Sandboxer vs Hetzner Dedicated (root servers)

Hetzner Dedicated rents whole physical servers, billed by the hour up to a monthly price cap plus a one-time setup fee; you install and run everything yourself, including any hypervisor. Sandboxer is a managed sandbox service billed per second. Pick Hetzner when you want raw hardware at a predictable monthly ceiling; pick Sandboxer when you want disposable, API-driven VMs without operating servers.

Checked against Hetzner Dedicated (root servers)'s public docs on October 24, 2026. Sources are linked in the table and listed below.

At a glance

Sandboxer and Hetzner Dedicated (root servers) compared
Capability	Sandboxer	Hetzner Dedicated (root servers)
Isolation	microVM Cloud Hypervisor, its own kernel	Bare-metal dedicated server (no sandbox layer provided) You get the whole physical machine; isolation between workloads is whatever you build.
Full Linux with root	Ubuntu 24.04, sudo, systemd	The AX42 page lists full root access.
Docker inside	Preinstalled	Not stated on the pages reviewed; you choose and install the OS yourself.
Nested virtualization (/dev/kvm)		Not stated on the pages reviewed.
Pause and resume with memory	Running processes come back	Not applicable: a rented physical server has no pause/resume product feature.
Fork a sandbox	Copy-on-write disk copy that boots fresh	Not applicable: no snapshot-and-clone feature is described on the pages reviewed.
HTTPS URL per port	Private with a token, or public	You get a public IP (IPv4 optional, IPv6 /64 included) and host your own listeners; no per-port HTTPS URL service.
Longest session	No limit on paid plans Auto-stop is up to 30 days or off	Persistent server, no session limit Rented as a long-lived server rather than per-session.
Billing	Per second, flat rate per size Stopped sandboxes are free	Hourly, capped at the monthly price, plus a one-time setup fee AX42: EUR 0.1586/h, EUR 99.00/month cap, EUR 49.00 setup, excl. VAT; no minimum term, cancellation takes effect immediately.
GPUs		A GPU line is offered.
Self-host or open source		It is hosted hardware you rent; not a self-hostable product.
Regions	US East (Virginia) and EU Central (Finland)	Falkenstein, Nuremberg (Germany) and Helsinki (Finland) AX42 lists HEL 1 and FSN 1.

= not documented publicly.

Where Hetzner Dedicated (root servers) is strong

Whole physical servers with full root access, so you can run any OS, hypervisor or workload.
Unlimited traffic on the AX42 listing (with a stated exception for the 10G uplink add-on) and a 1 GBit/s port.
Several hardware lines including GPU, storage-heavy (SX) and Dell (DX) servers, plus a server auction for refurbished machines.
ISO 27001:2022-certified data centers and 24/7 phone and email support.

Where Sandboxer differs

Hetzner is a hardware rental: you operate the OS, networking, updates and any virtualization yourself, while Sandboxer provisions a VM through an API.
Hetzner bills by the hour up to a monthly cap and charges a setup fee on many servers; Sandboxer bills per second with no setup fee and stopped sandboxes cost nothing.
Hetzner has no pause/resume, fork or snapshot-template feature on the pages reviewed; Sandboxer has all three.
Hetzner offers GPU servers and three data-center locations; Sandboxer runs in us-east and eu-central and has no GPUs today.

Pick Hetzner Dedicated (root servers) if

You need dedicated hardware at a predictable monthly price for a long-running workload.
You need GPUs, large local storage or your own hypervisor stack.
You want data-center locations in Germany or Finland and are comfortable administering servers.

Pick Sandboxer if

You want a full Ubuntu 24.04 VM with its own kernel, root/sudo, systemd and Docker preinstalled, and nested KVM (/dev/kvm).
You want to stop a sandbox and resume it with running processes back, with stopped sandboxes costing nothing.
You want coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and others) preinstalled, driven through a prompt API with streamed events, plus any port exposed as an HTTPS URL.

Sources

Products change. If something here is out of date, email hello@sandboxer.com and we'll fix it. Hetzner Dedicated (root servers) is a trademark of its owner. Sandboxer is an independent product and is not affiliated with Hetzner Dedicated (root servers).

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