Seedbox or a VPS in 2026? We priced Hetzner after the June increase

The short answer, and the number nobody has updated yet

If you want Plex, a download client and the Arr stack, a managed box is cheaper and finished. If you want root on a machine you can do anything with, or you want to store 40 TB for less than a hundred euros a month, a VPS or a dedicated server wins and it isn't close.

What's changed is the middle of that sentence. Hetzner is the host everybody means when they say "just get a cheap VPS", and on 15 June 2026 Hetzner put its cloud prices up. Some of them went up a lot. Their own price adjustment page has the table, and it is worth reading before you take advice written in 2024.

Monthly, excluding VAT, excluding an IPv4 address, for Germany and Finland. The CPX and CCX lines are the ones people were recommending for Plex, because they're the ones with enough CPU to transcode. CPX52 went from EUR 36.49 to EUR 100.49. CCX23 went from EUR 31.49 to EUR 85.99. Any blog post, forum reply or comparison table quoting the old column is now telling you about a price you can't buy.

What a cloud VPS actually gives you for the money

Here's the part that decides most of these arguments, and it has nothing to do with CPU. Look at the disk.

A CX23 is EUR 5.49 a month and gives you 40 GB of disk. Appbox Lite is EUR 5 a month and gives you 500 GB. That's twelve times the storage for less money, before you have installed a single thing.

Go all the way up the cost-optimised line to a CX53, pay EUR 29.49, and you get 320 GB. That's still less space than our cheapest plan. For EUR 32 our Appbox +6 gives you 6 TB. The VPS gives you sixteen vCPUs you mostly won't use and a disk that fills up during your first season pack.

That's not a gotcha. It's what cloud servers are for. They're sized for web apps and databases, where 40 GB is plenty and the CPU is the expensive part. A media library is the opposite shape: enormous disk, modest CPU, and traffic that runs all night.

You can bolt block storage onto a cloud server, and Hetzner's volumes go from 10 GB to 10 TB in 1 GB steps. I'm not going to quote you a per-GB price, because their block storage page doesn't render one without JavaScript and I'd be making it up. Go and price it yourself in their console before you commit, and price it at the size you actually want, not at 100 GB.

Where a VPS genuinely wins

Two places, and both are real.

Bulk storage per euro. If what you want is a lot of terabytes and you don't care how you get them, rent a storage server. Hetzner's SX-line starts at EUR 82.30 a month plus a EUR 39 setup fee for the SX65-2, and the SX65 is built around four SATA drives of 16 TB or more with 128 GB of RAM. Four times sixteen is 64 TB of raw disk. Our biggest Appbox is 18 TB at EUR 96. On terabytes per euro that isn't a contest, and pretending otherwise would be silly.

Two things to weigh against it. The SX-line sits on a 1 GBit/s port, and every Appbox is on 10 Gbit, so the storage server is roughly a tenth of the speed for pulling files in and pushing them back out. And you're now the sysadmin: the RAID, the disk failures, the OS, the updates and the 3 AM debugging are yours. That's the trade, and if you want it, take it. We wrote up the same trade against buying hardware in NAS or seedbox for your media library, and the shape of the answer is the same: past a certain size, owning or renting the raw disk wins on price alone.

Anything that isn't media. Root on a blank server means you can run whatever you like. A game server, a build runner, a database, some half-finished thing you wrote on a Sunday. No managed platform is going to beat that, ours included. If the appeal of a VPS is that it's yours to break, a seedbox is the wrong purchase and you already know it.

The GPU question, answered properly

People say a VPS can't do hardware transcoding. That isn't true and we shouldn't say it. Hetzner sells dedicated GPU servers, and their cheapest listed one, GEX44-1, is EUR 232.30 a month plus a EUR 114 setup fee.

So the honest version is about the price, not the possibility. Hardware transcoding on a rented GPU server starts at a bit over EUR 230 a month. Our GPU Appbox starts a long way below that. If you only need one or two transcodes, you may not need a GPU at all, which is the argument in 4K transcoding on a seedbox: GPU vs CPU. Most libraries direct play most of the time, and a transcode you never trigger costs nothing to not have.

What about copyright notices?

You'll see it claimed, including in older copy on our own site, that Hetzner is hostile to torrenting. I went and read their system policies page today and it doesn't mention peer-to-peer, torrents or file sharing at all. So I'm not going to repeat a claim I can't source.

What I will say is that this is the question to ask, and to ask it before you pay rather than after. Any general-purpose provider has an abuse process, and you want to know what it does: does a first notice get forwarded to you, does a second one suspend the server, is there a strike count, and does anyone tell you before the machine goes off. Ask their support directly and keep the reply. It's a two-minute email that saves you a bad week.

The work you're actually signing up for

The bill is the easy part to compare. The work isn't, so here it is in order.

Before anything runs: pick and install an OS, lock down SSH, set up a firewall, install Docker, work out a reverse proxy, get certificates issued and renewing, create the users and directories, install the download client, install Plex or Jellyfin, install Sonarr and Radarr and Prowlarr, and then wire the paths so the download client and the media server are looking at the same files. That last one is where most people lose an evening, and it's the same trap we describe in the complete Arr stack guide.

Then, forever: OS patches, Docker updates, app updates that change a config format, certificate renewals that quietly stop working, a full disk at midnight, and a kernel upgrade that eats your mounts.

None of that is hard if you've done it before. If you've done it before, you probably want the VPS. If you haven't, the honest estimate is a weekend for the build and an hour or two a month after that, and you should put a value on those hours before you call the VPS cheaper. We've written down exactly which of those jobs we take off you and which ones stay yours in what a managed seedbox actually covers.

Managed doesn't have to mean locked down

The usual objection to a managed box is that you lose root and can only run what's in the catalogue. That's a fair thing to check, and the answer differs a lot between hosts. On an Appbox you get SSH and rootless Docker, so you can run your own containers next to the one-click apps, with HTTPS handled for you. We covered how that works in run your own Docker containers on a seedbox, and we went and checked which other hosts allow it in which seedbox hosts let you run Docker.

It isn't the same thing as root on your own kernel. You can't load a kernel module or bind port 443 yourself. For most people the gap between "rootless Docker plus a panel" and "full root on an empty machine" turns out to be smaller than they expected.

How to decide, in four questions

1. How many terabytes do you want? Under about 10 TB, a managed box is cheaper once you've added storage to a VPS. Well over that, price a storage server and do the sums.
2. Do you want to run non-media software on it? If yes, take the VPS. Nothing else is going to give you that.
3. What is a weekend worth to you? Answer honestly. A VPS at EUR 5.49 that costs you two days isn't EUR 5.49.
4. What happens when it breaks at 3 AM? On a VPS, you fix it. On a managed box, you open a ticket and go back to bed.

If you land on the managed side, every Appbox plan is unmetered on 10 Gbit and starts at EUR 5 for 500 GB, prices exclude VAT, and there's a pro-rata refund if you're not happy in the first seven days. You can see the whole line on our plans page, and the setup that follows is in how to set up Plex on a seedbox.

If you land on the VPS side, good. Price the disk first, ask the abuse question, and give yourself the weekend.

What's next

• NAS or seedbox for your media library, priced both ways
• Seedbox vs VPN in 2026, what each one actually does
• What a managed seedbox actually covers, and what it doesn't
• Why your seedbox is slow, and how to find the real cause