In a discussion comparing Hetzner’s CX and CPX VPS plans, Canapin shares their experience migrating from a discontinued CPX31 (4 vCPUs, 8GB RAM, 15€/mo) to a CX43 (8 vCPUs, 16GB RAM, 10€/mo). Despite higher specs, the CX43 showed slower median page load times (876ms vs 523ms), which they initially attributed to “limited availability” — later clarified as older, cost-optimized hardware designed for variable workloads Canapin. Ed_S notes their smaller forum on an ARM-based CAX11 loads in ~400ms, suggesting workload size matters. Ed_S also explains shared cloud performance depends on neighboring tenants’ resource usage. eisammy warns that cloud hosting may struggle with high traffic and suggests bare metal alternatives like OVH or Netcup. Canapin confirms performance hasn’t improved over time and plans to test CPX32 (same specs as CPX31, cheaper). Falco adds that single-core performance — often better on lower-vCPU plans — likely explains the slowdown, aligning with pricing: higher cost per vCPU often means better per-core performance. The consensus: CX plans offer cost efficiency on older hardware for light/variable workloads, while CPX plans may deliver better consistent performance for active forums, despite higher cost.
My database is 23 GB and the forum is active daily, but niche.
My performance test is very… Let’s say, crude, but I guess it’s enough to see if the new plan is a good fit for my forum or not
I reloaded the home page 20 times and calculated the median loading time.
CPX31
CX43
Median loading time
523 ms
876 ms
And indeed, the forum feels slower to browse.
Despite the higher specs (double RAM and vCPUs) of the CX43, the low availability seems to be harming the loading time a lot (which is what matters most as a user). It might fluctuate over time so I won’t change to another plan right away, but in the meantime, I think it’s always good to know.
If you tried CX Hetzner’s server plans, please let us know your experience
The newer plan, CPX32, has same specs but is 3€ cheaper. ↩︎
Interesting. My home page load is about 400ms. I’m using CAX11, which is ARM based, and has only 40G storage. My compressed forum backup is only 1G. So, a much smaller forum, therefore perhaps faster load.
I would guess ‘limited availability’ means that Hetzner do not have many machines of this spec available. I wouldn’t expect any implication about performance.
Because these shared cloud plans divvy up CPU resources, they are ideal for development and testing environments, blogs, forums, CMS, small databases, and VPN servers.
Cost-efficient on older hardware generations, with limited availability. Ideal for variable workloads that can handle changing CPU performance. Optimized for low CPU usage with variable workloads.
(backend)
Optimized for cost efficiency, available only in limited capacity.
One thing about shared machines - and they always are shared - is that the other tenants might be very quiet, or very active. If they saturate the i/o, or use lots of memory bandwidth, you get a fair share, but that’ll be less than if they were quiet.
Yeah let me say something I’m watching a forum that using cloud too so maybe this be the big trouble for high traffic specially them that is was had many outages this month
I’m self-hosting using bare metal + virtualizor, you could try OVH or idk
That’s right. I know how it works, but I often forget it when looking at performances.
Out of curiosity, I measured reloading times to see if it changed, since the last time, but the median loading time is still the same (874ms Vs 876 last time).
I’ll try to move to a CPX32 (same specs as the discontinued CPX31, but cheaper, and as I heard, slightly better perfs) to see how it compares
Limited availability
