Hetzner, Contabo and OVHcloud: entry-level GPU comparison, hourly and monthly pricing

Anyone looking to test an inference load or lightweight fine-tuning without opening an account on AWS or Google Cloud has three solid options in Europe today: Hetzner, Contabo and OVHcloud. We checked the official price lists on 22 October 2026, price by price.

Hetzner: not "Cloud", it's a dedicated server

First, a clarification that matters for those making a choice: the Hetzner GPU product is not in the "Hetzner Cloud" catalogue (the CX, CPX, CCX instances provisioned via API in seconds), but in "Dedicated Root Server". The entry-level model is called GEX45 and is a physical bare-metal machine, not a VM on a shared hypervisor. From the official product page: NVIDIA RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell SFF Edition GPU with 24 GB of ECC GDDR7 VRAM, Intel Core i5-13500 CPU, 64 GB of DDR4 RAM, two 512 GB NVMe disks. The price is €214 per month plus a setup fee of €209, with an hourly rate of €0.3429 net. No commitment period, immediate cancellation available.

It's worth remembering that these price lists shift: on the higher-end GEX131 model, in the same 2026, the price rose from €1,197.30 (15 June list) to €1,499 (recorded on 13 October), a 25% increase in four months. There's no guarantee the GEX45 will hold steady for long.

Contabo: a single model, but with plenty of VRAM

Contabo launched its first dedicated GPU product in 2026 and, unlike Hetzner, does not offer a range of options: a single plan, GPU VPS, with an NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell with 96 GB of VRAM, 18 vCPU, 96 GB of RAM and 900 GB of NVMe storage. The price is €999 per month excluding VAT, with a 15% discount for a 12-month commitment and 20% for 24 months. It's not truly "entry-level" in the strict sense: it's the only gateway Contabo offers in this segment today, and it costs more than twice the Hetzner GEX45 for a much larger GPU.

OVHcloud: the widest range, hourly billing only

OVHcloud is the only one of the three with a true tiered catalogue of Cloud GPU instances. The entry-level tier is the Quadro RTX 5000 with 16 GB GDDR6, available from $0.60 per hour. The official page does not publish a fixed monthly price for this tier: billing is hourly, with no fixed plan like Contabo offers. Working it out, continuous use for a month (roughly 730 hours) would bring the cost above $400, but that's an arithmetic estimate based on the published hourly rate, not a tariff published by OVHcloud.

The table

Provider	Product	GPU	VRAM	Hourly rate	Monthly price	Minimum commitment
Hetzner (Dedicated Root Server)	GEX45	RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell SFF	24 GB	€0.3429/hour	€214.00/month + €209 setup	None
Contabo	GPU VPS	RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell	96 GB	Not published	€999/month (−15% at 12 months, −20% at 24 months)	Monthly, no lock-in on base plan
OVHcloud	Cloud GPU	Quadro RTX 5000	16 GB	from $0.60/hour	Not published (hourly billing only)	None, but no fixed plan

For short test runs

For a trial of a few hours, OVHcloud remains the only one with pure hourly billing and no setup fee. For full-month continuous use, Hetzner's GEX45 costs less than a quarter of Contabo's plan, but with significantly less capable GPU in VRAM: 24 GB versus 96 GB. Anyone needing to load large models into dedicated VRAM should look at Contabo or higher-tier OVHcloud options (L40S, H100), not the entry-level.