Self-hosting ERPNext on Hetzner: what it actually costs in 2026

There's a lot of hand-waving in ERP hosting discussions. "Self-hosting is cheaper" gets said a lot without numbers attached, and "managed hosting is easier" gets said without acknowledging what you're paying for that ease.

We run ERPNext for clients on self-hosted infrastructure. Here's what it actually costs, what it takes to run properly, and where the trade-offs sit.

The short answer

For a small-business ERPNext instance — say 15 to 30 users, moderate transaction volume, a few custom modules — you're looking at roughly £45 to £95 per month in infrastructure costs on Hetzner's dedicated-vCPU servers, including backups. Hetzner's ARM tier can bring that down to £15–25 a month all-in, with a caveat we'll come to.

Worth saying plainly: Hetzner raised its x86 cloud prices sharply on 15 June 2026 — the dedicated-vCPU tier roughly doubled. Older guides (and older evaluations, including ones we'd done ourselves) quote figures around £11–22 a month for these servers; those numbers are out of date. Even at the new prices, though, the totals remain a fraction of comparable managed ERP platform costs — so it's worth explaining what you get and what the figure doesn't cover.

What does ERPNext actually need?

ERPNext is a Python application built on the Frappe framework, backed by MariaDB, with Redis for caching and queuing, and a Node.js process for real-time features. It's not lightweight, but it's not enormous either.

Resource requirements scale with concurrent users rather than total users. A business with 20 staff might only have 5 people using the system simultaneously at peak. The rule of thumb that holds up in practice:

• Up to 10 concurrent users. 2 vCPU and 4–8GB RAM.
• 10 to 25 concurrent users. 4 vCPU and 8–16GB RAM.
• 25 to 50 concurrent users. 8 vCPU and 16–32GB RAM.

Storage depends entirely on how many documents you attach. A business generating a few hundred jobs a year with PDFs and photos attached might use 20–50GB. If you're storing large design files or high-resolution site photos, plan for more.

What does Hetzner actually charge?

Hetzner Cloud offers two relevant x86 server families.

• CX, shared vCPU. The cheaper tier. You share CPU cores with other tenants — fine for development or very light production use, but you can hit noisy-neighbour problems where someone else's workload affects your performance.
• CCX, dedicated vCPU. Cores that belong only to you, with consistent, predictable performance. This is what we use for production.

Current CCX pricing (post the June 2026 increase), approximately:

• CCX13. 2 dedicated vCPU, 8GB RAM, 80GB NVMe storage — roughly £37 a month.
• CCX23. 4 dedicated vCPU, 16GB RAM, 160GB NVMe storage — roughly £74 a month.
• CCX33. 8 dedicated vCPU, 32GB RAM, 240GB NVMe storage — roughly £119 a month.

All include 20TB of traffic, which no small-business ERP will come close to using.

There's also a third family worth knowing about since the price rises: CAX, Hetzner's ARM-based servers, which were barely touched by the increase. A CAX21 (4 vCPU, 8GB RAM) is roughly £9 a month and a CAX31 (8 vCPU, 16GB) roughly £18. ERPNext and the Frappe stack run on ARM64, so for cost-sensitive deployments CAX is genuinely worth evaluating — the caveat is that every custom module and dependency in your stack needs to build cleanly on ARM, which is exactly the kind of thing to prove on a staging server before committing.

For most small businesses, a CCX13 at around £37 a month is sufficient. If you want headroom or you're running multiple environments, a CCX23 at roughly £74 a month gives you plenty of room — and if the budget matters more than x86 familiarity, test the ARM route first.

Backups: the part people skip

A server without a tested backup strategy is a business continuity incident waiting to happen. Two layers matter.

• Hetzner snapshots and backups. Hetzner offers automated backups at roughly 20 per cent of the server cost — about £7.40 a month on a CCX13. This gives you point-in-time server images. Useful for rolling back a bad upgrade, useless if the whole Hetzner account is compromised.
• Offsite object storage. This is the important one. Frappe has built-in backup commands that produce database dumps and file archives. Push those to S3-compatible storage on a schedule. Wasabi costs around 7 US dollars per terabyte per month with no egress fees, which for a small-business ERP backup set is a few pounds a month at most.

The setup that works: a nightly database and files backup pushed to Wasabi with 30-day retention, plus Hetzner's own server backups for fast rollback. Total additional cost, roughly £10 a month on a CCX13.

And test your restores. A backup you've never restored from is a hypothesis, not a backup. Restore to a staging server quarterly and confirm the data is intact.

What does self-hosting actually involve?

This is where the honest accounting matters. The infrastructure is cheap. The operational overhead is not zero.

Initial setup

Setting up takes a day or so if you know what you're doing: provision the server, harden it (key-only SSH access, intrusion protection such as fail2ban, firewall rules), install the Frappe bench, configure Nginx and SSL certificates via Let's Encrypt, set up the ERPNext site, configure email, schedule the backup jobs, and put monitoring in place.

Ongoing maintenance

Ongoing maintenance is the part that catches people out:

• OS security patches — Ubuntu LTS with unattended security updates, plus manual review for everything else
• ERPNext and Frappe version upgrades, which need testing before applying, especially with custom modules
• SSL certificate renewal — automated with certbot, but worth monitoring
• Database maintenance and optimisation as tables grow
• Monitoring disk space, memory and queue health
• Log rotation so logs don't eat the disk
• Responding when something breaks at an inconvenient time

None of this is difficult if you're comfortable on Linux. All of it is a problem if you're not, or if you don't have time.

The honest comparison

Here's how self-hosting stacks up against the alternatives.

Frappe Cloud

Frappe's own managed hosting starts at roughly 25 US dollars a month for a basic instance and scales up from there. You get automated backups, one-click upgrades, monitoring, and support from the people who build ERPNext.

The trade-offs: less control over the underlying environment, custom app deployment goes through their process, and costs scale as you grow. But for a business without technical resource, it removes a genuine burden.

Self-hosted and self-managed

£45–95 a month in dedicated-x86 infrastructure (less on ARM), plus your own time. Full control over everything — the OS, the database, custom modules, upgrade timing, backup strategy.

The trade-off: you own the operational responsibility. If you're technically comfortable and the system isn't business-critical enough to need round-the-clock response, this is very good value.

Self-hosted, managed by a provider

The same infrastructure, bundled into a monthly service fee that covers the management. This is the model we offer clients — dedicated infrastructure and full control, without needing Linux skills in-house.

The trade-off: more expensive than managing it yourself, obviously. But cheaper than hiring for the skill, or being stuck when something breaks.

Why not just use a bigger cloud provider?

Reasonable question. AWS, Azure and Google Cloud all run ERPNext perfectly well.

The issue is cost. An equivalent AWS instance with the same specification as a Hetzner CCX13, plus block storage, plus data transfer charges, still comes out substantially higher — even after Hetzner's 2026 price rises narrowed the gap. For enterprise workloads with compliance requirements and existing cloud commitments, that premium buys you things that matter. For a 15-person business running an ERP, it mostly buys you a bigger bill.

Hetzner's European data centres are in Germany and Finland, which keeps your data inside the EEA — a territory the UK treats as adequate for GDPR purposes. That's usually sufficient for UK businesses.

The one genuine consideration: Hetzner's support is email-based and business-hours. If you need a phone number and a four-hour SLA, that's not what you're buying.

What does a sensible setup look like?

For reference, here's the shape of setup that has worked well for the systems we run:

• Server. Hetzner CCX13 or CCX23 depending on load, running Ubuntu LTS.
• Application. Frappe bench in production mode, supervisor-managed.
• Web. Nginx reverse proxy, Let's Encrypt SSL with automatic renewal.
• Database. MariaDB on the same server for small deployments; a separate instance if load justifies it.
• Backups. Nightly Frappe backup pushed to offsite S3-compatible storage with 30-day retention, plus Hetzner server backups.
• Monitoring. Uptime monitoring on the site, disk and memory alerts, queue health checks.
• DNS. A proxying CDN such as Cloudflare in front, for DDoS protection and to keep the origin server's address private.
• Access. SSH keys only, no password authentication, fail2ban and a firewall.

Nothing exotic. That's rather the point.

When is self-hosting the wrong answer?

We'd steer someone away from self-hosting if:

• Nobody in the business is comfortable on a Linux command line and there's no budget for a managed provider
• The system is critical enough that an outage at 11pm on a Sunday needs an immediate response, and nobody's available to give one
• Regulatory requirements demand specific certifications the hosting provider must hold
• You genuinely just want it to work and don't care about the cost difference

There's no shame in any of those. Managed hosting exists for good reasons.

The bottom line

ERPNext self-hosted on Hetzner costs roughly £45–95 a month for dedicated-x86 infrastructure and backups — or £15–25 on ARM if your stack proves out there. That's still a fraction of what comparable managed ERP platforms charge, and you get complete control over customisation, upgrade timing, and your data.

The cost you're not seeing on that line is the operational time to run it properly — which is either your time, or the cost of someone doing it for you.

For businesses with technical capability, self-hosting is excellent value. For those without, the honest comparison isn't £45 a month versus, say, £150 a month for someone to manage the hosting for you. It's £45 a month plus the risk of not knowing what you're doing, versus £150 a month and someone else's problem.

Pick accordingly.

Frequently asked questions

How much does it cost to self-host ERPNext on Hetzner?

Roughly £45–95 a month for a small-business instance on dedicated-vCPU servers, including backups, at the prices in force since June 2026. A CCX13 with 2 dedicated vCPU and 8GB RAM costs about £37 a month and is sufficient for most deployments of 15 to 30 users; Hetzner's ARM tier (CAX) can bring the total down to £15–25 a month if your stack runs on ARM64.

What server specification does ERPNext need?

Size for concurrent users, not total users. Up to 10 concurrent users runs comfortably on 2 vCPU and 4–8GB RAM; 10 to 25 concurrent users wants 4 vCPU and 8–16GB; 25 to 50 concurrent users wants 8 vCPU and 16–32GB.

Is Hetzner suitable for UK businesses under GDPR?

Usually, yes. Hetzner's European data centres are in Germany and Finland, which keeps data inside the EEA — a territory the UK treats as adequate for GDPR purposes.

Should a non-technical business self-host ERPNext?

Not on its own. If nobody in the business is comfortable on a Linux command line, either use managed hosting such as Frappe Cloud or have a provider run dedicated infrastructure on your behalf. The infrastructure is cheap; the operational responsibility is the real cost.

Weighing up self-hosting against a managed setup for your own business? Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll talk through what your system actually needs — including when the honest answer is that you don't need us.