Netcup vs Hetzner (2026): Dedicated EPYC Root Servers vs Hetzner Cloud Architecture
Netcup (AS197540) and Hetzner Online (AS24940) are the two pillars of German infrastructure engineering, yet their hypervisor scheduling, storage topologies, and commercial billing models solve fundamentally different architectural problems. Hetzner Cloud is engineered for elastic, hourly-billed cloud orchestration with native L4/L7 load balancers, floating IPs, and Terraform autoscaling. Netcup is engineered for sustained baseline compute density—offering pinned AMD EPYC 9645 "Turin" (Zen 5) cores on its Root Server line (starting at €10.86/mo net / €12.93/mo gross on RS 500 G12.5 and €18.26/mo net / €21.73/mo gross on RS 1000 G12.5), local RAID-backed NVMe storage without Ceph network hops, and unmetered fair-use 2.5 Gbit/s bandwidth on 12-month commitments.