Hetzner Cloud vs InterServer: two suppliers to resell

Provibr integrates both Hetzner Cloud and InterServer, and a machine on either one pays us the same €0.20 per month to manage, so our management fee gives us no reason to push you toward one. There is one place our interests are not neutral, and a comparison should say so up front: we carry an InterServer affiliate link (you will see it marked as such below), and we earn a commission when someone opens an account through it, which Hetzner does not pay us. The measurements here were still taken against real accounts on both providers this month; weigh them knowing that. This is the comparison we wish existed when we started.

They are not competing for the same job. Hetzner is a European hyperscaler-lite with hourly billing and a broad catalogue; InterServer is a cheap American host with a slice model and monthly billing. Choosing between them is mostly choosing where your customers are and what you are willing to build around each one's quirks.

The money

Both publish list prices, and both changed something recently, so start from the source rather than from memory.

After Hetzner's 15 June 2026 price adjustment, the entry Intel plan CX23 lists at €5.49/month and the top shared plan CX53 at €29.49/month, both excluding VAT and IPv4.

InterServer's cloud VPS lists at $3.00 per slice per month, where a slice is 1 CPU core, 2 GB RAM, 40 GB SSD and 2 TB transfer, scaling from 1 slice ($3) to 32 slices ($96).

The shape of the two curves differs. Hetzner's entry price is higher per machine, but the traffic allowance is generous and the top shared plan is substantially larger; a primary IPv4 is a separate €0.50/month line item that people forget when they set a resale price, and it is covered in the Hetzner selling guide. InterServer's floor is genuinely cheap (a usable 1-core, 2 GB machine for $3), and the ladder is perfectly linear, which makes a resale price list trivial to compute. Two honest caveats, the same ones as any list-price comparison: neither figure includes VAT or your margin, and both suppliers move prices (Hetzner did in June; that is why the source matters).

Where the machines live

Hetzner Cloud runs in Germany (Falkenstein, Nuremberg), Finland (Helsinki), Singapore, and the United States (Oregon and Virginia).

InterServer's cloud VPS is offered from three United States regions and lists no European location.

This is often the whole decision. If your customers are European, or you sell on GDPR residency, Hetzner's German and Finnish regions are the reason to pick it and InterServer is simply the wrong tool. If your customers are American and price-sensitive, InterServer's floor is hard to beat and Hetzner's US regions are the thinner part of its catalogue.

Delivery speed

Here the two are not close, and it changes what you can promise a customer.

Hetzner delivers in seconds: it is hourly-billed cloud, and a POST /servers returns a running machine almost immediately. InterServer is a purchase-and-provision flow: we timed one real InterServer delivery at about 52 minutes end to end (46 of them with the machine simply sitting in pending). That is one machine, so an observation and not a ceiling, but it means an InterServer product page should say "ready within the hour", while a Hetzner one can say "ready in a moment". Provibr models both the same way for safety (the machine coming to life is something it observes via status polling rather than a command it waits on), but the customer-facing promise should match the supplier.

API design

The credentials are philosophically opposite, and it affects how much of your account you are exposing.

Hetzner uses a per-project API token, and you choose Read or Read & Write when you make it. A token sees only its project. You want Read & Write, and there is a measured reason beyond the obvious: a read-only token fails inconsistently (we saw 401 token_readonly on one write endpoint but 403 forbidden on others), so a token that "tests fine" can still fail later on a call the test did not make.

InterServer issues one key per account, unscoped. The same key manages VPSes, reads billing, and can change the account password; making a new key rotates the old one and breaks everything using it. This is InterServer's published design, not a defect, but it means connecting InterServer delegates the whole account, where connecting one Hetzner project delegates one project. Provibr surfaces that difference in the credential help and, for InterServer, in a consent step you accept before anything is stored.

What you can do once connected

Both are managed through Provibr's outbound agent, so neither supplier needs an inbound port and nothing is installed on either side. What differs is the capability surface, and every gap below is a measured decision rather than an unfinished feature.

Two rows deserve a sentence. Delete is the trap: on Hetzner it destroys the machine and stops the meter, on InterServer it cancels at end of term and keeps billing until the paid-through date, so the same button means two different things and Provibr's dialog says which. And suspend is missing on both but for different reasons: Hetzner has no suspend state, so overage enforcement powers the machine off and locks it; InterServer keeps billing until you cancel, so there is nothing to suspend to.

Which one should you pick?

Pick Hetzner if your customers are European, if you need a browser console or usage graphs, if you want reinstall, or if you want fast delivery you can promise on. It is the more capable integration and the more complete API, and the price is fair for what you get.

Pick InterServer if your customers are American and price is the whole pitch, if a $3 floor lets you offer a tier you otherwise could not, and if you can live without a console, without graphs, and with a delivery that takes the better part of an hour. The slice model makes the price ladder effortless.

Use both if you sell across regions. There is no reason to choose globally when you can choose per customer: a European order goes to Hetzner, a cheap American order goes to InterServer, and both land in the same server list on the same invoice. That is the case Provibr is actually built for: one inventory, one permission model, one activity trail, regardless of whose datacentre is underneath.

Read next

• How to sell VPS with Hetzner Cloud: the full Hetzner walkthrough.
• How to sell VPS with InterServer: the full InterServer walkthrough.
• Hetzner Cloud billing automation: turning hourly compute into a fixed monthly product.

Hetzner and InterServer prices and locations were read from hetzner.com, docs.hetzner.com and interserver.net on 26 August 2026. The delivery timing, credential behaviour, console protocol and delete semantics were measured against live accounts on both providers while building the Provibr integrations.