They are truly great for thrifty do-it-yourself hosting. Don't expect customer support or discounts or anything, but their prices are impossible to beat, and everything works as advertised. The big gotcha is that their only points of presence are in Germany and Finland.
My only gripe would be that running your business on Hetzner can be a little bit scary at times since they have so much unattended automation in place to block abuse. For example, if your server is erroneously sending traffic with private IP addresses out of its public interface, they will block the server without warning. I don't have any other providers to compare this against, so that might just be how it is.
> For example, if your server is erroneously sending traffic with private IP addresses out of its public interface, they will block the server without warning.
I had a CS class last semester where the students used some Hetzner cloud servers. I always got an email or two before having the servers IPs blocked. And it were mostly students' faults by choosing easy passwords..
I recommend Hetzner! No affiliation, just a happy user..
To be fair, you can also book a managed server with them.
For their hosted hardware offering, HDD/SSD swaps (or even "we replace everything about your server because it produces random faults except your HDDS") are within reasonable timeframes (i.e. usually within an hour).
They, however, will not diagnose this for you - that part is on you.
I've been a customer for years and have nothing negative to say. They are providing exactly the products they are advertising. Even those specs that don't necessarily have hard numbers attached with all products (disk speed, CPU performance) have always been good.
That said, there are some products certain customers expect that they will not sell you (and don't advertise). For example, you won't be able to click a button to deploy Software Y pre-configured by the provider as you might with Digital Ocean. What you'll get is mostly along the lines of "server with the OS of your choice and your SSH key installed on it". If that's what you're looking for, Hetzner is difficult to beat on price to performance.
I moved personal projects to Hetzner from Linode several years ago, due to significantly better pricing for the RAM I needed, and I haven't had any problems. I am using a few of their "cloud" shared servers (https://www.hetzner.com/cloud) and backups, can't speak to other services. I'm not doing anything CPU or IO intensive, though.
I've been their customer for over 2 years, no problems at all and I'm very happy with their prices and offering. Started with dedicated server and now I'm also using their cloud services for some of my EU-based clients. Can definitely recommend, I much prefer Hetzner vs no-name VPS providers when I need cheap VMs.
I used to run several root-servers and once they started their cloud-offering moved everything over there.
Support was always great (although rarely needed), performance is fantastic, prices hard to beat.
I love the simplicity of their cloud offering which fits my use-cases perfectly and doesn't put the burden of overly complex products, APIs and tools on me as a user.
My only gripe would be that running your business on Hetzner can be a little bit scary at times since they have so much unattended automation in place to block abuse. For example, if your server is erroneously sending traffic with private IP addresses out of its public interface, they will block the server without warning. I don't have any other providers to compare this against, so that might just be how it is.