Hetzner Cloud vs IONOS Cloud

Both are German clouds that rent plain Linux VMs you set up yourself. Hetzner Cloud bills every started hour and has low rates for servers kept on, while IONOS Cloud bills its Cubes by the minute and adds H200 GPUs and Windows Server.

The companies and products

Hetzner Cloud

Hetzner is a German hosting company founded in 1997; Hetzner Cloud rents virtual servers, storage and networking by the hour.

A Hetzner Cloud server is a Linux VM picked from shared vCPU lines (cost-optimized CX and CAX, regular CPX) or dedicated vCPU (CCX), with local NVMe disk, a public IP and up to 20 TB of traffic in the EU. You add volumes, private networks, firewalls and load balancers, and run everything yourself through the Console, the Cloud API, the hcloud CLI or Terraform. It is general infrastructure, not an agent sandbox, so this page compares the two where they overlap: giving an agent its own Linux machine.

Founded: 1997, in Germany
Product: Virtual machines on Hetzner's physical servers, with root and your own OS image
Billing: Hourly with a monthly cap; every started hour is billed, and a server bills until you delete it, even when it is off
Pricing change: New prices for new orders and rescales since 15 June 2026; older servers keep their old price until rescaled
Locations: Falkenstein and Nuremberg (Germany), Helsinki (Finland), Ashburn and Hillsboro (US), Singapore
Stock: The cheapest CX and CAX servers show "This product is currently unavailable. Please check back later."
Certifications: ISO/IEC 27001:2022

IONOS Cloud

IONOS Cloud is the public cloud of IONOS, a German hosting company in the United Internet group. It is a hyperscaler-style IaaS cloud, not an agent sandbox.

You rent KVM virtual machines: Cubes (fixed sizes from 1 to 16 vCPU with a local NVMe disk, billed by the minute), vCPU servers up to 60 vCPU and 230 GB of RAM, Dedicated Core servers and H200 GPU VMs. You build them in the Data Center Designer or through the Cloud API, SDKs and Terraform, next to block storage, private networks, firewalls and managed services. It is for teams that want to run their own servers in Germany, the rest of Europe or the US, and set up everything on them themselves.

Company: IONOS, member of the United Internet group; IONOS Group SE listed since February 2023
Founded: As 1&1 in 1988, headquartered in Germany
Isolation: KVM virtual machines; a Cube is a VM with an attached NVMe volume
Locations: Cubes and vCPU servers in Germany (Berlin, Frankfurt), UK (London, Worcester), France (Paris), Spain (Logroño) and the US (Newark, Lenexa)
GPUs: NVIDIA H200 PCIe VMs with 1 to 8 GPUs, in Frankfurt and Worcester
Billing: Pay as you go; Cubes are invoiced by the minute; first 2 TB of outgoing traffic each month at no charge

Which use cases each one fits

For each use case, Battleships prices every sandbox provider on the same workload and sorts them from the cheapest monthly bill up. “51st cheapest of 364” means 50 of the other 363 providers run that workload, with every feature it needs, for less. “With limits” means the provider runs it but misses something, so it is listed after every full match. Open a use case for its whole ranking and what each provider misses.

Use case and its workload	Hetzner Cloud: price rank	IONOS Cloud: price rank	boat: price rank
Software factory 100 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 2,200 sessions of 8 h a month Both give a root VM with Docker, but Hetzner rules out nested virtualization and IONOS does not document it; boat ranks 3rd with /dev/kvm and coding agents built in.	46th of 367, with limits $287 a month	64th of 367, with limits $492 a month	3rd cheapest of 367 $634 a month
Always-on AI employees 50 machines 24/7 · 2 vCPU / 4 GB	94th of 366, with limits $325 a month	107th of 366, with limits $540 a month	5th cheapest of 366 $657 a month
Code interpreter bursts 100 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 200,000 sessions of 1 min a month Short bursts favor per-minute billing: IONOS Cloud ranks 53rd, while full-hour billing puts Hetzner Cloud at 156 and boat's start limits put it at 186.	156th of 345, with limits $649 a month	53rd of 345, with limits $27 a month	186th of 345, with limits $2,000 a month
Sandboxes for your users 300 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 30,000 sessions of 23 min a month Neither cloud publishes how many machines can run at once, so 300 user sandboxes need a support request on both; boat ranks 1st with 100 to 2,000 sandboxes by plan.	46th of 361, with limits $314 a month	35th of 361, with limits $182 a month	Cheapest of 361 $209 a month
RL rollouts 1,000 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 1,000,000 sessions of 3 min a month IONOS Cloud ranks 9th for RL rollouts on per-minute Cubes; Hetzner Cloud ranks 104th because every rollout is billed by the started hour, and boat ranks 34th.	104th of 360, with limits $6,490 a month	9th of 360, with limits $740 a month	34th of 360, with limits $2,000 a month
Agent evals 250 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 15,000 sessions of 20 min a month	51st cheapest of 364 $1,010 a month	93rd of 364, with limits $137 a month	10th cheapest of 364 $200 a month
CI runners 40 at once · 8 vCPU / 16 GB · 6,000 sessions of 12 min a month IONOS Cloud ranks 1st for CI runners because Cubes bill by the minute; Hetzner Cloud ranks 83rd since each short job is billed a full hour, and boat ranks 4th.	83rd cheapest of 377 $788 a month	Cheapest of 377 $60 a month	4th cheapest of 377 $86 a month
24/7 dev boxes 1 machine 24/7 · 4 vCPU / 8 GB Both clouds fit a 24/7 dev box well; IONOS Cloud ranks 9th and Hetzner Cloud ranks 32nd, partly because Hetzner's cheapest CX servers are out of stock.	32nd cheapest of 368 $42 a month	9th cheapest of 368 $20 a month	18th cheapest of 368 $26 a month
Computer-use agents 50 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 20,000 sessions of 15 min a month Neither cloud has a desktop stream or computer-use tools, only a console for fixing servers; boat ranks 6th with a 60fps desktop and Chromium built in.	134th of 369, with limits $320 a month	86th of 369, with limits $137 a month	6th cheapest of 369 $200 a month
Browser-use agents 50 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 30,000 sessions of 10 min a month	227th of 367, with limits $312 a month	156th of 367, with limits $74 a month	7th cheapest of 367 $200 a month
Scraping & bots (startup scale) 50 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 100,000 sessions of 3 min a month	157th of 346, with limits $62 a month	153rd of 346, with limits $40 a month	6th cheapest of 346 $90 a month
Mass scraping & bots (undetectable) 1,000 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 3,000,000 sessions of 2 min a month	45th of 338, with limits $1,248 a month	39th of 338, with limits $897 a month	71st of 338, with limits $1,800 a month
Parallel red teaming 200 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 5,000 sessions of 30 min a month	114th of 360, with limits $52 a month	105th of 360, with limits $38 a month	2nd cheapest of 360 $200 a month
GPU eval jobs 10 at once · 8 vCPU / 32 GB · 500 sessions of 30 min a month	Can't run it	Can't run it	Can't run it
macOS agents 5 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 1,000 sessions of 20 min a month	Can't run it	Can't run it	Can't run it

Key features

Feature	Hetzner Cloud	IONOS Cloud	boat
Isolation	Every server is a full VM with its own kernel	Every server is a KVM VM with its own kernel	Every sandbox is a full VM with its own kernel
CPU speed (Node.js build-and-test, 4 vCPU / 8 GB)	8.88 runs/s on a shared CX33; CPX and CCX were not measured	Not measured	26.69 runs/s on dedicated AMD Ryzen 9 9950X (Zen 5) hosts
Billing step	Every started hour billed in full, with a monthly cap	Cubes invoiced by the minute, with no plan fee	Per second, from a monthly plan that becomes usage credit
Stopping a machine	A powered-off server bills at the full rate until you delete it	A suspended Cube keeps billing; a stopped vCPU server stops compute billing while its volumes keep billing	A stopped sandbox costs nothing and keeps its disk
Docker and nested virtualization	Root and Docker; nested virtualization is "not possible on cloud server"	Root Linux VM where you install Docker; running your own VMs inside is not documented	Docker, root, systemd and /dev/kvm on every machine
Snapshots and backups	Snapshots you take yourself, or daily backups in 7 slots for 20% of the server price	Manual full snapshots of one volume, usable only in the same location	Automatic snapshots every minute and on stop
Fork	Snapshot, then create a new server from it (disk, no memory)	Snapshot a disk, then create new VMs from it (disk, no memory)	Fork a running sandbox in one call (disk, no memory)
Desktop and computer use	None built in; a VNC console for admin	None; a remote console for troubleshooting servers	60fps desktop and Chromium, computer use and browser control, embeddable stream
Coding agents and keys	None; you install agents and put secrets on the server yourself	None in the VM; an MCP server lets your own AI client manage IONOS resources	Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and more preinstalled, a prompt, steer and events API, and an AI credentials proxy for any HTTPS API
Reaching the machine	Public IPv4 and IPv6 on any port; HTTPS needs your own certificates or a paid load balancer	Public IP on each VM and any port you open; reserved IPv4 billed per 30 days; load balancers	HTTPS URLs for up to 50 ports, token-protected; raw TCP; own IP
Outbound rules	Free Cloud Firewalls with inbound and outbound rules by IP, port and protocol	Network Security Groups with ingress and egress rules by IP, port and protocol	Open internet on every plan; no provider-side allowlist
Largest machine	Up to 48 dedicated vCPU / 192 GB (CCX63)	vCPU servers up to 60 vCPU / 230 GB; Cubes up to 16 vCPU / 64 GB	Up to 16 vCPU / 32 GB per sandbox
GPUs and Windows	No GPU servers or Windows images	NVIDIA H200 VMs with 1 to 8 GPUs; Windows Server VMs with a licence billed per vCPU	No GPUs; no Windows guests, Wine for Windows apps
Regions	Germany and Finland, plus Ashburn, Hillsboro and Singapore	Germany, UK, France, Spain and the US	EU only: Germany, Finland, France

Every feature Battleships tracks (43)

Feature	Hetzner Cloud	IONOS Cloud	boat
Full VM (own kernel)	Yes	Yes	Yes
Docker inside	Yes	Yes	Yes
Nested virtualization	No	Not published	Yes
Root	Yes	Not published	Yes
Systemd	Yes	Not published	Yes
Desktop GUI	No	No	Yes
Browser	No	No	Yes
Computer-use API	No	No	Yes
SSH	Yes	Yes	Yes
Persistent disk	Yes	Yes	Yes
Pause/resume	Yes	Yes	Yes
Automatic snapshots	No	No	Yes
Fork/clone	Yes	Yes	Yes
Live fork (no pause)	Yes	Yes	Yes
Memory fork	No	No	No
Custom image (Docker or snapshot)	Yes	Yes	Yes
≥24 h sessions	Yes	Yes	Yes
Idle auto-stop	No	No	No
Wake on request	No	No	No
HTTPS preview URLs	No	Yes	Yes
Raw TCP inbound	Yes	Not published	Yes
Public IPv4	Yes	Yes	No
Egress allowlist	Yes	Yes	No
Secret proxy	No	No	Yes
Secret proxy for any API	No	No	Yes
Preinstalled agents	No	No	Yes
Agent harness API	No	No	Yes
MCP server	No	Yes	No
GPU	No	Yes	No
Windows	No	Yes	No
Arm64	Yes	No	No
Self-hosting	No	No	No
BYOC	No	No	No
Open source	No	No	No
Scoped API keys	Not published	Not published	Yes
Spend limits	No	Not published	Yes
Usage per sandbox (API)	No	Yes	Yes
Audit logs	Not published	Not published	No
SSO	No	Yes	No
SOC 2	No	Not published	No
HIPAA	No	No	No
EU data residency	Yes	Yes	Yes
Zero data retention	Not published	Not published	Yes

Performance

Hetzner Cloud8.88 runs/s

IONOS CloudNot measured

boat26.69 runs/s

boat did 26.69 Node.js build-and-test runs per second at 4 vCPU / 8 GB in StarSling's public benchmark, on dedicated AMD Ryzen 9 9950X hosts. The only Hetzner Cloud number is 8.88 runs per second on a shared CX33, measured when boat's temporary fallback capacity ran there, about a third of boat's speed; Hetzner's CPX and CCX servers were not measured. IONOS Cloud has no comparable measurement, so there is no direct Hetzner vs IONOS speed number.

Node.js build-and-test loop at 4 vCPU / 8 GB, higher is better. Measured with the open hpc-sandbox-benchmarks suite. Hetzner Cloud measured on: Shared vCPU, Cost-Optimized (CX, Intel/AMD), EU. IONOS Cloud has no published run in this suite yet, so there is no like-for-like number to compare.

Pricing in five scenarios

Each bill is priced from the providers' public price lists by the open Battleships engine, with the cheapest plan that runs the scenario.

Scenario	Hetzner Cloud, a month	IONOS Cloud, a month	boat, a month
One coding agent, workdays 4 vCPU / 8 GB, 50 GB disk, 8 hours a day, 22 days a month, files kept between days	$3 · Pay-as-you-go (postpaid) · with limits	$5 · Pay as you go	$20 · $20/mo
One agent that never stops 4 vCPU / 8 GB, 50 GB disk, running 24/7 all month	$10 · Pay-as-you-go (postpaid) · with limits	$20 · Pay as you go	$26 · $20/mo
50 agents in parallel 50 machines of 4 vCPU / 8 GB at once, 8-hour sessions, 1,100 sessions a month, Docker inside	$141 · Pay-as-you-go (postpaid) · with limits	$240 · Pay as you go	$317 · $20/mo × 3 seats
Sandboxes for your users 2 vCPU / 4 GB, 30,000 sessions of 10 minutes a month, up to 300 at once	$312 · Pay-as-you-go (postpaid) · with limits	$74 · Pay as you go · with limits	$200 · $100/mo × 2 seats
1,000 short jobs at once 2 vCPU / 4 GB, 1,000 at once, 3 minutes each, 200,000 jobs a month	$2,080 · Pay-as-you-go (postpaid) · with limits	$148 · Pay as you go · with limits	$2,000 · $2000/mo · with limits

Hetzner Cloud: Hetzner bills each server by the hour, rounding every started hour up, with a monthly cap, and keeps billing until you delete it, even when it is off. The prices here use the shared CX line, which is currently out of stock; the CPX and CCX servers you can order today cost more per hour.

IONOS Cloud: IONOS bills Cubes by the minute at a fixed rate per size with the NVMe disk included, and vCPU servers per core and per GB of RAM. Suspended Cubes keep billing, and reserved IPv4, extra storage and traffic past 2 TB a month cost extra.

IONOS Cloud: You pick a monthly plan from $20, and all of it becomes usage credit spent per second on running sandboxes. A stopped sandbox costs nothing and keeps its disk.

Limits in those scenarios

Every Hetzner scenario is priced on the CX line, which Hetzner's site marks as currently unavailable, so none of them fit as priced today. Neither cloud publishes how many machines an account can run at once: Hetzner reviews a raise request by hand and IONOS raises limits through its support, so 300 user sandboxes or 1,000 jobs at once are not confirmed on either. Hetzner bills a 3-minute job as a full hour, which is why its 1,000-job burst comes to $2,080 against $148 on IONOS. On boat that burst gets queued and needs more starts per day than the $2,000 plan allows.

Scenario	Hetzner Cloud	IONOS Cloud	boat
One coding agent, workdays	stock-limited: all CX types "currently unavailable" on hetzner.com (2,026-09-28)	None that bite	None that bite
One agent that never stops	stock-limited: all CX types "currently unavailable" on hetzner.com (2,026-09-28)	None that bite	None that bite
50 agents in parallel	stock-limited: all CX types "currently unavailable" on hetzner.com (2,026-09-28)	how many machines can run at once: limit not published, probably fine at 50 (the typical published limit is 50)	None that bite
Sandboxes for your users	stock-limited: all CX types "currently unavailable" on hetzner.com (2,026-09-28)	not confirmed: how many machines can run at once (you need 300; the typical published limit is 50)	None that bite
1,000 short jobs at once	stock-limited: all CX types "currently unavailable" on hetzner.com (2,026-09-28)	not confirmed: how many machines can run at once (you need 1,000; the typical published limit is 50)	max 2,400 starts/day (needs ~6,667) max 600 starts/hour (needs ~1,000) bursts above 90 starts/min are queued (a burst of 333 takes ~4 min to start)

Which one should you use?

Use Hetzner Cloud when

you want low-rate servers that stay on, large included traffic, daily backups, or regions in the US and Singapore, and you can get the server line you need in stock.

Low rates for servers kept on. Useful for always-on machines: one 4 vCPU agent running all month comes to $10 on Hetzner's CX line against $20 on IONOS, while stock lasts.
20 TB of traffic per server. Useful for heavy downloads: each Hetzner EU server includes 20 TB of outbound traffic, while IONOS includes 2 TB a month per contract.
Daily backups as a switch. Useful if you want backups without scripts: Hetzner keeps daily backups in 7 slots for 20% of the server price.

Use IONOS Cloud when

your jobs are short and per-minute billing matters, or you need H200 GPUs, Windows Server, very large VMs, or data centers in the UK, Spain or the US.

Billing by the minute. Useful for short or bursty jobs: IONOS bills Cubes by the minute, while Hetzner bills every started hour in full.
H200 GPUs and Windows Server. Useful if your workload needs NVIDIA H200 VMs or Windows Server VMs, which IONOS rents and Hetzner Cloud does not.
Bigger single machines. Useful for very large single machines: IONOS vCPU servers go up to 60 vCPU and 230 GB of memory.

Where boat fits

Hetzner Cloud and IONOS Cloud both rent plain servers that you install, secure and look after yourself. If what you are really running is AI agents, boat gives each one a full VM that is ready to work, with coding agents, a desktop and snapshots built in, and a stopped sandbox costs nothing.

/dev/kvm inside every machine

Agents that run emulators or their own VMs need KVM. Hetzner says nested virtualization is not possible on its cloud servers and IONOS does not document it, so that work moves to a dedicated server you manage.

Free stops and snapshots every minute

Agents sit idle between tasks. A powered-off Hetzner server bills in full and a suspended IONOS Cube keeps billing, so on both you snapshot, delete and rebuild to stop paying, and snapshots are taken by hand.

Agents, desktop and keys ready

On both clouds a server starts as an empty OS image: you install each agent, a desktop and a browser, and the agent can read any key you copy onto it. boat ships them, with a credentials proxy.

Use boat when you are really running AI agents and want each one on a ready full VM: /dev/kvm, coding agents you drive from outside, a desktop and browser, keys kept outside, snapshots every minute and stops that cost nothing. Compare it one to one: boat vs Hetzner Cloud and boat vs IONOS Cloud.

Questions people ask

Is Hetzner Cloud cheaper than IONOS Cloud?

For machines that stay on, Hetzner's list rates are lower: one agent running all month comes to $10 on Hetzner and $20 on IONOS, and 50 agents in parallel come to $141 against $240. Those Hetzner prices use the CX line, which is out of stock. For short jobs IONOS wins on per-minute billing: 1,000 short jobs at once come to $148 on IONOS against $2,080 on Hetzner.

Which is faster, Hetzner Cloud or IONOS Cloud?

There is no direct comparison. Hetzner's shared CX33 did 8.88 Node.js build-and-test runs per second in one measured run, and IONOS Cloud was not measured. boat did 26.69 runs per second at the same 4 vCPU / 8 GB size.

Can Hetzner Cloud and IONOS Cloud run Docker?

Yes. Both give you a root Linux VM where Docker runs. Hetzner says nested virtualization is not possible on its cloud servers, and IONOS does not document it. On boat, Docker, systemd and /dev/kvm are documented on every machine.

Do I pay for a stopped server?

On Hetzner, yes: a server bills at the full rate until you delete it. On IONOS, suspended Cubes keep billing, while a stopped vCPU server stops compute billing but its volumes still bill. On boat, a stopped sandbox costs nothing and keeps its disk.

Which one has GPUs and Windows?

IONOS Cloud rents NVIDIA H200 VMs with 1 to 8 GPUs and Windows Server VMs. Hetzner Cloud has neither. boat has no GPUs and no Windows guests, with Wine for Windows apps.

Where does my data run?

Hetzner Cloud runs in Germany and Finland, and also in the US and Singapore. IONOS Cloud runs in Germany, France and Spain, and also in the UK and the US. boat runs only in the EU (Germany, Finland and France), with EU data residency.

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