netcup, the German host that many teams treat as the budget benchmark for a cheap dedicated-core server, has raised prices for the second time this year. The new rates took effect on September 22, and this round is far steeper than the spring one: root servers go up by roughly 70% to 110% depending on term, standard VPS by up to about 40%, and the light VPS line by up to about 20%. Some plans also lost disk. The cause is the memory shortage that has worked down the supply chain all year — but it has now moved from a commodity price we covered in the abstract to a named provider's published list.
What changed
The increase applies to netcup's new G12.5 generation. According to the company's founder and CEO, Alexander Windbichler, who posted the announcement on netcup's own community forum under the blunt title "RAMpocalypse: we need to talk about pricing … again," DRAM has cost the company roughly five times what it did a year earlier, and the outlook from suppliers gives no near-term relief. So the plans built around the most memory — the root servers, which pair dedicated CPU cores with generous RAM — took the biggest jump, up to about 110% on longer terms. The standard x86 VPS range rose by up to about 40%, and several of those plans had their included disk reduced after netcup looked at real usage. The lighter VPS Lite tier moved up by as much as roughly 20%. netcup also slotted in a new, smaller RS 500 entry model to keep an accessible price point in the root-server range.
One important detail for anyone already on netcup: existing contracts are not touched. Current customers keep their old rate for the life of the contract and can still upgrade at legacy pricing. The new numbers apply to new orders and new generations. This is the second move of 2026 — the spring increase, effective May 1, lifted existing contracts by about 18.5% and new ones by about 24% — so a provider that was cheap by reputation has repriced twice in five months.
What it costs now
Here is where the abstract becomes a monthly line. On netcup's current price list, the entry VPS 500 G12.5 (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 64 GB SSD) is €8.26 a month on a 12-month term, about $9.40 at the current rate near $1.14 to the euro. The VPS 1000 G12.5 (4 vCPU, 8 GB, 128 GB) is €14.50, about $16.50, and the VPS 2000 G12.5 (8 vCPU, 16 GB, 256 GB) is €26.92, about $30.70. All are shown net of Germany's 19% VAT, which a VAT-registered business reverse-charges rather than pays. On the root-server side, the RS 1000 G12.5 (4 dedicated cores, 8 GB) carried a €10.36 base before this round; a 110% increase on a comparable plan is the difference between a server that rounds to €10 and one that rounds to €22 — the same doubling the wider market has been absorbing on memory-heavy hardware since spring.
The number that should catch a buyer's eye is not any single price but the shrink alongside it. When a plan's headline figure holds but its included disk drops, that is a price increase that does not show up as one. A VPS whose SSD quietly falls from 256 GB to 128 GB at the same price is materially more expensive per gigabyte, and easy to miss if you compare only the monthly line.
Why root servers took the worst of it
The pattern is not netcup-specific; it is what the shortage does to any price list. Plans are repriced in proportion to how much memory they carry, because RAM is the input that moved. A light VPS with a few gigabytes barely feels a 5x commodity move; a root server with 64 or 128 GB of DDR5 feels all of it. That is the same economics behind the premium a dedicated-core plan already commands over a shared one — you are paying for guaranteed silicon — except now the memory attached to that silicon is itself the scarce, expensive part. For a European buyer weighing hosts in the region, netcup still competes on dedicated-core value, but the gap to the next option has narrowed, and it is worth comparing the field in the same locations rather than assuming last year's price order still holds.
What a buyer should do
If you already run on netcup, do nothing hasty: your contract rate is locked, and if you need more capacity the upgrade path at legacy pricing is worth using before it closes. If you are shopping now, normalize on the metric that actually moved — cost per gigabyte of RAM, on the term you will really keep — and read the spec sheet for silent disk cuts, not just the monthly figure. And treat this as the second data point in a trend rather than a one-off: OVHcloud repriced in September, netcup has now moved twice, and as long as memory stays scarce the next provider to update its list will do the same. Locking a longer term at today's number is a hedge only if you are confident the spec behind it will not shrink under you.
netcup's own price pages carry the current figures above, and the increase was announced by CEO Alexander Windbichler on the netcup community forum in September, with the new rates effective from September 22, 2026.