Hetzner
Best For
About Hetzner
Hetzner Online has been a stalwart of the European hosting market since 1997 (rebranded to current form around 2003), operating state-of-the-art data centers in Falkenstein and Nuremberg (Germany), Helsinki (Finland), and Ashburn, Virginia (US). They are renowned for offering exceptional price-to-performance ratios on cloud servers, dedicated servers, and colocation services. Their Hetzner Cloud offering is widely considered the best value in European cloud hosting — a CX22 instance with 2 vCPUs and 4 GB RAM costs just €3.59/mo, undercutting DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Linode significantly. Hetzner owns and operates their own data centers and builds their hardware in-house, enabling them to control costs and quality throughout the stack. Their cloud platform offers a clean API, Terraform provider, CLI tool, and features like load balancers, firewalls, floating IPs, volumes, and private networking. Hetzner's dedicated server auction marketplace lets customers bid on previously-used servers at steep discounts. The Robot (dedicated) and Cloud consoles are functional if not flashy. Hetzner is GDPR-compliant with strong European data sovereignty — a key consideration for EU businesses. The trade-off is minimal managed support and a primarily self-service model. Hetzner is the top choice for European developers, self-hosted infrastructure, and anyone who wants maximum compute resources per dollar.
Performance
Key Differentiators
Pros & Cons
Cloud servers at roughly half the price of DigitalOcean and Vultr with comparable or better performance — unbeatable value.
Hetzner owns and operates their data centers and builds hardware in-house, ensuring quality control and cost efficiency.
German-based with EU data centers — strong data sovereignty and GDPR compliance for European businesses.
Unique dedicated server auction marketplace offers previously-used servers at 30-60% discounts.
Clean REST API, official Terraform provider, CLI tool, and Ansible collections for infrastructure as code.
Only one US data center (Ashburn, VA) — latency may be higher for West Coast US or Asian users.
Minimal managed support. You're responsible for server setup, security, and maintenance.
No cPanel, no WordPress hosting, no website builders — pure infrastructure only.
Ticket-based support without live chat. Response times vary from hours to days for non-critical issues.