Comment by codethief | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codethief | Hacker News Reader

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Hetzner Online GmbH and Hetzner Cloud GmbH are fully owned (resp. majority-owned) by ENSoXX Holding AG of which Martin Hetzner is the CEO and which seems to be the parent company[0]. I cannot find any indication in the publicly available documents that any US company (or any other company for that matter) holds more than a 25% share in ENSoXX Holding AG. (25% is the reporting threshold.)

In the 2022 annual financial statement they do mention expanding to the US, though they don't go into the legal details. As the link posted in the cousin comment mentions, though:

> Hetzner US LLC, as a subsidiary of Hetzner Online GmbH, provides data center services within the USA for the parent company, Hetzner Online.[2]

So there is no US owner.

[0]: https://www.northdata.de/Hetzner+Online+GmbH,+Gunzenhausen/A...

[1]: https://www.unternehmensregister.de/ (enter "ENSoXX Holding AG" in the text field)

[2]: https://docs.hetzner.com/general/general-terms-and-condition...

Quite impressive the numbers they're doing

78M profit on 290M revenue

(See [0] above)

_ edited figures _

I see 78M on 290M EUR but yeah, still very impressive!

It's insane that they are so cheap and they could still have a third lower prices and not lose money somehow

Makes you wonder how much you are overpaying on AWS.

Hetzner is all about doing things efficiently, in unconventional ways.

There are some Youtube videos of people getting tours of their data centers. It's a very custom setup, keeping both component costs and energy costs down. Their earliest servers were basically tower PCs on shelves, their more recent generations are more akin to custom rack designs with inhouse-assembled servers, with a datacenter design that exploits natural convection to do a lot of the cooling.

They also distributed some 50M EUR to employees and management

a friend of mine told some support staff got 20k EUR in bonuses last year because of that

probably they figured out, it's easier to give some of the profits away than pay a higher tax

Finding good people is difficult, especially back in 2021 when everyone was scaling IT like crazy. A good bonus is a good investment in employee retention. On top of that having employees participate in business success aligns incentives. It's just good business sense.

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