Hetzner CX and CAX out of stock: what to buy instead

For years the default answer to “where do I put a small server?” was a Hetzner CX or its Arm cousin, the CAX: 4GB of RAM and 20TB of traffic for about €6 a month. Since the summer you mostly can’t buy one. On 2026-10-15 Hetzner’s cloud page still listed the whole Cost-Optimized group — every CX and CAX size — as “Currently not available”. This guide is about the practical question that leaves: what do you order instead, and what does it cost?

What you can and can’t order today

Hetzner has not published a restock date or a retirement notice; its page only says the number of these servers is limited. The public web shop renders every plan as unavailable without JavaScript, so it is not a reliable stock signal on its own. The better source is Hetzner’s own API: the datacenters endpoint lists, per location, which server types are available right now. An unofficial tracker that polls it every 20 minutes (hetzner.thegoated.dev) showed this at 14 October, 22:40 UTC:

• CX (shared Intel) and CAX (Arm): not available in any datacentre. A few sizes (CX23–CX43, CAX11, CAX21) showed as “limited” in Falkenstein, Nuremberg or Helsinki, which in practice means you may get one if you try at the right moment.
• CPX (shared AMD): the 1–4GB sizes (CPX02, CPX12, CPX22) available in all three EU sites; the 8GB CPX32 only in Helsinki; larger sizes sold out in the EU. In Ashburn and Hillsboro the older CPX11–CPX51 were available.
• CCX (dedicated AMD vCPU): available almost everywhere, including the EU.

Stock moves daily, so treat this as a snapshot. Before you plan, open the Cloud Console’s create-server screen for your project and location (or run hcloud datacenter describe) — that is what decides whether you can order.

If you already run a CX or CAX: keep it

Your existing server is now the cheapest Hetzner capacity you can have. Three things keep it that way:

• Don’t rescale. Hetzner’s 15 June 2026 price list applies to new orders and instance rescales. Resizing moves the server onto the new prices, and with the line out of stock you may not be able to go back.
• Don’t delete it to “start clean”. A deleted CX or CAX can’t be re-created while the line is unavailable. Reinstalling the operating system (Rebuild) or restoring a snapshot onto the same server keeps it.
• Scale out, not up, if you must grow — and price the extra node against the tables below, because it will be a CPX or CCX at the new prices, or another provider.

Hetzner’s own fallbacks cost 3–4× more

Euros a month from Hetzner’s price-adjustment table, excluding VAT, including the €0.50 primary IPv4, for Germany and Finland:

The CPX plans are not a bad product — they come with twice the disk of the CX sizes they replace and the same 20TB of EU traffic — but at €19.99 for 4GB they are no longer cheap. At 8GB the dedicated-core CCX13 (€43.49) is only €7.50 more than a CPX32 and, unlike the CPX32, was in stock in every EU site; it has half the vCPUs, but they are not shared. At 16GB, the CPX42 costs 4.2× a CX43. If you are paying those prices, it is worth looking outside Hetzner.

Same RAM elsewhere: 4, 8 and 16GB

Cheapest orderable plan with at least the given RAM per provider, US dollars a month. Plans come from our data set (as of 2026-10-12) plus the 8GB and 16GB sizes we read from each provider’s pricing page on 2026-10-15. Not-orderable plans (every Hetzner CX and CAX) are left out. Sorted by the 8GB column; cheapest per column in green.

Read the terms before you compare the green cells:

• OVHcloud prices are for a 12-month upfront commitment; its page shows no separate no-commitment price. Traffic is unmetered at a capped speed (500 Mbps on VPS-1, 1 Gbps on VPS-2) in Europe and North America.
• Hostinger prices are introductory and renew higher (the notes in our data set give the renewal price for each plan).
• netcup prices are its 12-month term, after its September G12.5 increase (see netcup G12.5 vs Hetzner).
• DigitalOcean, Vultr, Akamai (Linode), Lightsail and Hetzner bill by the hour or month with no term. Among these, Vultr’s Regular Performance line is the cheapest at 8GB and 16GB. At 4GB, Scaleway’s DEV1-M is lower on paper, but its storage and IPv4 are billed on top.

Traffic changes the answer

The thing a CX server really gave you was not 4GB of RAM — plenty of providers sell that — but 20TB of outbound traffic in the price. Here is the cheapest ≥8GB plan per provider again, with outbound traffic added at each provider’s published overage rate:

Overage: DigitalOcean $0.01/GiB (allowance pooled across a team’s Droplets), Vultr $0.01/GB, Lightsail $0.09/GB (US East and most EU regions). * Akamai’s $0.005/GB dates from its 2023 price change and is not stated on today’s pricing page. Hostinger publishes no overage price, so we don’t estimate past its allowance. Hetzner’s 20TB EU allowance covers every column.

At a couple of terabytes a month nobody pays extra and list price decides. Past about five, the metered plans start to climb — Lightsail steeply — while Hetzner, OVHcloud and netcup stay flat. That is the honest case for paying Hetzner’s CPX prices: if you serve a lot of bytes from Europe (downloads, media, a busy API) and want hourly billing, a CPX32 at 10TB a month undercuts every metered US-style plan in the table.

What this does to a real app — live

Our cost engine picks the cheapest plan that fits a stack and traffic level, skipping plans that can’t be ordered. For a Spring Boot app (2GB RAM) at startup traffic (50,000 visits a month), the VPS ranking as of 2026-10-12:

Hetzner now ranks 9 of 9 here: the smallest plan in our data set that a new customer can order is the 4GB CPX22. (A 2GB CPX12 is in stock in some locations, but we could not confirm its EU price on an official Hetzner page, so it is not in our data.) For a small app, the loss of CX hurts most: the 2GB boxes from DigitalOcean, Vultr, Akamai and Lightsail cost about half of what Hetzner charges for its cheapest orderable plan, and OVHcloud and Hostinger less again on their terms.

What to buy, by situation

• A small app or side project (≤4GB, little traffic): a monthly-billed 2–4GB box from Vultr, DigitalOcean, Akamai or Lightsail. Don’t pay CPX prices for this. See Hetzner vs Vultr and Hetzner vs DigitalOcean.
• 8–16GB, steady workload, happy to commit: OVHcloud is by far the cheapest per GB of RAM, with unmetered traffic — if a year upfront is acceptable. Compare Hetzner vs OVHcloud.
• Traffic-heavy in Europe, hourly billing: stay with Hetzner and buy CPX or CCX. At 10TB+ a month the included 20TB is worth more than the price gap.
• Need predictable CPU (databases, CI runners): the CCX13 is the in-stock Hetzner option. If the database is the reason for the server, also price managed Postgres.
• Waiting for CX to come back: fine for a hobby box, but don’t prepay a year elsewhere to bridge what may be a temporary shortage unless that price is good on its own — and set the server up with config you can move (Docker Compose, Ansible, Coolify) so switching back costs an afternoon.
• Unsure you want to run a server at all: see what PaaS really costs — for small apps the gap to a managed platform is smaller than it was in spring.

Methodology: Hetzner availability from hetzner.com/cloud on 2026-10-15 and the unofficial API-based tracker hetzner.thegoated.dev (14 October, 22:40 UTC); Hetzner prices from its price-adjustment table (new prices from 15 June 2026, Germany/Finland, excl. VAT) plus €0.50 / $0.60 primary IPv4; CPX and CCX specs from Hetzner’s product pages. 8GB and 16GB plans for DigitalOcean, Vultr, Akamai and Lightsail, and Vultr’s Regular Performance 4GB, read from their pricing pages on 2026-10-15; everything else from our data set as of 2026-10-12. Traffic in decimal TB (1TB = 1,000GB; DigitalOcean counts GiB). None of these providers changed the ordering; affiliate links in the tables are disclosed in the footer.