Hetzner vs Railway
Verdict up front: Hetzner starts cheaper ($3.79/mo); Hetzner covers more ground (6 regions). The right pick depends on workload — details below.
| Hetzner | Railway | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | $3.79/mo | $5/mo |
| Billing | monthly | usage |
| Regions | 6 | 4 |
| Free tier / trial | None | $5 monthly usage credit (trial) |
| Category | iaas, baremetal | paas |
Hetzner
German engineering — best price-per-vCPU in the business
- + Cheapest compute per spec anywhere
- + Generous bandwidth (20TB+)
- + Dedicated servers excellent value
- + Auction servers even cheaper
- − EU-centric (US regions newer/smaller)
- − Strict account verification
- − No managed K8s on auction/dedicated
Railway
Deploy-from-repo PaaS with usage-based pricing
- + Git-push deploys in seconds
- + Usage-based billing
- + Great DX + templates
- + Databases as first-class plugins
- − Costs scale unpredictably vs VPS
- − Fewer regions
- − No static IP on hobby tier