[MartinMond]

Shared storage? Use Riak CS, MogileFS, ceph, LeoFS, Openstack Swift etc. as a S3 replacement.

Availability zones: Hetzner has multiple independent DCs and they are happy to place your servers in different DCs if you ask them. What Amazon calls "Elastic IP" they call "Failover IP".

Yes if you only need to host your blog yet you don't want it to go down when the HW inevitably fails, don't go to Hetzner because setting up Postgres failover and Chef and all that is complicated.

And if you're big / have enough money Hetzner's off-the-shelf HW and their unwillingness to offer an SLA will make you move away.

But there's a sweet spot for Hetzner, it's where you want good performance for a great price, have enough money/knowledge to setup proper bare metal deployments with failover yet don't yet need the guarantees of a "premium" DC or the features of AWS.

I know quite a few companies which fit that description.