Comparing OpenMetal, Hetzner, and OVHcloud for Proxmox VE Hosting

You’ve already decided on Proxmox. Now you’re staring at three very different pricing pages, three different hardware philosophies, and no clean way to compare them, because none of these providers frame their offering the same way.

That’s a real problem, because “Proxmox hosting” means something different depending on which of these three you’re looking at. One sells you consumer-grade hardware at a genuinely aggressive price. One sells a wide, complex range built for European SMB compliance requirements. One sells dedicated enterprise hardware with a support relationship built around running Proxmox specifically. None of that shows up clearly until you dig past the homepage pricing.

The Three Approaches to Proxmox Hosting

Before comparing specs line by line, it helps to understand what each provider is actually optimized for, because that shapes every decision downstream.

Hetzner built its business on aggressive, high-volume pricing using consumer and workstation-class hardware, primarily AMD Ryzen, sold with minimal support and a strong self-service, community-driven culture. It’s genuinely excellent value for teams that want to run their own show.

OVHcloud operates a much wider, more complex product range (Rise, Advance, Scale, and more) aimed at covering everything from budget web hosting to enterprise-grade infrastructure, with built-in features like DDoS protection and processor-level confidential computing options on some lines. The breadth is real, but so is the complexity of figuring out which range you actually need.

OpenMetal takes a narrower approach: large-scale dedicated hardware with high core counts, large memory configurations, and all-NVMe storage, sold with a support relationship built specifically around Proxmox, including handling Proxmox support subscription procurement directly as an authorized reseller.

Hardware and Pricing Head to Head

Pricing across all three shifted meaningfully in 2026, so current numbers matter more than they usually would.

Hetzner

Hetzner’s dedicated line splits into the AX series (AMD Ryzen) and EX series (Intel), plus a discounted server auction for decommissioned hardware. The AX41-NVMe (Ryzen 5 3600, 6 cores/12 threads, 64GB DDR4, 2x512GB NVMe) runs around €42-49 per month, and the AX102 (Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 128GB DDR5, 2×1.92TB NVMe) runs around €122 per month. That’s genuinely aggressive pricing for the raw hardware.

It’s worth knowing Hetzner raised dedicated server prices in April 2026 by roughly 3-21% across the AX line, and restructured its broader server pricing again in June 2026, so the gap against enterprise providers has narrowed somewhat from where it stood a year ago.

The tradeoff is the hardware class itself. Ryzen desktop and workstation CPUs are strong for the price, but they’re not the same category as server-grade Xeon or EPYC silicon built for sustained, multi-tenant virtualization workloads, and support beyond the hardware itself is largely self-service and community-driven.

OVHcloud

OVHcloud’s Rise range starts around $62-66 per month for general-purpose configurations up to 128GB RAM on a 500Mbps public connection, backed by a 99.90% SLA.

The Advance range, better suited to SMB virtualization workloads like Proxmox, scales up to 1TB of RAM with public bandwidth options from 1 to 5 Gbps, with Advance-1 2026 configurations starting around $107-134 per month depending on region and installation fees. Some Advance-line servers also ship with processor-level confidential computing support (Intel SGX or AMD SEV), exposed as a simple toggle in the OVHcloud control panel at the hardware level. As with any confidential computing feature, whether a given hypervisor, Proxmox included, actually uses it inside a specific VM depends on your own configuration on top of that hardware capability. It’s worth knowing this isn’t unique among the three either way; OpenMetal also offers TDX and SGX-capable hardware configurations, just via a dedicated server SKU rather than a control panel toggle on general-purpose hardware.

The tradeoff here is navigating the range itself. Rise, Advance, Scale, and the newer cloud-integrated Metal Instances all target different needs with overlapping naming, and figuring out which specific configuration actually matches a serious Proxmox deployment takes more research than either of the other two options.

OpenMetal

OpenMetal’s bare metal lineup runs dual-socket Intel Xeon configurations across the current v4 and v5 generations, ranging from Medium configurations (24 cores/48 threads, 256GB DDR5) up through XL and XXL configurations (up to 64 cores/128 threads, up to 2TB DDR5), with all-NVMe storage as standard rather than an add-on. Current pricing and configurations are on our bare metal pricing page. Every server includes dual 10Gbps private networking as standard, which matters directly for Proxmox cluster traffic and Ceph storage networking if you scale into a hyperconverged setup.

The tradeoff is the one you’d expect: this is enterprise-tier, dedicated hardware and support, priced accordingly. It isn’t the cheapest way to get a Proxmox node running, and it isn’t trying to be.

What Actually Differs Beyond Price

Support Model

This is where the three providers diverge most.

Hetzner’s model is largely self-service: you get the hardware, and you’re expected to run it yourself, with community forums and documentation as the primary support surface.

OVHcloud includes standard support access with most dedicated plans, with additional support tiers available for an added cost.

OpenMetal’s model is built specifically around the software you’re running: Level 1 support for the Proxmox deployment itself, direct escalation to Proxmox’s own subscription support tiers for deeper issues, and a private Slack channel per customer for direct access to the infrastructure team.

Storage Architecture for Clustering

A single Proxmox node doesn’t need much storage architecture thought. A Proxmox cluster with high availability does, and this is where the three providers separate further. Hetzner and OVHcloud both leave storage architecture almost entirely up to you, local ZFS, NFS, or self-managed Ceph across nodes you configure and network yourself.

That’s a real decision with real tradeoffs either way. Local ZFS storage keeps things simple and fast for a single node or a small cluster, particularly with abundant RAM and an Optane SLOG device for write caching, but it doesn’t give you the kind of distributed, self-healing storage that survives losing an entire node without manual intervention.

Ceph solves that problem, distributing and replicating data across every node in the cluster, but it has its own hardware appetite: production Ceph deployments typically want a full core reserved per OSD service and enough network bandwidth that storage traffic doesn’t compete with VM traffic for the same pipe. On Hetzner or OVHcloud, building that out means sourcing compatible NVMe across each node yourself, provisioning your own storage network, and tuning replication settings with no vendor support if something goes wrong at 2am.

OpenMetal’s infrastructure includes Ceph storage clusters as a native, supported option specifically because that build-it-yourself gap is real. A Proxmox deployment that starts on a single node and later needs to grow into a proper HA cluster with distributed, resilient storage has a supported path to do that, rather than retrofitting a storage layer designed after the fact. For a deeper look at when Ceph is worth that complexity versus when local ZFS is the better call, see our Ceph vs. ZFS decision guide for Proxmox on bare metal.

Backup Targets and Disaster Recovery

Proxmox Backup Server handles the backup job itself well on any of these three, with incremental, deduplicated backups that keep both backup duration and storage requirements down regardless of which provider’s hardware it’s running on. Where the three differ is what happens to that backup once it’s created. Storing backups only within the same cluster they protect is a real risk, and off-site or off-cluster replication is the standard fix, whether that’s syncing PBS backups to an S3-compatible object store or replicating to a separate PBS instance in another data center entirely.

On Hetzner or OVHcloud, building that off-site target means standing up your own S3-compatible storage elsewhere, whether that’s a self-hosted MinIO instance, a separate PBS server in a different region, or a third-party object storage service, and managing the egress and replication yourself. OpenMetal’s Ceph clusters expose an S3-compatible object storage gateway (Ceph’s RADOS Gateway) that can serve directly as a PBS backup target, so an off-site, off-cluster backup destination is available from the same provider rather than a separate integration project. Our guide on scaling Proxmox for large deployments covers this and other considerations that change as a cluster grows.

Network and Data Center Footprint

Hetzner’s footprint is concentrated in Germany and Finland, with expansion into Singapore and the US, and private networking between dedicated servers is handled through its free vSwitch feature. vSwitch is a genuinely useful tool, but it’s worth understanding what it actually is: a Layer 2 connection that runs over the server’s existing single uplink rather than a separate, dedicated private network interface, and it requires manual VLAN and MTU configuration on each server rather than coming set up by default. For a Proxmox cluster, that means cluster and storage traffic share the same physical link as everything else unless you configure it carefully. OVHcloud has one of the widest global footprints of the three, with dedicated server availability across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, and its Advance range offers public bandwidth options scaling from 1 to 5 Gbps depending on configuration, along with included DDoS protection across the range.

OpenMetal operates across Ashburn, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, and Singapore, a smaller number of locations than OVHcloud but chosen specifically to cover major US, EU, and APAC latency and data residency needs rather than maximizing point count. Every server ships with dual 10Gbps NICs bonded for 20Gbps of private network bandwidth as standard, with public bandwidth allocated separately by server tier, not a shared uplink you have to carve up yourself. That matters directly for two things a growing Proxmox deployment eventually needs: cluster corosync and migration traffic between nodes, and, if the deployment grows into a Ceph-backed HA cluster, dedicated bandwidth for storage replication that doesn’t compete with VM network traffic on the same interface.

Who Each Provider Actually Fits

Hetzner fits well if:

• Budget is the dominant constraint and you’re comfortable managing everything yourself
• Your workload doesn’t need sustained, server-grade CPU performance under heavy multi-tenant load
• You’re running a homelab, a small self-hosted stack, or a development/test Proxmox environment
• You don’t need a distributed storage architecture built in

OVHcloud fits well if:

• You want processor-level confidential computing (SGX or SEV) available as a simple control-panel toggle rather than a dedicated hardware SKU
• You want the widest possible global data center footprint among the three
• You’re willing to invest time understanding which of several overlapping product ranges actually matches your workload

OpenMetal fits well if:

• You want enterprise-grade dedicated hardware built for sustained virtualization workloads
• You expect to grow from a single node into a proper HA cluster with distributed storage, and want that path already supported
• You’d rather have your Proxmox subscription handled by your infrastructure provider directly
• You want the option of TDX or SGX confidential computing hardware available from the same provider

What This Doesn’t Cover

This comparison is about the three providers’ dedicated server offerings specifically for running Proxmox VE yourself. None of the three offer Proxmox as a fully managed service, you’re deploying and administering Proxmox on top of the hardware in every case.

Pricing across all three changes fairly often, especially in 2026’s hardware cost environment, so confirm current numbers before making a final decision rather than relying on any figure cited here.

Getting Started

Current OpenMetal hardware configurations suitable for Proxmox deployments are on our bare metal pricing page, and our Proxmox use case overview covers the support model and subscription handling in more detail. Our general guide to running Proxmox VE on OpenMetal bare metal and Installing Proxmox VE on Bare Metal cover the deployment details in depth.

If you’re still weighing Proxmox against a hosted OpenStack private cloud rather than another Proxmox-specific provider, our Proxmox vs. OpenStack comparison covers that decision directly, and if this deployment is replacing existing VMware infrastructure, the infrastructure needed for a VMware to Proxmox migration walks through that path specifically.

FAQ

Which is cheapest for running Proxmox: OpenMetal, Hetzner, or OVHcloud?

Hetzner is generally the least expensive on a pure dollar-per-core basis, using consumer and workstation-class AMD Ryzen hardware. OVHcloud sits in the middle, with a wide range of options depending on which product line you choose. OpenMetal is priced for enterprise Xeon-class hardware and a support model built around Proxmox specifically, positioned differently rather than competing purely on lowest sticker price.

Do any of these providers offer Proxmox as a managed service?

No. All three sell dedicated hardware that you deploy and manage Proxmox VE on yourself. Support models differ significantly, from Hetzner’s largely self-service approach to OpenMetal’s Proxmox-specific support and subscription handling, but none of the three run Proxmox for you as a managed platform.

Which provider is best for a Proxmox HA cluster with distributed storage?

OpenMetal has a more direct path here, since Ceph storage clusters are a native, supported part of its infrastructure. Hetzner and OVHcloud can both support a Ceph-based HA cluster, but the storage architecture is left almost entirely to you to design and manage across nodes.

Has Proxmox hosting pricing changed recently among these providers?

Yes. Hetzner raised dedicated server prices in April 2026 and restructured broader pricing again in June 2026. OVHcloud has also signaled ongoing price adjustments tied to 2026’s RAM and storage cost increases industry-wide. OpenMetal’s latest V5 hardware line is also more expensive than prior releases due to hardware price increases. Confirm current pricing directly with each provider before deciding.