Cloud
Hetzner
A German provider with very good-value VPS, dedicated servers and a simple cloud API.
What it is
Hetzner Online is a German hosting company founded in 1997. It launched the Hetzner Cloud line in 2017: virtual servers, volumes, load balancers, networks and firewalls with a clean API.
The main advantage is price per resource: much more CPU, RAM and traffic for the money than in the big clouds. It also offers dedicated servers (bare metal) and an auction of used servers.
Data centers are in Germany (Falkenstein, Nuremberg), Finland (Helsinki), plus the USA and Singapore. The managed service catalog is narrower than AWS: databases, queues and the like you run yourself.
Use it when
- A startup or SaaS in Europe where price and GDPR jurisdiction matter.
- You run Kubernetes, Docker or Coolify on your own servers.
- You need a powerful machine or bare metal for CI, databases, game servers.
- You want predictable bills without complex pricing.
Avoid it when
- You need a wide catalog of managed services (queues, ML, analytics) without administration.
- Compliance requires certifications that only a large hyperscaler has.
- You need dozens of regions around the world.
Key concepts
- Cloud server
- A virtual machine billed hourly with a monthly price cap, created in seconds.
- Dedicated server
- A physical server at your disposal, with no virtualization, for stable performance.
- Firewall / Network
- Cloud firewalls and private networks between servers, managed through the API.
- hcloud CLI
- The official CLI for managing servers, volumes and load balancers.
- Terraform provider
- The official provider lets you describe Hetzner infrastructure as code.
Example
Interview questions
1. Why is Hetzner cheaper than AWS?
A simpler product without a large managed service catalog, own data centers and much more included traffic. You pay for raw resources, and the team handles administration.
2. Cloud server or dedicated?
A cloud server is flexible, created in seconds and scalable. Dedicated gives stable performance and more hardware for the price for constant heavy loads, but it is harder to change quickly.
3. How do you improve fault tolerance on Hetzner?
Keep several servers in different locations, put a load balancer in front and make regular backups or snapshots. Database replication you have to set up yourself.
Related technologies
- DigitalOceanA simple cloud provider for developers: Droplets (VPS), managed databases, Kubernetes and App Platform.
- AWSThe largest cloud platform, with hundreds of services from virtual machines and storage to databases, queues and ML.
- DockerDocker packages an application with its dependencies into a container that runs the same on a laptop, a server and the cloud.
- KubernetesKubernetes is a container orchestration system that deploys, scales and heals applications across a cluster of servers.
- TerraformTerraform is an infrastructure as code tool: you describe cloud resources in configuration and it creates and changes them.
- CaddyCaddy is a web server and reverse proxy written in Go with automatic HTTPS and very simple configuration.
- TraefikTraefik is a cloud-native reverse proxy and edge router that discovers services in Docker and Kubernetes and configures routes itself.
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