Does Hetzner beat the whole IaaS market ?

Since Cloud Mercato started to globaly evaluate the whole Cloud Market, one vendor always stands out from the crowd when we talk about European IaaS: Hetzner. Small Cloud provider but well established dedicated servers and collocation sellers.

Hetzner is an UFO in the European market (yes, funny for a Cloud), so much that most of the competitors prefer to ignore the German actor in their benchmark.

Who are they ?

We are not facing a young fresh vendor from 2020 but a successful company funded in 1997. A German and European web hosting provider that has diversified its offering with bare metals and Cloud services.

In terms of Cloud, Hetzner owns a flexible Compute with recent Intel & AMD processors coupled with a efficient Block Storage. Nothing crazy so far, it's not comparable to the market leaders and their +200 services but cleary has a value in small and medium niche.

But how do they shine ?

To be fully transparent with you, at Cloud Mercato we use their Compute as primary Cloud. Why ? Because they exactly match with our requierements and have a pricing defying all competition, maybe the criteria number one for you too.

But this fills specificaly our needs:

• Virtual Machines with decent performance
• Block Storage with decent performance
• Focus on IaaS
• Of course, the lowest price as possible

OK, so why you should not go ?

1. The lack of high-level services

Nowadays, VMs are simple commodities, so like at General Purpose providers, they are a simple way to translate your on-premise infrastructure to a public Cloud. But deploying your software into a IaaS via Ansible, Puppet and Co. isn't considered anymore as a modern management. Developers, hence, startups favor solutions such as Container-as-a-Service, K8aaS or Serverless. Of course you can install your custom Kubernetes and OpenFaaS but clearly not a lot of people want and can manage it themselves.

2. A European footprint

3. Not as certified as competitors

For security of data, sovereignty or the guarantee of a datacenter well operated, certifications are often a criitical requirement for some projects. Unfortunately here, Hetzner can only claim a ISO 27001 which can be currently considered as the minimum for data management.

While it could be enough for many use cases, the race for certifications allows Clouds to sport valuable accomplishments such as:

• HDS
• SOC I, II, III
• Tiers 3/4 datacenters

I didn't said: Don't go

Don't get me wrong, each Cloud vendor has its philosophy and its manner to approach the market. From my perspective, Hetzner is not comparable with the hyperscalers, not by its size but by its usage. You do not subscribe for +200 services only for virtual machines in the same vein that you won't subscribe to the German Cloud for a serverless archtecture.