I would not recommend them for a serious, money-on-the-table business.
I actually moved a business of ~100 FTEs from AWS to Hetzner once. Aside from the migration cost, the price was roughly 25% of AWS.
At the end, the biggest gain was not monetary, but human. For years, that business could retain skilled engineers who had the opportunity to work close to bare metal, caring about the nitty-gritty technical details of backups, failover and high availability.
And they did not even cost much. That they had so much leeway in designing the system instead of "relying on the cloud" was a major retainer.
I left many years ago, the business switched frameworks since then but they stayed on Hetzner.
P.S. Yes, that was before Hetzner Cloud became a thing )
* crypto mining (I used it when it wasn't causing much trouble but I noticed my nodes were constantly attacked at a ratio I newer saw for other servers); IIRC Hetzner's current ToS forbid crypto mining
* things in legally grey area which might be legal in some places but not so in others, especially in the EU
* protect your servers well; if you become a victim of an attack and your servers will start attacking other, Hetzner will isolate them and notify you so that you can solve the problem
Other than that, the only problems I had in the last 15 or so years are failing bare-metal components that they promptly replaced, that's all.
So beware of their ToS.
I disagree. It's not just the nuisance of wasted clock cycles. It also makes the network a juicy target for hackers. To anyone about to reply "you don't think people hack them now?", how do you think the correlation of attack sophistication and frequency looks for a network with/without a bunch of FREE MONEY inside? :)
Besides, no mainstream crypto is mined anymore except Bitcoin.
So moot.
Besides, no mainstream crypto is mined anymore except Bitcoin.
> also some arbitrary financial technologies they don't like
It is obviously a hostile language created by lawyers who did not spend much time researching the subject.
Of course it's unenforceable in practice and that is why a hefty chunk of Ethereum nodes are hosted on Hetzner for years and years with no problems.
Maybe they're cheap for a reason.
They deleted all of my data a month in due to not beleiving my name was real, and without even bothering to contact me to verify anything. They deleted my backups as well because I was dumb enough to keep them under the same account.
I learned a valuable lesson the hard way and have improved my methods as a result, but sad that it cost me an entire month's work due to carelessness and recklessness on their part.
Sure, it's "cheap for a reason", but let's not pretend like this type of expectation is advertised, especially as many on HN tout them as a drop-in replacement for competitors.
Wonder what's the algorithm they use to know a "real name"
[citation needed]. Even when they shut down Russian customers they gave advance warning. This is the first time I have heard of service being shut off (and data deleted) without any warning.
They do that even within EU, and even when your credit card passes 3D secure validation.