Hetzner

What it is

Hetzner rents servers in German and Finnish data centres. No builder, no managed service: you get a machine, an access key, and from there it is on you. It appears here for two reasons, price and location.

Where it holds

A small server running several services at once costs about as much per month as a single subscription elsewhere for one managed equivalent. Run three, four or ten things and you do not save a little, you save an order of magnitude.

The second point matters to anyone handling customer data: the data centres are in the EU, the company is German, and there is a data processing agreement. That is not a marketing tick, it spares you the awkward question of which country the data actually flows to.

Where it bites

You are the administrator. Updates, backups, firewall, encryption: nobody does that for you. It is manageable, and it is a real job, and whoever skips it eventually has a problem more expensive than any subscription.

Backups are not simply there. A server on its own is not a backup. Set nothing up and you have nothing when something breaks.

If you break it, you fix it. Support helps with the machine, not with what you run on it.

What it looks like when it runs

One machine carries the whole toolbox: the automation, the filing, the reporting, the website. That costs less per month than one subscription per tool, and it sits in Europe, which turns the data protection question from an exception into a footnote. The point is not the price alone. It is that the switch is in your hand: what runs on it, when it moves, and who gets to read along.

What to think about before choosing it

Here is the honest limit, which is why it is written down: I have run this infrastructure for myself for years. I have not built it for a client yet. If you have nobody who feels responsible for it, a managed service is the right call even at a higher price. A server without an owner is not saved money, it is a deferred outage.