Hetzner is a hosting provider based in Germany. It sells cloud servers, dedicated servers and storage from data centers in Germany and Finland, plus cloud locations in the US and Singapore.
Cloud servers can talk to each other over private networks, and stateful firewalls help secure your setup. Backups, snapshots and block storage volumes are optional add-ons. Floating IPs are public addresses you can move between servers as needed. Load Balancers spread traffic by round robin or least connections, run active and passive health checks, and can take over TLS decryption from your servers. They can send traffic to both Hetzner Cloud servers and dedicated root servers.
Hetzner says dedicated vCPU servers suit steady, heavy workloads such as data analysis, web shops, ERP and inventory systems, SaaS applications and APIs. Hetzner lists running a Kubernetes cluster or a database that isn’t publicly accessible as typical uses for its private networks. For backups, a Storage Box works like an external drive you reach over FTP, SMB or Rsync, while Object Storage gives you an HTTPS endpoint for storing files. Storage Share, based on Nextcloud, lets users share files and folders with other users and groups through a web browser or the Nextcloud client, and the client can sync files automatically.
You order servers in the Hetzner Console, and a REST API and CLI tool cover the main functions for managing your infrastructure automatically. Hetzner names Ansible, Terraform and Kubernetes as management frameworks you can use. Servers can run Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and other Linux distributions, or start from one-click apps. Hetzner provides self-service docs, guides and how-tos, and a community forum for support and discussion.
Cloud servers come in shared and dedicated vCPU types, with Intel, AMD and Arm options, and are billed hourly up to a monthly cap. European servers include a large traffic allowance. Current prices are in the pricing box above.