Linode vs Hetzner in 2026: Pricing, Locations, Latency, and Benchmarks

Linode vs Hetzner in 2026: Pricing, Locations, Latency, and Benchmarks

Linode and Hetzner are both popular for developers and small teams, but they’re different products in practice:

• Choose by location first (latency to users dominates many workloads)
• Then compare pricing, resource ratios (RAM/vCPU), and performance signals (benchmarks, storage type)
• Finally, verify policies (refund/termination, billing cycle, traffic)

Quick decision guide

Pick Linode if you care about:

• A wide set of global locations
• Measured latency tiers for specific cities
• A simple “it just works” cloud experience

Pick Hetzner if you care about:

• Strong price/performance in key regions
• Predictable plan lineup and simple pricing
• Measured latency tiers on their main cloud locations

How to compare (recommended workflow)

1. Decide where your users are (US East/West, EU, Asia, etc)
2. Open VPS Finder and filter by measured latency + budget/specs
3. Pick 1–2 candidates from each provider and validate:
   • latency + routing
   • disk performance (especially for DB workloads)
   • bandwidth/traffic caps

What “measured latency” means here

For plans marked as measured, we run reproducible ping measurements from a fixed set of probe regions and convert median RTT into tier labels. It’s still a snapshot, so always validate from your real audience.

Next steps

• If you’re choosing mainly by cost: Best VPS under $10
• If you’re choosing mainly by routing/latency: Best low latency VPS
• If you want performance-per-dollar signals: Best benchmarked VPS