Hetzner

What Makes It FOSS-Friendly

Hetzner is a German company that has been hosting open source projects since the beginning. They don't impose proprietary restrictions on what you run, don't have Terms of Service clauses that forbid "competing services," and don't charge absurd premiums for bandwidth that makes self-hosting impractical.

Their robots.txt is a love letter to open source. Their community forums are full of Linux experts sharing knowledge freely. They offer native Arch Linux and openSUSE images alongside Ubuntu and Debian. Their rescue system supports all major Linux distributions and even FreeBSD.

Setup & Management

Hetzner doesn't have a slick cloud dashboard. Management is primarily via their Robots API (REST API for provisioning and managing servers) or their web console. For automated provisioning, the hcloud CLI tool works well with Terraform and Ansible.

There's no built-in backup service for VPS (unlike some competitors). You'll want to set up your own backup strategy — rsync to off-site storage, Restic, or Hetzner's optional backup space (€1.50/mo for 100 GB).

• REST API + hcloud CLI
• Terraform and Ansible support
• Optional backup add-on
• DNS API for automation

Caveats & Gotchas

Hetzner's simplicity is a feature, but it can also be a learning curve if you're used to cloud providers with built-in load balancers, managed databases, and automatic scaling. Here, you build it yourself — which is often exactly what FOSS enthusiasts want.

Their terms explicitly prohibit certain use cases: no spam, no illegal content, no cryptocurrency mining on shared resources. Payment is SEPA direct debit or bank transfer for EU customers. Credit cards and PayPal are not accepted — this trips up non-EU users.

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