Productivity - Setup Guide

How to set up Hetzner

Otto's honest, no-fluff walkthrough. Every step here is what we'd actually do if we were sitting at your keyboard. Real gotchas first, real steps second, and a link to the personalized version at the bottom.

Read these before you start

• 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.

The 7-step setup

1. 1

   Create your Hetzner account

   Sign up at the link below. Card required for the paid tier - most plans include a trial period; check the pricing section on this page first so you know what you're committing to.

   Open Hetzner signup
2. 2

   Complete the initial onboarding

   Skip the marketing questionnaires when you can. Fill only the fields that actually configure the product - name, timezone, your first workspace or project. If Hetzner pushes you into a setup wizard, take it - it usually accelerates the first productive session.

3. 3

   Connect your existing tools

   Wire Hetzner into the rest of your stack. The integrations that most people set up first: Terraform provider, Ansible modules, Packer, Kubernetes (managed via Hetzner Cloud Kubernetes), Docker (self-managed), CI/CD via GitHub Actions or GitLab CI, Cloudflare (recommended in front for CDN and DDoS), Grafana Cloud (for monitoring since Hetzner does not bundle observability).. Do these before importing data - clean integration first, data second.

4. 4

   Import your existing data (only what you'll actually use)

   Do NOT bulk-import everything. Import the last 30 days of the ONE workflow you're moving over first. Prove it works. Then import more. Big-bang migrations are how Hetzner deployments die in month 3.

5. 5

   Set up your first real workflow

   Pick the single most-frequent task you'll do in Hetzner - the daily-driver workflow. Configure it end-to-end. Use it live for a week. Do not touch any other feature yet. Adoption failure comes from teams trying to use everything on day one instead of the one thing that actually pays.

6. 6

   Add your team (if applicable) and set access

   Once your solo workflow works, invite one teammate at a time. Watch them use it. The friction points you missed are the ones they hit. Fix those before scaling to more users. Never invite 20 people at once - you'll get 20 confused people and 0 useful feedback.

7. 7

   Compound with the right pairings

   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.