alt Hacker NewsThey are great for throwaway hobbyist side projects where you don't want to worry about AWS billing horror stories or more expensive offerings like Digital Ocean or Linode.
I would not recommend them for a serious, money-on-the-table business.
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I would absolutely use Hetzner for a real money-on-the-table business. You just have to know what you are up to and do your cost-benefit analysis.
I actually moved a business of ~100 FTEs from AWS to Hetzner once. Aside from the migration cost, the price was roughly 25% of AWS.
At the end, the biggest gain was not monetary, but human. For years, that business could retain skilled engineers who had the opportunity to work close to bare metal, caring about the nitty-gritty technical details of backups, failover and high availability.
And they did not even cost much. That they had so much leeway in designing the system instead of "relying on the cloud" was a major retainer.
I left many years ago, the business switched frameworks since then but they stayed on Hetzner.
P.S. Yes, that was before Hetzner Cloud became a thing )
I only use them for money-making projetcs. Based on my own experience and what I read online, you need to be careful with:
* crypto mining (I used it when it wasn't causing much trouble but I noticed my nodes were constantly attacked at a ratio I newer saw for other servers); IIRC Hetzner's current ToS forbid crypto mining
* things in legally grey area which might be legal in some places but not so in others, especially in the EU
* protect your servers well; if you become a victim of an attack and your servers will start attacking other, Hetzner will isolate them and notify you so that you can solve the problem
Other than that, the only problems I had in the last 15 or so years are failing bare-metal components that they promptly replaced, that's all.