[mufumbo]

Right now I have three servers in hetzner. I have been using them for 5 years, but only last year my startup "boomed", so I had to cancel my old server and move it in the same rack as the other servers. If your startup has already "boomed" just make it sure to rent all your servers in the same rack or pay the reservation fee ($10 per server).

Hetzner prices are great for any software engineer. Having that powerful server waiting for my projects is one of the reasons that I had the chance of succeeding. I used to say that this is our profession and having a dedicated server is a mandatory thing.

Even with one server from hetzner I was able to virtualize it into 8 machines and create a real production environment that made it easier to scale. After you learn XEN it's faster than going through amazon interface.

From my past experience I always worked with people who wanted to use amazon or google appengine. I was always against it and said that the prices were ridiculously expensive. My colleges said that they didn't wanted to manage servers and the cost of appengine was only $2 per day, etc. This is a real story and when the time of high traffic came the $2 became $50 and now we pay $1500 in something that could be handled with ONE $100 hetzner server. After using hetzner I would NEVER advise appengine and I would only advise amazon if you must have the servers in the US.

For those who say that the site would have too much latency if it's in hetzner: just use a cdn for static content, http://www.maxcdn.com is very cheap and probably much better than just hosting in the US.