Hetzner

The Hetzner pitch

Hetzner has been quietly running European data centers since 1997, long before “cloud” was the dominant idiom. Today they pair traditional dedicated servers with a clean cloud product that consistently delivers more compute per euro than any name-brand cloud — often by an order of magnitude.

A CCX13 instance with 2 dedicated vCPUs, 8 GB RAM, 80 GB NVMe, and 20 TB bandwidth runs about €13/month. The equivalent on a hyperscaler is hard to match without leaving traffic costs in the gutter.

The trade-off

Hetzner is opinionated about what it sells. You will not find a managed Postgres service, a Lambda-equivalent, a global edge network, or an enterprise-grade IAM. What you find is solid Linux servers, fast networks, and a Cloud Console that does what you expect without a maze of permissions.

That trade-off has produced a thriving ecosystem of self-hosted PaaS layers — Coolify, Dokploy, CapRover, Kamal — built specifically to make Hetzner servers feel like Heroku.

Data residency

For European teams subject to GDPR or sovereign-cloud requirements, Hetzner’s German and Finnish data centers are operationally and legally inside the EU. There is no parent-company exposure to the US CLOUD Act.

Inclusion criteria

Hetzner meets two of three criteria (2/3 score):

• Transparent public pricing — every product line lists firm prices
• Self-service signup — though new accounts require manual verification, which can take a few hours
• Public SLA — uptime targets are part of the standard terms with a status page, though they fall short of a formal financial SLA

Hetzner’s reputation for reliability is operational rather than contractual — uptime is generally excellent, but the documented SLA is lighter than what hyperscalers publish.