Why Hetzner?
Hetzner is the EU-compliant hosting provider of choice at KnausDev. The pricing on their dedicated machines is reasonable for what they offer, and for most production workloads that don’t specifically require Azure, Hetzner is where I deploy. I’ve been hosting multiple large-scale production applications on their servers under client accounts, alongside my own infrastructure for personal projects and services.
When Azure, when Hetzner
If a project requires Azure — compliance reasons, client infrastructure requirements, or specific managed services — I’ll work within that ecosystem. For everything else, Hetzner delivers better value with simpler operational overhead.
How I Use It
I’m currently operating over 10 dedicated machines and several cloud VPS instances with Hetzner at KnausDev, spanning client production systems, self-hosted services, and personal infrastructure.
What runs on Hetzner
- Production applications: large-scale Laravel and Vue 3 platforms deployed on dedicated machines under client accounts
- Web hosting: multiple sites running on my own webserver, fronted by Nginx and Cloudflare
- Email infrastructure: self-hosted Mailcow for email services
- Game servers: Minecraft servers and other game servers spun up on demand
- Remote development: dedicated machines used as compute for larger data aggregations that would take hours on a local machine
- Cross-location setups: infrastructure distributed across Hetzner data centers for redundancy
- Personal infrastructure: a VPS running OPNsense as the router for my home network
- Docker-based deployments: containerized services managed across dedicated and cloud instances
I previously used Hetzner’s S3-compatible object storage but had to cancel it. The service wasn’t stable enough for production use.
Status
Active: primary cloud provider for all infrastructure that doesn’t require Azure.