Hetzner Review

Hetzner is the self-hosting bedrock — a German hyperscaler with German pricing and decade-long uptime track records. If you're escaping AWS/GCP egress bills, a CX-series cloud server at €4/month with included traffic feels like a thermostat dropped 20°. The trade is operator discipline: Hetzner gives you a Linux box and a control panel, and expects you to handle the rest.

What we tested

We spun up three machines in nbg1 (Nürnberg) and ash (Ashburn): a CX22 (2 vCPU / 4GB) for a small Postgres + app pair, a CCX13 dedicated-CPU for a build-heavy CI runner, and an EX44 dedicated box for a stateful workload that wanted bare-metal disks. We tracked provisioning latency, network performance between regions, and unit cost vs. an equivalent DigitalOcean droplet over a 90-day window. Value landed at 9.5 / 10 — across every shape, Hetzner came in 40–70% cheaper than the closest US competitor.

What we liked

Bandwidth is included on cloud servers (20TB/month on a €4 box) rather than metered per-GB; for marketing + tools traffic this alone justifies the move from a hyperscaler.

What needs work

Onboarding feels dated next to Vercel/Fly. Account verification can ask for a photo ID + utility bill before the first server boots, which surprises US founders. Ease scored 6 / 10 — the platform rewards operators, not first-time deployers.