vCPU (shared) / 8 GB / 80 GB NVMe / 20 TB traffic - €8.49/mo + €0.50/mo IPv4, excl. VAT.
- Dedicated vCPU
- CCX13: 2 dedicated vCPU / 8 GB / 80 GB - €42.99/mo excl. VAT.
- API
- Proprietary Hetzner Cloud API with an official Terraform provider and hcloud CLI.
- Billing
- Hourly, capped at the monthly price.
- Object storage
- €6.49/mo base including 1 TB stored + 1 TB egress; ~€6.47 per additional TB.
The same 4 vCPU / 8 GB server
| Hetzner CX33 | Unio u33 | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly price (excl. VAT) | €8.49 + €0.50 IPv4 = €8.99 | €7.79, IPv4 included |
| vCPU / RAM | 4 shared / 8 GB | 4 shared / 8 GB |
| NVMe storage | 80 GB | 80 GB |
| Traffic included | 20 TB | 20 TB |
| Billing | Hourly, capped monthly | Hourly, capped monthly |
| API | Proprietary (hcloud) | Standard OpenStack |
| Dedicated 2 vCPU / 8 GB | CCX13 - €42.99/mo | d13 - €11.90/mo |
| Jurisdiction | Germany, with US operations | EU only |
Hetzner prices from hetzner.com as of July 2026, excl. VAT. Hetzner bills IPv4 separately at €0.50/mo; Unio Cloud includes it.
Why teams look for a Hetzner alternative
Dedicated vCPU costs three to four times more
Hetzner's shared-CPU lines are aggressive, but guaranteed cores are not: CCX13 (2 dedicated vCPU, 8 GB) is €42.99/mo. Unio's d13 has the same specs with CPU pinning for €11.90/mo. If your workload needs predictable CPU - databases, game servers, CI runners - the gap is the whole bill.
The cheap lines are supply-constrained
Hetzner's own site marks the CX (Intel/AMD) and CAX (ARM) lines as having limited availability, and they exist only in EU locations. When stock runs out you are steered to the CPX line, where the same 4 vCPU / 8 GB costs €35.49/mo - four times the CX33 price.
A proprietary API is a soft lock-in
Hetzner's API and Terraform provider are genuinely good, but they are Hetzner-shaped: your automation, and any tooling you build on it, works nowhere else. Unio exposes standard OpenStack (Nova, Cinder, Neutron, Glance) plus S3, so the OpenStack CLI, Terraform provider and Ansible collections work unmodified - and keep working if you ever move again.
US operations complicate the sovereignty story
Hetzner is German-owned, which is a real advantage over US hyperscalers. But it now operates US data centers, and whether a US operational presence creates exposure to US legal process is a genuinely debated question. If your compliance posture requires zero ambiguity - no US nexus at all - an EU-only provider removes the question entirely.
When Hetzner is the right call
- You need a provider with a two-decade operational track record at massive scale - Unio Cloud is new and currently onboarding from a waitlist.
- You also want dirt-cheap dedicated bare metal: Hetzner's Robot server auctions remain unmatched in Europe.
- You depend on the mature hcloud ecosystem - CLI, Kubernetes cloud-controller, csi-driver - and don't mind the lock-in.
Try the EU-sovereign way
Cloud servers from €4.99/mo with a full OpenStack API, billed hourly and capped monthly. EU-owned, EU-hosted.
Join the waitlistSources
Prices and facts last verified against the linked sources in July 2026. Spotted something outdated? Tell us and we'll fix it.