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Hetzner is awesome.

I wish they would go public.

Would be very interesting to see how their business is doing compared to IONOS and OVH.

We need more public cloud companies in Europe.

The last thing we need is more enshitification on this space.

I just migrated my selfhosted email server to Hetzner and I don't want them turning into monstrosity like AWS or Azure, with theit miriad of ways to nickel and dime the customers.

Compared to IONOS, it is day and night. IONOS in my experience is just worse in every category that matters. IONOS has buggy and bad wannabe SPA web frontend, broken OS images, bottlenecks in their provisioning API, that they don't care to fix, and 10x the costs.

If you are not desperate for one specific offering of IONOS, that Hetzner doesn't offer, and you have any other options, there is no good and justifiable reason to go for IONOS. IONOS is a low effort, low quality, high marketing spend shop. Hetzner is almost the opposite. They don't waste money on advertising, they cost much less to rent servers from, their OS images work, they got good technical support.

Do tech companies like Hetzner count as mittelstands?
Mittelstand is singular (like middle class).

I would say decidedly yes for Hetzner. Mittelstand can somewhat be characterized by size, but it's mostly that they are more like a family, have different values and more long term thinking than the larger industry and public companies. It's also kind of a brand that many companies would like to attribute to themselves, even much larger companies that like that seal of quality.

Had a server in that DC for a few years until recently (no knock on Hetzner they where excellent, just didn't need it any more).

Robot is a brutally functional tool but it does function (well) and had zero issues.

I love Hetzner. That said their IPv6 support is poor. A server gets a /64 only, if you want a /56 (allowing 256 container networks) then you have to pay €15. As for virtual networks: they only support IPv4!

At least they're not as bad as Azure... :)

Why do you need ipv6 on your internal network? Is 10/8 really not enough/overlap? For 99.99% of people it's fine for the internal interfaces and if anything actually simplifies configuration.
I disable IPv6 and I’m somewhat scared of the concept of having containers with public IPs.
Does each container network of the 256 really need its own /64? Is there some constraint that doesn't let them work on a /72?
I have a tiny Hetzner VPS (2 vCPUs, 2 Gb RAM) in their west us datacenter that costs me $5.59 a month. I get 1 TB a month free outgoing bandwidth and unlimited incoming bandwidth, plus additional outgoing bandwidth at a rate of $1.20 per TB. I host my personal project's git LFS server there, a file server, and a Caddy instance that proxies over Tailscale to a more powerful box in my apartment. It's a great homelab architecture and I couldn't be happier with it. Thanks Hetzner!
Thanks for the shout-out! We're really glad you're happy with it :D --Katie
Hetzner certainly has this cult-like following mostly because of their low cost.

I assume it is a recent push toward these kind of open frame, super minimalist, consumer hardware based systems (I don't speak german and didn't translate the video).

It looks like they're using lots of consumer hardware and very little redundancy; you'll notice that the power supplies are generic ATX units and they're not doubled up. And then they're also running the onboard networking with a second connection which looks like it's for just a management system. Might not even be 10 gigabit networking.

It's interesting that in an era where almost all of the major players are moving toward cable-free arrangements i.e. backplanes with fully integrated power and networking, etc., they're instead opting for the rat's nest of cabling. It must have something to do with lower labor costs vs hardware costs. The amount of density that they are achieving with those systems is also incredibly low relatively speaking.