As of 2 Nov 2026, the panel rates Hetzner Cloud 2.5/5 and netcup VPS 2/5 in Web Hosting. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 3 of the 6 judges pick Hetzner Cloud and 3 pick netcup VPS. Hetzner Cloud scores higher on 4 of 6 criteria (European sovereignty, Control panel, WordPress & developer tooling, Security, backups & recovery, plus 1 more). netcup VPS scores higher on 2 of 6 criteria (Performance, uptime & infrastructure and Scaling, migration & exit). Provenance — Hetzner Cloud: EU-Made; netcup VPS: EU-Made. Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made.
Hetzner Cloud leads on management and developer tools (6.7 vs 4.3, six judges), support and service (4.3 vs 2.7, six judges), security and backups (5.7 vs 3.8, five judges, one tie) and sovereignty (7.2 vs 3.8, six judges). netcup VPS leads on pricing transparency (6.0 vs 2.2, five judges) with published prices from 8,26 € a month on a 12-month term to 289,46 €, both including 19% VAT, plus performance and reliability (5.3 vs 3.7, five judges) and scaling and portability (4.7 vs 4.0, five judges). Weighted totals split: netcup VPS ahead for the agency lead (5.4 vs 5.3), app developer (5.7 vs 5.3) and skeptic (5.6 vs 4.9); Hetzner Cloud ahead for the shop operator (5.3 vs 5) and data protection officer (5.6 vs 4.8). Hetzner Cloud has no verdict summary and its pricing is unweighted (the vendor publishes no prices); listed sovereignty attributes read unknown for both products.
Choose Hetzner Cloud if
Your team scripts infrastructure daily through a management console and API — six judges lean Hetzner Cloud on management and developer tools (6.7 vs 4.3).
You need support channels with published hours and response times — six judges lean Hetzner Cloud on support and service (4.3 vs 2.7); netcup VPS's verdict records no public information on phone or chat channels, hours or response times.
Your backup policy requires stated snapshot retention — five judges lean Hetzner Cloud on security and backups (5.7 vs 3.8); netcup VPS's verdict documents only customer-triggered snapshots without stated retention.
Your compliance review scores sovereignty first — six judges lean Hetzner Cloud there (7.2 vs 3.8), a criterion where the netcup VPS bench itself split 3-6.
You sit in the data protection officer's chair — that judge's weighted total reads 5.6 for Hetzner Cloud against 4.8 for netcup VPS.
Choose netcup VPS if
You need published prices before signing — five judges lean netcup VPS on pricing transparency (6.0 vs 2.2), with prices from 8,26 € a month on a 12-month term to 289,46 €, both including 19% VAT.
You buy against named hardware generations — five judges lean netcup VPS on performance and reliability (5.3 vs 3.7), on hardware named to the generation (AMD EPYC 9645, DDR5, NVMe).
You plan to step between fixed server sizes on a published ladder — five judges lean netcup VPS on scaling and portability (4.7 vs 4.0).
You judge like the app developer or the skeptic — their weighted totals read 5.7 and 5.6 for netcup VPS against 5.3 and 4.9 for Hetzner Cloud.
Your priorities match the agency lead's — the weighted total reads 5.4 for netcup VPS against 5.3 for Hetzner Cloud.
Read this comparison as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.
The Data Protection Officer
External data protection officer for a group of medical practices and two law firms whose sites take appointment requests and contact forms. Reads the DPA, the subprocessor list and the certifications before anything else: where the servers and the backups are, which group company outside the EU can reach them, how customers are isolated from each other, and when data is deleted after the contract ends.
Hetzner Cloud
This judge's pick
netcup VPS
Criterion by criterion
Performance, uptime & infrastructure
Hetzner Cloud
A public status page with incident history and scheduled maintenance selectable by data centre is documented, including resolved outages and current work on core routers. We found no public information on per-tariff resources, an uptime target or an SLA with service credits, caching, PHP versions or a CDN in the captured pages.
netcup VPS
Every tariff lists cores, RAM and SSD or NVMe storage, the root server line names the AMD EPYC 9645 CPU and DDR5 RAM, and the platform describes redundant uplinks, redundant power and hardware RAID. A public status page exists and root servers carry a 99,9 % guaranteed minimum availability, though the captured pages state explicitly that this guarantee, the satisfaction guarantee and dedicated cores are not included in the VPS line, and we found no public information on SLA credits, a CDN or measured performance figures.
Control panel, WordPress & developer tooling
Hetzner Cloud
The console deploys one-click apps including a ready-to-use WordPress with MySQL and Apache, alongside Coolify, Docker CE and GitLab CE, and covers snapshots, firewalls, volumes, private networks and placement groups. A documented API for servers, load balancers, volumes, firewalls, floating IPs, placement groups and DNS comes with the hcloud command line tool and Go and Python libraries, plus separate APIs for dedicated servers and storage boxes. Projects support member invitations with role-based permissions over backups and snapshots, and servers, snapshots, storage boxes and domains can be transferred to other customers; we found no public information on managed automatic updates, staging environments or Git deployment.
netcup VPS
The Server Control Panel covers start, stop and reboot, image deployment, snapshots, a VNC console, traffic statistics and SSH with full root access, and an API with remote console is advertised and separately documented. We found no public information on staging environments, Git deployment, team roles or client and agency management — this is a self-managed server, and the site operations tooling sits with the customer.
Security, backups & recovery
Hetzner Cloud
Daily encrypted server backups with 14-day retention across seven slots, manual snapshots that survive server deletion, restore by rebuilding the server or creating a duplicate in any location, and cloud firewalls are documented, and the technical and organisational measures are audited annually by TÜV Rheinland. The vendor states that cloud servers are unmanaged products and that setting up backups is the customer's responsibility, and restore is at the level of the whole server rather than single files or databases. We found no public information on a web application firewall, malware scanning or cleanup, DDoS protection, two-factor login to the panel, or an ISO 27001 or BSI C5 certification.
netcup VPS
ISO 27001 and ISO 27701 have been certified since 2023 with annual validation by TÜV Nord, DDoS protection is included, and the KVM basis with hardware RAID provides virtualization isolation, plus customer-created snapshots. However, the products are self-managed, and we found no public information on a backup service with stated frequency or retention, restore procedures, SSL, a web application firewall or two-factor login to the panel.
Scaling, migration & exit
Hetzner Cloud
The servers run standard open stacks such as WordPress with MySQL and Apache under full root access, snapshots and backups restore to any location and move between projects, and domain transfer out is documented via a token valid for 7 days, with servers, storage boxes and rack space transferable between customers. We found no public information on cancellation periods, deletion of data after the contract ends, a migration service from another host, or scaling resources without moving the server.
netcup VPS
A tariff ladder runs from vServer Lite through ARM64 and x86 to root servers, local block storage expands up to 8 TB at 0,012 € excluding VAT per GB without fixed terms, monthly terms are available, and image import and export gives a standard way out. We found no public information on a migration service from another host, domain transfer out, or the deletion of data after the contract ends.
Support, domains & email
Hetzner Cloud
A searchable documentation centre, a community forum, email notifications for product status reports and a documented topic on support opening hours exist, and mailboxes are documented with configurable storage and per-email size and count limits, per-mailbox spam filtering, forwarding to additional addresses, retention settings and webmail, alongside domain handling. We found no public information on support channels such as phone or chat with stated hours, response times, help with hacked sites, a premium support tier or a partner programme.
netcup VPS
A help centre, vServer FAQs and a contact form in the Customer Control Panel are documented, and the managed vServer option adds maintenance, security updates and monitoring by the vendor's experts for Linux. We found no public information on support hours, channels such as phone or chat, response times, or on domains, SSL certificates and mailboxes bookable in the same account.
European sovereignty
Hetzner Cloud
The contracting entity is Hetzner Online GmbH in Gunzenhausen with its own data centres in Falkenstein, Nürnberg and Helsinki; customer, contract and billing data are processed exclusively in the EU, backups stay in the EU when an EU location is chosen, and authority requests for the German sites are accepted only from German courts with a valid order and for Helsinki only from Finnish ones. An Article 28 data processing agreement is published in German and English together with a subprocessor list, master data are not passed to the US subsidiary, only data a customer actively stores on a US or Singapore server reaches those countries, and US or Singaporean authorities have no direct access to EU server contents. The subprocessor list is published without the subprocessors' locations on the pages we read, and we found no public information on an ISO 27001 or BSI C5 certification for the data centres, though an annual TÜV Rheinland audit of the technical and organisational measures is documented with the report available to customers who concluded the agreement.
netcup VPS
The vendor describes itself as netcup GmbH of Karlsruhe with virtual servers in Nuremberg, Vienna and Amsterdam, a data protection officer has been appointed, Article 15 access requests are handled through the panel, and ISO 27001 plus ISO 27701 certificates are published for download with annual audits. But the captured data centre page itself did not load, the vendor also operates locations in the USA and Singapore, and we found no public information on a published data processing agreement or a subprocessor list — the exact chain my clients need before signing is not documented.
Pricing transparency
Hetzner Cloud
The cloud documentation directs buyers to pricing in the info boxes on the cloud page, yet the captured pages contain no tariff price, minimum term, setup fee, included services, add-on cost or VAT treatment. We found no public information on renewal prices or cancellation terms in the pages we read.
netcup VPS
All sixteen VPS and root server tariffs show the discounted monthly price and the list price side by side including 19 % VAT, terms of 1, 12 and 24 months carry stated discounts of −13 % and −26 %, block storage is priced at 0,012 € excluding VAT per GB per month, a VAT selector is shown, traffic is included, and a 30-day money-back guarantee refunds the full base fee. We found no public information on setup fees, charges for restores or premium support, or the cancellation and data-return terms, which keeps the three-year total from being fully computable.
Sovereignty, side by side
Dimension
Hetzner Cloud
netcup VPS
Legal entity
Not determined
Not determined
Hosting location
Not determined
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Hosting options
Not determined
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Open source
Not determined
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Data processing agreement
Not determined
Not determined
Transfer impact assessment
Not determined
Not determined
Questions about Hetzner Cloud and netcup VPS
Which is better, Hetzner Cloud or netcup VPS?
As of 2 Nov 2026, the panel rates Hetzner Cloud higher: 2.5/5 against 2/5. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 3 of the 6 judges pick Hetzner Cloud and 3 pick netcup VPS. Which one fits depends on the criteria that matter to you; the table on this page shows both side by side, and each judge’s reading has its own page. Both were scored by the same AI bench under the same rubric, from public evidence only, as the methodology describes.
Is Hetzner Cloud or netcup VPS European?
Hetzner Cloud is European (EU-Made). netcup VPS is European (EU-Made). Provenance is read from each company’s own legal pages: who builds it and who owns it.