Hetzner has opened a new cloud data centre in Ashburn, Virginia — their second US location after Hillsboro, Oregon. This brings European-style pricing (€4.50/month for 4 GB RAM, 2 vCPU) to the US East Coast and significantly improves latency for East Coast and European users.
Why Ashburn matters
Ashburn, Virginia is the internet infrastructure capital of the US East Coast. It hosts the largest concentration of data centres in the world, including major peering exchanges. Being in Ashburn means:
- Direct peering with major ISPs and content networks
- Low latency to New York, Washington DC, Boston, and Atlanta (under 10ms)
- Cross-connects to AWS, Google Cloud, and other providers
- Transatlantic cables terminating nearby, giving low latency to Europe
The Hillsboro location serves the West Coast well but adds 70-90ms of latency for East Coast users. Ashburn fixes this: Virginia to London is roughly 70ms, and Virginia to Frankfurt is about 85ms.
Performance benchmarks
Initial benchmarks from the Ashburn location (CX22, 4 GB, 2 vCPU):
| Test | Result |
|---|---|
| UnixBench (single-core) | ~1,150 |
| Disk I/O (NVMe) | ~1,900 MB/s read |
| Latency to NYC | 5-8 ms |
| Latency to London | 70-75 ms |
| Latency to Frankfurt | 85-90 ms |
| Latency to San Francisco | 60-65 ms |
The East Coast-to-Europe latency (70-85ms) makes Ashburn a viable option for serving both US East Coast and Western European users from a single server — something that was harder to achieve from Hillsboro.
Pricing parity
Notably, US pricing is identical to European pricing:
- CX22: $4.97 (€4.50 equivalent)
- CX32: $9.94 (€9.00 equivalent)
- CX42: $19.88 (€18.00 equivalent)
Traffic between Hetzner’s own data centres (including between Germany and US) is free and unmetered. This means you can run a database in Nuremberg and a web server in Ashburn without bandwidth costs between them.
What this means for hosting choices
For US-based developers, Hetzner has gone from “great value if your users are in Europe” to “great value if your users are anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere.” The Ashburn location combined with Hetzner’s pricing makes it competitive with — and often cheaper than — any US-based VPS provider.
A comparison for a WordPress site targeting a US audience:
| Provider | RAM | vCPU | Storage | Transfer | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hetzner CX22 (Ashburn) | 4 GB | 2 | 40 GB NVMe | 20 TB | $4.97/mo |
| DigitalOcean Basic | 1 GB | 1 | 25 GB SSD | 1 TB | $6/mo |
| Linode Shared | 1 GB | 1 | 25 GB SSD | 1 TB | $5/mo |
| Vultr Regular | 1 GB | 1 | 25 GB SSD | 1 TB | $6/mo |
For the same $6 that gets you 1 GB RAM elsewhere, Hetzner gives you 4 GB. And the performance (AMD EPYC, NVMe storage) is superior. The value proposition is difficult to argue with.
Caveats
Hetzner’s account verification remains strict for new US customers. Some report needing to provide photo ID and wait 24-48 hours for approval. This is a one-time hurdle, but it means you cannot spin up a server instantly on a Sunday evening.
The Ashburn location currently has limited capacity. During the launch, some instance types showed as “temporarily unavailable.” This should resolve as Hetzner scales the facility, but early adopters may face provisioning delays.
The bottom line
Hetzner in Ashburn changes the hosting value equation for the US East Coast. At $5/month for 4 GB RAM on modern hardware, no US provider comes close. If you are comfortable with European-style account verification and do not need the managed services ecosystem of DigitalOcean, Hetzner is now the best value VPS for US East Coast workloads.