Netcup and Hetzner Online are two major providers in the European cloud infrastructure market. Both offer competitive price-to-performance metrics, but their underlying architectural philosophies and commercial pricing models are vastly different.
This benchmark analysis compares the Netcup Root Server G12 series against Hetzner Cloud (CPX and Dedicated CCX series) across CPU sustained throughput, NVMe storage performance, network routing, and total 3-year cost of ownership.
Architecture Model Comparison
- CPU: 100% Dedicated AMD EPYC 9645 Physical
- Steal Time: Constant 0.0% (No Throttling)
- Storage: 256GB - 2TB Enterprise PCIe 4 NVMe
- Traffic: 2.5 Gbps Fair-Use (3 TB / 24h)
- Network: 2.5 Gbit/s Redundant Uplink
- Billing: Fixed Contract (1 to 12 Months)
- CPU: Shared vCPU (Hypervisor Time-Sliced)
- Steal Time: Variable (5% to 20% in Peaks)
- Storage: 40GB - 160GB Local NVMe (Small)
- Traffic: 20 TB / Month Included
- Network: 1.0 Gbit/s Uplink
- Billing: Strictly Hourly / Per-Minute
1. Technical Head-to-Head: Hardware & Virtualization
To evaluate real-world parity, we pitted the Netcup RS 1000 G12 (€10.74/month 0% VAT net / €12.78 gross with 19% VAT) against the comparable Hetzner CPX21 (€9.50/month) and the dedicated Hetzner CCX23 (€38.50/month):
| Architectural Metric | Netcup RS 1000 G12 | Hetzner CPX21 (Shared) | Hetzner CCX23 (Dedicated) |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU Silicon | 4 Dedicated Physical Cores (AMD EPYC 9645 “Turin”) | 3 Shared vCPUs (AMD EPYC) | 4 Dedicated vCPUs (AMD EPYC) |
| Memory | 8 GB DDR5 ECC | 4 GB RAM | 16 GB DDR4/DDR5 ECC |
| Storage Capacity | 256 GB PCIe 4.0 NVMe | 80 GB NVMe | 160 GB NVMe |
| Monthly Traffic | 2.5 Gbps Fair-Use (3 TB/24h soft limit) | 20 TB / Month | 20 TB / Month |
| Egress Overuse Fee | €0.00 (Throttles to 300 Mbps, auto-resumes) | €1.19 per TB | €1.19 per TB |
| Network Uplink | 2.5 Gbit/s | 1.0 Gbit/s | 1.0 Gbit/s |
| Base Price (Gross 19% VAT) | €12.78 / month | €9.50 / month | €38.50 / month |
| Base Price (Non-EU 0% VAT) | €10.74 / month | €7.98 / month | €32.35 / month |
2. 72-Hour Stress Test & Performance Benchmarks
Using standardized YABS (Yet Another Bench Script) and FIO storage profiles, both machines were subjected to sustained compilation and synthetic database query loads:
A. Geekbench 6 CPU Benchmark
Geekbench 6 Single-Core Performance:
Netcup RS 1000 G12 (AMD EPYC 9645) : [====================] 2,315 pts
Hetzner CCX23 (AMD EPYC Dedicated) : [================== ] 2,050 pts
Hetzner CPX21 (AMD EPYC Shared) : [============== ] 1,690 pts
Geekbench 6 Multi-Core Performance:
Netcup RS 1000 G12 (4 Dedicated) : [====================] 8,420 pts
Hetzner CCX23 (4 Dedicated) : [================== ] 7,950 pts
Hetzner CPX21 (3 Shared vCPUs) : [========== ] 4,120 pts
B. CPU Steal Time Under Continuous Multi-Tenant Stress
- Netcup RS Series: Throughout 72 hours of uninterrupted 100% CPU pinning (
stress-ng), the CPU Steal Time remained locked at 0.0%. Netcup’s Terms of Service explicitly permit indefinite 100% CPU utilization. - Hetzner CPX Series: Average steal time registered at 4.2%, with evening European peak spikes reaching 18.7%, causing tail latency degradation in relational database operations.
C. NVMe Storage I/O (fio 4K Random Read/Write)
- Netcup RS 1000 G12: ~248,000 Read IOPS / ~82,000 Write IOPS (Direct PCIe 4.0 redundant software RAID). Average write latency: 0.04 ms.
- Hetzner Cloud: ~115,000 Read IOPS / ~52,000 Write IOPS. Average write latency: 0.08 ms.
3. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Analysis: Storage and Bandwidth Costs
When evaluating base prices, it is important to factor in additional costs for storage and egress traffic when sizing infrastructure for larger environments (e.g., requiring 500 GB NVMe storage and 30 TB bandwidth):
Scenario: Running a Production Web Application with 500GB Data
-
Hetzner Deployment Cost:
- Base Dedicated CCX23 (160GB NVMe included): €38.50/mo
- Extra Block Storage Volume (340 GB @ €0.052/GB): €17.68/mo
- Extra Bandwidth (10 TB overage @ €1.19/TB): €11.90/mo
- Total Hetzner Monthly Bill: ~€68.08 / month (€816.96 / year)
-
Netcup Deployment Cost:
- Netcup RS 2000 G12 (Includes 8 Dedicated Cores, 16GB DDR5 ECC, 512GB NVMe, and 2.5 Gbps Fair-Use Bandwidth): €18.00 / month (0% VAT net)
- Extra Storage: €0.00
- Extra Bandwidth: €0.00
- Total Netcup Monthly Bill: €18.00 / month (€216.00 / year at 0% VAT, or €21.42/mo gross)
[!IMPORTANT] In this specific 500GB / 30TB scenario, Netcup’s bundled model results in an annual saving of over €600 compared to Hetzner’s dedicated compute and volume pricing (€216/yr vs €816/yr), while providing twice the dedicated CPU cores (8 EPYC Zen 5 cores vs 4 vCPUs).
4. Decision Matrix: Which Provider Should You Choose?
Choose Hetzner Cloud When:
- Dynamic Ephemeral Workloads: You deploy microservices that spin up and destroy automatically via CI/CD pipelines (GitLab runner, GitHub Actions) and require billing to the exact minute.
- Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC): You rely heavily on mature, first-party Terraform providers, Packer integrations, and dynamic Kubernetes cluster-autoscalers.
- Short-Term Staging: You need a test instance for 3 hours and want to delete it immediately.
Choose Netcup Root Server When:
- Permanent Production Systems: High-traffic eCommerce stores (WooCommerce, Shopware), SaaS backends, corporate databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis).
- Compute-Intensive Operations: Continuous data scraping, video encoding, machine learning inference, game servers, where CPU throttling cannot be tolerated.
- High Storage & Bandwidth Needs: Media storage, Nextcloud instances, large Docker registries, where Hetzner’s volume surcharges would become prohibitive.
- Maximum Performance Per Euro: You want the absolute highest computational power per dollar spent in Europe.