Hetzner: Cheap European Iron, and the Catch

The three product lines

• Cloud — hourly-billed virtual servers in Nuremberg, Falkenstein, Helsinki, Ashburn and Hillsboro. Provisioned in seconds, snapshots, floating IPs, private networks, load balancers and managed firewalls.
• Dedicated — physical machines rented monthly. Often bought through the server auction, where used hardware goes at a substantial discount.
• Storage Box and Storage Share — cheap bulk storage over SMB, WebDAV, rsync and Nextcloud, priced far below object storage per terabyte.

Most people arrive for cloud servers and stay for the price of the dedicated line.

Where the price advantage is real

The gap is widest on sustained, predictable compute and on egress. Hetzner includes a generous traffic allowance with each server — measured in terabytes — where hyperscalers bill per gigabyte after a small free tier. For anything that serves files, video, backups or large API responses, that single difference often dominates the whole comparison.

A rough sense of the shape:

What Hetzner does not have

This is the part worth reading twice before committing. There is no managed Kubernetes control plane, no managed relational database service, no serverless functions, no managed message queue, no global CDN, no identity service beyond the account itself, and no marketplace of third-party managed services.

If your architecture assumes those exist, you will be running them yourself on Hetzner instances. That is entirely doable — plenty of teams run their own Postgres and their own Kubernetes — but it is engineering time you are trading for the lower bill. Price the time honestly.

The signup friction

Hetzner verifies new accounts more strictly than most providers. Expect identity checks, and expect the first order to be reviewed manually. Accounts opened from some regions, or paid with certain cards, are declined without a detailed reason. This is a fraud-control decision on their side, and it is the reason a verified account has value.

New accounts also start with a server limit — often a handful of cloud servers — that rises as the account establishes payment history. The configurations on the Buy Hetzner Account page are described by that server limit for exactly this reason.

Port 25 and outbound mail

Hetzner blocks outbound port 25 on new accounts by default. This is standard practice across the industry and exists to stop spam originating from freshly created servers. If you need to send mail directly from a server rather than through a relay, the block has to be lifted, which Hetzner does on request once an account has a track record.

An account with port 25 already open is therefore materially different from one without it. If mail delivery is part of your plan, confirm the port status before you order rather than after. The same applies on Kamatera and Linode, which handle it the same way.

Getting a server running

1. In Cloud Console, create a project — it is the boundary for servers, networks and firewalls.
2. Add your SSH public key to the project before creating the first server, so it is injected at build time.
3. Create the server: pick a location, an image, a type, and attach the SSH key.
4. Attach a firewall immediately. Hetzner servers get a public IPv4 by default and are reachable the moment they boot.
5. Set up automated snapshots or backups. Backups are a paid add-on billed as a percentage of the server price.
6. If you need a stable address across rebuilds, allocate a floating IP and point it at the server.

Step four is not optional advice. An unfirewalled server with a public address is found by scanners within minutes.

Common questions

Where to go next

Hetzner is most often compared with OVHcloud, which occupies similar ground in Europe — that comparison is here. To see the available account configurations and their server limits, open the Hetzner account page.