Had a server with them for more than 10 years. Had they eliminated the setup fee, they would get more of my money for sure for small projects.

They often have a couple of servers with no setup.

The setup fee is a one-time fee though, so if you have a server for many years that won't hurt so much. I pay around €30/month for the server I am renting but I know it will last a long time even if I get spikes on any on my many projects. For a 8 core, 16GB droplet/vps at DigitalOcean it will cost you ~$96/month. The performance is better at Hetzner for about 1/3 the cost.

Yes. I'm talking about occasional needs for a small server for a month or two.

Why not go with hertzner cloud? No setup fees and you'll be billed by the usage. Still cheaper than other cloud providers.

The VM performance tax is huge. Also, no GPU and limited/paid traffic (large limit though).

Use the server auction? No setup fee then.

They have VPS cloud offerings similar to DigitalOcean as well, with no setup fees.

I don't work at Hetzner, I live in Sweden. I'm just a happy customer giving praise for a company that really doesn't get so much attention.

With all big american companies seemingly getting so much attention nowadays, I am glad for the European alternatives that we have where you don't have to ship your customers data to the three letter agencies.

Ah yes, they are great if you messing about. Not so great if you have crucial business server with them.

We've been running stuff on their platform for years with very little problems. Why not?

Care to elaborate on that?

I've been using their services for some 20 years at various scales, and the only complaints I've had are that their shared mailservers occasionally get blacklisted.

That, and the UI of their KonsoleH could do with a bit of a refresh.

I haven't run into a single issue for years, what do you mean by that?

why not?

Signed up from an Asian country and during signup they asked me to upload a passport copy page.

I thought that was weird (I mean no other cloud provider asked for it but okay). I uploaded anyway because I thought it’s in EU so they at least have better privacy laws so they may end up deleting it later from their systems but I immediately got rejected. Not sure why no reason specified. So now they have my passport copy page without me having an account.

Oh well, seems like either they have an overly aggressive spam filter that gets false positives or they don’t really like accepting signups from Asia

Hetzner is pretty hostile towards foreigners.

And don't you dare suggest in their forum that foreign tech is better than German, instaban.

Fuck Hetzner

I can see a possible scenario, in where rather your general attitude might have been the problem.

I'm from South America, got a server with them, no issues so far.

What German tech - AMD, Intel or Nvidia?

Please don’t feed the trolls.

I had a similar experience very recently (albeit within Europe). Did you try their manual verification process? It was available to me after two failed automatic attempts, and it basically had me send an email to Hetzner support asking if they needed any more information. I got approved manually the very next morning.

Maybe not the most customer-friendly experience, but I figure half an hour of signup weirdness is okay for a solid after-signup service in the long term, especially as that half an hour is likely to deter a decent chunk of fraud.

Had the same experience. Contacted support for manual verification, was online the next day with Hetzner. Machine has been running without interruption for a year now.

Same story from the US. I think they mostly worry that you are trying to avoid paying VAT.

Which server do you have on Hetzner that I missed? Dedicated servers start at 37.30 Euro per month now there, the AX-41 couch is pretty good and has no setup fee. On the other side I'm paying OVH about 12 Euro per month for two small VPSes and they are even too much for me, performance wise.

Have a look at the server auction? Tbh, I would limit my dedicated server rentals to server/ddr ram setups (which is a little more expensive).

But if you just need some cpu (to transcode some video, crack some passwords, what-have-you, run a game/videochat server) - consumer cpu models give you unmetered gigabit or 30tb/month 10gbps. So can definitely be worth it vs a VPS.

I have a dedicated server that I got on their auction page for 30 euro per month. That gives me 64GB of ram, 8 cores and some disk space.

Sure, you can get a cheaper VPS, but given a VPS with the approx same perf it would cost much more.

Ditto.

Been using them since 2012 or something, and have never had a problem (that wasn't my own fault).