CreateOS Sandbox vs Hetzner Cloud

Hetzner Cloud is the better buy for a steady, always-on server on a tight budget, especially in Europe. CreateOS Sandbox fits when software, not a person, creates the machine: one micro-VM per agent task, billed per second, paused with memory intact or forked into copies. The two overlap less than the word VM suggests.

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Pricing at a Glance

CreateOS rates verified 17 October 2026. Hetzner Cloud pricing as published on 17 October 2026. Rates billed per GB rather than per GiB, or as bundled sizes, are quoted as published rather than converted.

CreateOS Sandbox

Compute: $0.0362 /vCPU-hr
Memory: $0.0116 /GiB-hr

No egress fees, 50 GiB bandwidth budgetvCPU stops billing while paused

Hetzner Cloud

Hetzner lists CPX02 (1 AMD vCPU, 1 GB, 20 GB NVMe) in the EU at EUR 0.0096/hour or EUR 5.99/month excl. VAT, plus EUR 0.50/month for a primary IPv4, as of 17 October 2026.

Where CreateOS Sandbox Fits Better

What CreateOS Sandbox brings to this matchup, with a plain note on where Hetzner Cloud has the edge.

Memory-state pause and resume, which Hetzner Cloud does not mention; its backups and snapshots copy the disk only.

Billing by the second rather than by the hour, so a three-minute agent run is charged for three minutes.

Hostname-based egress rules enforced on the host; Hetzner Firewall rules work by IP address.

Where Hetzner Cloud is strong

Hetzner publishes some of the lowest prices for always-on VMs, includes at least 20 TB of traffic a month on EU servers, and caps hourly billing at the monthly price so a server never costs more than its monthly figure.

Which to Pick

Pick CreateOS Sandbox if

You need a fresh isolated machine per agent task, created and destroyed from code.
You want to fork one prepared environment into several parallel copies.
Your agent's outbound access must be restricted to named hosts such as a package registry.

Pick Hetzner Cloud if

You run long-lived servers, CI runners or small databases and the monthly price is the main factor.
You move a lot of traffic from EU servers and want 20 TB a month included.
You need dedicated-vCPU shapes up to 48 vCPU / 192 GB (CCX63).

Head-to-Head Comparison

Every dimension side by side, checked on 17 October 2026 against each vendor's own docs and pricing pages. "Not published" means we could not find it on the vendor's pages, not that the feature is missing.

Dimension	CreateOS Sandbox	Hetzner Cloud
Isolation	Firecracker micro-VM with its own guest kernel	Full VM (cloud server); hypervisor not named
Create and destroy by API	Yes: REST API, CLI, MCP server and SDKs for TypeScript, Go, Python, Rust, C# and Java (all but TypeScript pre-1.0)	Yes: REST API, hcloud CLI, official Go and Python libraries
Memory snapshot (pause and resume)	Yes: disk, memory and CPU state saved; vCPU stops billing, memory and storage still bill	Not mentioned; snapshots and backups copy the server disk, not attached Volumes
Fork	Yes: fork a paused sandbox into many independent sandboxes	Indirect: new server from a snapshot or backup; no live fork
Outbound network controls	Open with no rules; deny-by-default once any host, IP, CIDR or wildcard rule exists, enforced on the host outside the VM	Open with no rules; once outbound rules exist, unlisted traffic is blocked; rules by IP; up to 5 firewalls per server
Billing granularity	Per second while running: $0.03616363/vCPU-hr, $0.01159025/GiB-hr, storage $0.0001584/GB-hr	Hourly with a monthly price cap
Largest size	8 vCPU / 16 GB on Enterprise; 8 vCPU / 8 GB on Pro	Shared CPX62 16 vCPU / 32 GB; dedicated CCX63 48 vCPU / 192 GB
GPU	None; no GPU shapes	No on Cloud servers; GPUs only as dedicated root servers

Common Questions

Does Hetzner Cloud have a default vCPU limit per account?

Yes. Hetzner sets default limits of 20 shared vCPUs and 8 dedicated vCPUs per account, raised on request. CreateOS caps concurrent sandboxes by plan instead: 1 on Free, 5 on Beginner, 20 on Pro and 30 on Enterprise, with paused sandboxes counted.

How do Hetzner Firewall egress rules compare with CreateOS egress rules?

They start the same way: both are open outbound with no rules and block unlisted traffic once an outbound rule exists. The difference is the rule type. Hetzner matches IP addresses; CreateOS also accepts hostnames and wildcards, matched on TLS server name or HTTP Host on ports 80 and 443.

Is Hetzner Cloud cheaper than CreateOS Sandbox for an always-on 1 vCPU machine?

Yes. CPX02 is EUR 5.99 a month excl. VAT, while a 1 vCPU / 1 GB CreateOS sandbox left running for 720 hours is about $35.52. CreateOS is priced for sandboxes that run for minutes or hours and are then paused or destroyed.

See CreateOS Sandbox for yourself

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