Hetzner Cloud
Cloud Computing Germany
Cloud servers with scalable compute, networking, and storage. Alternative to Amazon EC2, Azure Virtual Machines, DigitalOcean Droplets, and Google Compute Engine.
Details
Hetzner Cloud sells hourly virtual servers from the German hosting company Hetzner Online GmbH, with datacentres in Germany, Finland, the United States and Singapore. The product is deliberately narrow: cloud servers, volumes, private networks, firewalls, floating IPs, load balancers and snapshots, driven by a clean API, a CLI and a Terraform provider.
Its reputation rests on price. A given amount of vCPU and RAM typically costs a fraction of the equivalent at a US hyperscaler, and traffic is generously included rather than metered aggressively.
The trade-off is that almost nothing sits on top of the compute. There is no managed Kubernetes service, no managed database, no GPU instance type and no licensed Windows image, so a Windows estate or a team that wants managed building blocks has to look elsewhere or run them itself.
About Hetzner
Hetzner Online GmbH is registered at Industriestr. 25, 91710 Gunzenhausen in Bavaria, at the Ansbach registration office under HRB 6089, VAT ID DE 812871812. Martin Hetzner, Stephan Konvickova and Günther Müller are the managing directors. The terms of business place the contract under the law of the Federal Republic of Germany and make Gunzenhausen the exclusive place of jurisdiction.
Martin Hetzner, an electrician by training, founded the company in 1997, and its career site names him as the owner and states that the business takes no investor capital. Hetzner’s own published figures are more than 450 employees, over a million customers and around 450,000 servers across eight locations. It sells dedicated servers, cloud instances, colocation, shared hosting, storage boxes, domains and SSL certificates.
The data centre parks are at Nuremberg and Falkenstein in Germany and at Helsinki, run through Hetzner Finland Oy in Tuusula, with further sites in Ashburn, Hillsboro and Singapore. All of them are certified to DIN ISO/IEC 27001:2022. The German sites have run on renewable electricity since 2008 and the Finnish park since it was built in 2018; Hetzner puts annual average PUE between 1.10 and 1.16 and water use at zero, because the servers are air-cooled.
