Source: Hetzner Cloud Documentation

Hetzner has launched the public beta of its new cloud network stack, called hcnet, on 20 October 2026. The beta is available to all Hetzner Cloud users, and each server can be switched to the new stack individually.

More headroom for connection heavy workloads

The most concrete change is capacity. The limit for connection tracking increases from 80,000 parallel connections for IPv4 and IPv6 combined to 120,000 each, which means significantly more headroom for services that handle many simultaneous connections, such as load balancers, API gateways, proxies, chat backends, and streaming services.

Switching is done from the Hetzner Console. Users select a cloud server, open the Networking tab, and choose Try new network stack under Network Stack. Hetzner notes that both switching to the new stack and reverting to the standard one will briefly interrupt connectivity to the server, and that active firewalls may drop existing connections during the change. A feedback button in the same section sends reports directly to the engineering team.

Practical advice before you flip the switch

Because the switch causes a short connectivity interruption, it should be planned like any other maintenance window. For single server workloads the impact is usually a brief blip, but for clustered or load balanced setups you should drain traffic node by node, verify health checks after each switch, and have a rollback path ready. The beta also means behavior may still change, so test critical paths before relying on it in production.

As a German provider with data center parks in Nuremberg, Falkenstein and Helsinki, Hetzner is a popular choice for European companies that want EU hosted infrastructure at low cost. If you want help planning a zero downtime migration to the new network stack or tuning your infrastructure for high connection loads, contact us for professional advice.