Hetzner CX Not Available: What to Buy Instead (2026)

The verdict: Hetzner’s budget CX and Arm CAX lines are still down today. The status page has an open “Limited availability of cloud instances” notice that started 26 June 2026, and every Cost-Optimized plan shows the “not available” wall. Don’t wait on it for anything urgent. Who picks what: stay on Hetzner with a CPX12 (from €15.05/month incl. 25.5% VAT) if you want zero migration and the same API, firewalls, and VPN intact. Move to netcup VPS 500 G12 (from €5.91/month incl. 19% VAT) if you want budget pricing with more RAM and unlimited traffic, but know netcup’s ARM line is also sold out. Datalix is sold out across all four KVM lines as of September 2026, so don’t slot it in as a “buy today” option. Skip Contabo. It wins on specs per euro, but we ran workloads there and moved off: unstable, uptime short of what was advertised, and support that went quiet exactly when boxes were down.

Affiliate disclosure: Some links in this post are affiliate links. If you click through and buy, SaaSpicious may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We check prices against each vendor’s live pricing page and name the downsides on both sides regardless.

Prices accurate as of September 2026; check the vendor’s site for current rates.

What happened to Hetzner CX?

Every Cost-Optimized plan is affected, not just one SKU. As of 10 September 2026 all eight carry the badge: the x86 CX23, CX33, CX43 and CX53, and the Arm CAX11, CAX21, CAX31 and CAX41. The Create button is disabled on each. The Regular Performance (CPX) and Dedicated vCPU (CCX) lines carry no such label and remain orderable.

The homepage now labels the entire Cost-Optimized line “Currently not available,” and the status page has carried the same open incident since 26 June 2026, which our captured status-page evidence confirms:

Hetzner’s own wording on the Cost-Optimized page describes the cause as a hardware supply crunch: “proven hardware generations” run low and “available servers is limited.” This is an episodic budget-hardware drought, not a sudden permanent deprecation of the CX line. It is also not a glitch on your account: the badge is server-wide and affects every logged-out visitor the same way.

Will CX come back? Almost certainly yes, but supply is bursty and unpredictable. Hetzner refreshes hardware in batches; when a run of the budget SKUs sells out it stays out until the next batch lands. There is no reserve pool, so “check back later” can mean days or weeks. If you have the latitude, set a reminder and keep a fallback ready. If you need compute now, read on. The options below are orderable today.

Option 1: Hetzner Regular Performance (CPX), the zero-migration answer

If you already run on Hetzner, the CPX line is the lowest-friction escape hatch. Same API, same console, same firewall rules, same private networks, same object storage and load balancers. You lift your existing VM setup onto a CPX11 or CPX12 and nothing else about your stack changes.

Where CPX wins: zero migration, no firewall rewrite, same Terraform provider, same billing account, and your existing VPC and snapshots carry over. For a production box that is live today, this is the safest hour-one move.

Where CPX loses: it costs roughly double the CX entry point. CX23 was from €5.99/month excl. VAT (€7.52/month incl. VAT) before the drought; the nearest size by specs today is the CPX12 at from €15.05/month incl. 25.5% VAT, and the CPX11 tier lists at from €22.58/month incl. 25.5% VAT. So the “cheap entry level” you came for is now not-cheap at Hetzner. If the whole point of the CX line was the price, CPX defeats it.

Option 2: netcup VPS G12, the budget value alternative

netcup’s current-generation x86 VPS is the closest direct budget competitor in Germany, and it is in stock. The entry VPS 500 G12 runs €5.91 per month (incl. 19% VAT) for 2 vCores, 4 GB DDR5 ECC RAM, 128 GB NVMe, and unlimited traffic. That is more storage and memory per euro than the CX line ever offered, with unlimited traffic on most vServer tiers.

Where netcup wins: the cheapest per-euro x86 box here, with DDR5 ECC RAM and NVMe, so small-to-mid workloads that outgrew a budget Hetzner plan have headroom without re-architecting.

Where netcup loses: the control panel (CCP) is denser and less polished than Hetzner’s console; there are no managed load balancers out of the box, and backups and certain add-ons cost extra. And the big one for this post: netcup’s ARM line is also sold out:

So if you were chasing CAX specifically for the Arm price-to-performance, netcup won’t rescue that plan either. You’d land on their x86 G12 lines here.

Option 3: Contabo, cheap for a reason — we’d skip it

Contabo looks unbeatable on paper: lots of vCores, RAM, and storage per euro. That part is real. Our advice is still to stay away, and this is the one recommendation in this post that comes from running the thing rather than reading the pricing page.

We ran workloads on Contabo and the experience was bad enough that we moved off. It was not stable. The uptime we actually got did not match what was advertised. Problems were constant rather than occasional, and support was the worst part of it — slow when it replied at all, and least responsive exactly when something was down and we needed it most.

That is our experience, not a benchmark, and one customer’s bad run can be luck. So it matters that the public record points the same way: Contabo sits at 2.6/10 across 46 user reviews on WHTop, and the recurring themes in independent reviews are tickets going unanswered during outages, vague status updates, and paid backups that don’t work when called on. Reviews are genuinely mixed — plenty of people run Contabo boxes happily on price alone — but the failure mode people describe is consistent, and it is the same one we hit.

If your budget is the only constraint and the workload can tolerate a bad week, Contabo is cheap for a reason and you may be fine. If the box needs to stay up, or you need someone to answer when it doesn’t, spend the extra few euros elsewhere in this list.

Option 4: Datalix and Cherry Servers

• Datalix: do not buy today. As of September 2026, Datalix shows sold out across all four KVM lines (Ryzen, Epyc, Xeon, IPv6). There is no “buy now” button because there is nothing to buy. The prices were always low, but a sold-out box costs you time either way. Skip it for an urgent deployment.

  

• Cherry Servers: the premium upmarket move. If budget CX is the problem because you actually need something beefier, Cherry Servers is a premium EU alternative with dedicated hardware, 24/7 human support, and instant deployment. It costs clearly more than any VPS here, so treat it as the move when you need guaranteed resources and hands-on support rather than the cheapest box.

Hetzner CX unavailability: FAQ

Which Hetzner plans are unavailable?

All eight Cost-Optimized plans: CX23, CX33, CX43 and CX53 on x86, and CAX11, CAX21, CAX31 and CAX41 on Arm. Regular Performance (CPX) and Dedicated vCPU (CCX) are unaffected and still orderable as of 10 September 2026.

Why is Hetzner CX not available?

Hetzner’s status page has carried an open notice titled “Limited availability of cloud instances” since 26 June 2026, 06:00 UTC, listing Cloud Server as the affected system. Hetzner’s own Cost-Optimized page attributes it to hardware supply: the “proven hardware generations” these plans run on are in short supply. Hetzner has not published anything more specific than that.

Is Hetzner CX discontinued?

No. The notice is a limited-availability incident, not a discontinuation, and the plans are still listed with their specs and prices — just unorderable. That is a meaningful difference: the pages would normally come down entirely if the line were retired.

When will Hetzner CX be back in stock?

Hetzner has not announced a date, and the notice has stayed open since June. If your need is urgent, treat it as unavailable and pick from the options above rather than waiting — you can always move back when stock returns.

Is the Arm CAX line affected too?

Yes, all four CAX plans carry the same badge. If you specifically wanted Arm price-to-performance, note that netcup’s ARM line is also sold out, so this post has no in-stock Arm recommendation today.

Action checklist

Decide based on your workload:

• Need compute right now, already on Hetzner, production box: order a CPX12 (from €15.05/month incl. 25.5% VAT) and migrate. Smallest blast radius.
• Need the cheapest x86 box, can live without managed load balancers: go netcup VPS 500 G12 (from €5.91/month incl. 19% VAT). More RAM and storage per euro than the old CX, and it is in stock.
• Chasing Arm specifically: both Hetzner CAX and netcup ARM are sold out. If you must have Arm today, this post has no in-stock recommendation; check back on both, or step up to a premium provider.
• Urgent, load-sensitive, and willing to pay up: Cherry Servers covers guaranteed resources with human support.

Need a hand migrating a live workload off Hetzner’s CX line? That is exactly the kind of move we help with.

For the broader budget field, our best cheaper Hetzner alternatives roundup, the netcup vs Hetzner spec-by-spec, and the Datalix vs Hetzner stock note all go deeper than this action guide.