Hetzner occupies a specific niche: genuinely cheap compute in German and Finnish data centres, with a service catalogue deliberately kept small. If what you need is cores, memory and disks, the price per unit is difficult to beat. If you need managed analytics or a broad platform, you are in the wrong place.
The value proposition
Hetzner runs its own data centres and sells capacity close to cost. A virtual server with several dedicated cores and a useful amount of RAM costs a fraction of the equivalent on a large platform. Bandwidth allowances are generous and overage pricing is mild.
Dedicated root servers sit alongside the cloud instances, and for sustained workloads they are often dramatically cheaper than equivalent virtualised capacity elsewhere.
Account server limits
Hetzner accounts carry a limit on how many servers can run concurrently. New accounts start low and limits rise with account history and payment record.
Configurations described as 5 server or 10 server accounts refer to that concurrent ceiling. Size against peak simultaneous servers:
- A single application with a database: 2 to 3 servers.
- An application with separate worker and cache tiers: 4 to 6.
- A small Kubernetes cluster: 3 or more nodes plus a control plane, so at least 4.
- Multiple client environments in parallel: it scales with clients, quickly.
The verification step
Hetzner’s identity verification is stricter than most. Accounts are commonly referred for manual review, and documents that do not align exactly with the details entered on the account are a frequent cause. For international customers this can add days.
This is a real characteristic of the platform rather than a criticism of it: Hetzner’s pricing depends on keeping abuse low, and identity verification is how they do that. It is also the practical reason teams buy accounts with billing already active, so a project is not held up waiting on a review.
The open port 25 configuration
Outbound SMTP is restricted by default, as everywhere. An account with port 25 open is for running a genuine mail server. Application email should relay through a service such as Amazon SES instead.
If you do run mail directly, Hetzner IP ranges have mixed reputation because of their popularity, so authentication records and careful IP warming matter more here than on a premium range. Our port 25 guide covers the setup.
What Hetzner does not have
There is no managed data warehouse, no managed machine learning platform and a limited set of managed databases. Load balancers, block storage, object storage and firewalls exist and work well. Anything beyond that infrastructure layer you build yourself.
For many teams that is the point. For teams that want managed services, AWS or Google Cloud are the comparison, and the price difference buys real capability.
Before you deploy
Change the delivered credentials, enable multi-factor authentication, replace SSH keys with your own, check for existing servers and volumes, set a spending notification and configure the firewall before exposing anything. Hetzner gives you a public IP by default, so assume the server is reachable from the internet the moment it boots.
Common questions
Can server limits be raised?
Yes, through support, and they tend to rise as an account builds payment history.
Is Hetzner suitable for production?
Yes, and a great deal of production runs on it. Design for failure as you would anywhere, since cheap capacity does not mean fault-tolerant capacity.
Where are the data centres?
Primarily Germany and Finland, with additional locations including the United States and Singapore.