Hetzner
German cloud hosting with insanely cheap dedicated servers and VPS
What it does
Hetzner is a German cloud and dedicated-server provider offering some of the cheapest compute in the industry. Cloud VPS starting under 5 EUR/month, dedicated servers (real hardware, not virtualized) starting around 30 EUR/month with specs that would cost 5-10x on AWS, plus object storage, block storage, load balancers, and managed Kubernetes. Data centers in Germany, Finland, and Ashburn Virginia (U.S. presence added in 2023).
Free tier
No
Starts at
$5/mo
Setup
medium
Key features
Integrates with
Terraform, Ansible, Docker
Who this fits
- Cost-sensitive startups running production workloads (compute cost 1/5 of AWS for equivalent specs)
- Bootstrapped SaaS teams that want to control their infra costs
- Engineers comfortable with more self-management (Hetzner does less hand-holding than AWS/GCP)
- Teams needing dedicated hardware (bare metal) at reasonable prices
- EU-based businesses needing German-hosted infrastructure for GDPR reasons
Who it does NOT fit
- Teams that need managed services stack of AWS/GCP (RDS, Lambda, S3-with-CDN edge, SQS, Cognito)
- Enterprises requiring specific compliance certifications beyond ISO 27001 (Hetzner is not FedRAMP, HIPAA-covered under a BAA is limited)
- Teams that want click-and-deploy PaaS (use Fly.io, Railway, Render, Vercel)
- Non-technical users; Hetzner is IaaS, you manage the server
Pricing
Real gotchas
- Account verification: new accounts, especially non-EU, sometimes hit manual review requiring ID upload. Delays are 1-2 days [source: docs.hetzner.com/cloud/general/faq].
- Hetzner support is email-only for most tiers. There is no phone support, and response time is business hours German time. Compared to AWS phone support, it is much slower.
- Bandwidth overages exist but are cheap (about 1 EUR per additional TB on cloud VPS after the included 20TB).
- Hetzner terminates accounts for policy violations (crypto mining, spam, some scraping) without much warning. Read the ToS.
- Data center choice matters: Ashburn (U.S.) has lower latency for U.S. users but smaller product catalog than Nuremberg or Falkenstein.
Integrations that matter
Otto’s take on this tool
Recommend Hetzner for cost-conscious startups running production workloads, or for teams that want dedicated hardware for database-heavy or ML workloads without AWS pricing. Recommend AWS, GCP, or Azure when the client needs managed services (RDS, Lambda, BigQuery, etc.) or enterprise compliance. Recommend Fly.io, Railway, Render, or Vercel for PaaS-style deploys where developers do not want to manage servers.
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Editor's curated reviews
2,943 reviews across TrustPilot - avg 3/5Curated by Otto from TrustPilot public reviews (fetched 2026-08-31). Hetzner's TrustPilot is bimodal (50% 5-star / 39% 1-star of 2,943 total, 3.0 headline) with a signal shape that matches the tool's real-world reputation: exceptional price-to-performance on the hardware, friction on the operational edges. Positive reviews center on speed and price per compute unit; the 1-star cluster concentrates on cancellation friction, ongoing charges after servers were shut down, and price-increase disputes. Read the critical cluster carefully before setting up autopay - the pattern is consistent enough to be a category-signal, not a tool defect. G2 and Capterra were consulted for aggregate context but not directly cited here (source-access limits). Not user-submitted on Ottomately.
“There is litterally no other provider which provides such fast & powerful webhosting servers at those prices.”
TrustPilot5.0/5“The support team was very professional and fast. Thank you for unlocking port 25 - everything works perfectly now.”
TrustPilot5.0/5“Great service. Great people.”
TrustPilot5.0/5“Their servers are amazing. The support and their policies: the worst.”
TrustPilot1.0/5“Prices increased by more than 100% is extremely difficult to justify.”
TrustPilot1.0/5“They make it impossible to cancel...they lie and lie to save a few dollars.”
TrustPilot1.0/5“I shut down my servers after not needing them and they keep charging for months unfairly.”
TrustPilot1.0/5“We submitted a support ticket about this issue on August 20, and we still have not received any response.”
TrustPilot1.0/5
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