They also build their own servers in their own datacenters

Does digital ocean not do this?

They don’t.

Where do DO get their servers and data centers from? ... Apparently they run on AWS, I'm surprised

> Apparently they run on AWS, I'm surprised

They don't run on AWS. Not sure what sort of rumors are running :(

> data centers from?

The major players e.g. Equinix, Coresite, etc. Varies per location. Even AWS don't build most of their data centers.

The competitor of DO, Vultr does this IIRC, yet it is not really cheaper

> Simple, Hetzner mainly operates on Germany, the people are mostly Germans, and they automate the stuff to a point a small team could manage it well even if not remotely, so they have less cost on human resources.

I feel like there might be more to it, especially considering the situation with electricity prices in some places in EU recently.

I used (and still use) a Lithuanian platform called Time4VPS which was cheaper than Hetzner previously, yet had to increase their prices somewhat for that reason. Now only some of their plans are competitive with Hetzner, while Hetzner also provides some managed services as well.

Hetzner docs also went into some of the details regarding the pricing: https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/pricing/hetzner-prici...

And yet, I can't help but to wonder why they don't give in to the desire to maximize profit margins, like happened to say Scaleway (good platform, but as expensive as DigitalOcean).

I've wondered how they can host this cheap in Germany given their very high electricity prices.

Maybe that's not actually the dominant cost, or they've optimized everything else so well they can just eat the electric bill.