Hetzner as EU hosting for Swiss fiduciaries and SMEs: data centres, contracts, cost

What is Hetzner?

Hetzner Online GmbH is a German hosting provider based in Gunzenhausen (Bavaria), founded in 1997, with data centres in Falkenstein (Saxony, three sites), Nuremberg, and Helsinki. The company is not publicly traded, remains owned by the Hetzner founding family, and operates its own hardware in its own buildings – no reseller, no middleman. As of May 2026 Hetzner serves over half a million customers, mostly from Europe.

The offering splits into two product lines. Hetzner Cloud (CX, CCX, CAX series) is classic IaaS: virtual machines with hourly billing, from EUR 4/month for an ARM instance with 4 GB RAM, from EUR 5.83/month for an x86 VM with 4 GB RAM and 40 GB SSD. Plus load balancers, object storage (S3-compatible), volumes, snapshots, and firewall – the standard IaaS building blocks.

Hetzner Dedicated (AX, EX, RX series) are dedicated servers with fixed monthly rent. An AX102 with AMD Ryzen 9, 128 GB ECC RAM, 2x 1.92 TB NVMe RAID1 currently runs at EUR 132/month – the same hardware on AWS or Azure would be 5 to 10 times more expensive. The EX series carries Intel Xeon and more disk options, the RX series is ARM-based (Ampere Altra). Setup fees usually EUR 49 to EUR 99, sometimes waived in promotion windows.

Our fairlane.systems infrastructure runs on a Hetzner Dedicated server in Falkenstein: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, 125 GB RAM, 2x NVMe in RAID1, over 48 days of uptime. A second server at DigitalOcean for stage/prod separation, both under the same Cloudflare account.

Why it matters

For Swiss fiduciaries and SMEs three points matter: legal certainty under nFADP, EU data residency, and cost per actual compute. Hetzner gives a clear picture on all three.

Legal certainty: Hetzner is a German GmbH under GDPR. The data processing agreement (DPA per Art. 28 GDPR, equivalent to nFADP Art. 9) is available by default – as a downloadable PDF, a signed version on request. There is no third-country clause, no US parent company, no Cloud Act exposure. Under a compliance review it is documented in 5 minutes.

Data residency: Falkenstein and Helsinki are both clearly inside the EU. Data does not leave the EU unless explicitly configured (external S3 backup, cross-border snapshot replication). Helsinki is also relevant for climate factors – the Finnish data centres run mostly on hydropower and use outside air for cooling. Anyone reporting sustainability has a defensible figure for the ESG report here.

Cost: a dedicated Hetzner server with 128 GB RAM costs EUR 132/month. The same configuration as an EC2 instance (m6i.8xlarge with 128 GB RAM) runs over EUR 1,000/month at AWS. Even Hetzner Cloud is 3-5 times cheaper than AWS or Azure at comparable spec. For SMEs that do not need to scale to 1,000 containers in seconds, Hetzner is the sweet spot – predictable cost, sufficient performance, EU law.

Reality check: Hetzner is not AWS. There is no managed Postgres, no managed Kubernetes, no 99.99% SLA, no 24/7 phone support for standard customers (enterprise support is available at an extra charge). Anyone needing that pays for it separately. Anyone running a server with Docker, Postgres, and n8n, doing backups themselves, is well placed at Hetzner and saves substantially.

How it works

Ordering: through the Hetzner Robot portal (dedicated) or the Hetzner Cloud console (VMs). Dedicated servers are usually provisioned within 1-2 hours, sometimes instantly on promo stock. SSH access by public key, root password optional. First steps: update the system, configure the firewall (ufw), put SSH on a non-default port, install Fail2ban or CrowdSec, enable automatic security updates.

Network: every server gets a public IPv4 plus an IPv6 subnet included. Hetzner Cloud additionally offers private networks (vSwitch) for internal communication across multiple servers. Bandwidth is typically 1 Gbit/s included, with no data-transfer fees up to 20 TB/month – beyond that, EUR 1 per TB. That is the big cost advantage over AWS, where egress often is the dominant line item.

Storage: dedicated servers come with local NVMe or SATA SSD depending on configuration. In addition, Hetzner Storage Box as external file storage (CHF 4/month for 1 TB, SFTP/SMB/Borg backup protocol). Hetzner Object Storage (S3-compatible) from EUR 5/month for 1 TB. Backups usually follow this pattern: local snapshot via Borg/restic, plus replication to Storage Box, plus an optional third pull location.

Contract details: dedicated servers have a one-month minimum term; cloud VMs are billed hourly. The DPA can be generated online – enter your company details, get the signed version back with a click. For a Swiss company the signed Hetzner variant usually suffices; some cantons want a counter-signed document, which goes through Hetzner support.

Migration: a typical move from AWS or Azure to Hetzner takes 2-5 days depending on complexity. Database dump, redeploy application containers via Docker Compose on Hetzner, switch DNS, move monitoring. The main effort is not Hetzner-specific but depends on the layering of the application.

Hetzner setup for an AI stack in 6 steps

1. 01Sizing: 64 GB RAM for small fiduciary setups, 128 GB for RAG-plus-Ollama stacks, 256 GB when several local models should stay hot in parallel.
2. 02Generate the DPA in Hetzner Robot with company details (Swiss branch allowed), file the signed PDF in the compliance folder.
3. 03Order the server, pick Falkenstein or Helsinki, choose Ubuntu 24.04 LTS or Debian 12 as the image, RAID1 for availability.
4. 04Initial hardening: SSH on a non-default port, ufw, CrowdSec, automatic security updates, an unprivileged sudo user.
5. 05Roll out the Docker-Compose stack: n8n, Postgres, Qdrant, Ollama, LiteLLM behind Nginx with Certbot for Let's Encrypt SSL.
6. 06Backup strategy: daily Borg or restic snapshot to a Hetzner Storage Box, plus a monthly pull to a DigitalOcean server for location diversity.

When to use Hetzner

Hetzner is the right choice when (a) EU data residency is mandatory, (b) predictable cost versus AWS is desired, or (c) self-hosted components such as n8n, Qdrant, Postgres, LiteLLM are to share one machine.

Typical cases: a Swiss fiduciary with 50 clients piloting AI workflows – an AX server with 64 GB RAM at EUR 80/month carries the whole stack. Law firm with local Ollama plus Qdrant – a larger AX with 128 GB RAM. SME with 30 staff that wants to pull its GitLab instance off US cloud – an AX server with RAID1 for availability.

Hetzner also suits multi-server setups. Stage/prod split with two AX servers, or a cluster of three cloud VMs behind a load balancer for a production web application. The Dedicated (for data-heavy workloads) plus Cloud (for dynamic web loads) mix is a common configuration.

When not to use

Anyone needing managed services in depth – managed Kubernetes, managed Postgres with multi-AZ failover, managed Redis with automatic sharding – is better off with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. Hetzner has a young managed-DB product in development but not at the breadth and depth of the hyperscalers.

Hetzner is unsuited for applications with extreme scaling needs – anyone who must spin up from 10 to 10,000 machines in hours does not have the auto-scaling layer here. The cloud platform offers up to 1,000 servers per account, but not the dynamic management tooling of a managed Kubernetes service.

Also unsuited: applications that require specialised hardware accelerators (TPU, inference-specific ASICs) – those options are not in the Hetzner standard catalogue. GPU servers exist (e.g. with RTX 4000 or A4000) but availability is limited.

General caveat: Hetzner does not offer 24/7 phone support for standard customers. Anyone needing a technician on the phone at 3 am gets that only via an enterprise contract (extra charge). For most SMEs, email support within 1-2 hours is sufficient; for mission-critical 24/7 systems, an in-house on-call capability or an additional managed-service provider may be needed.

Trade-offs

FAQ

Related topics

Sources

1. Hetzner Online – Data processing agreement (DSGVO/GDPR DPA) · 2026-05
2. Hetzner Dedicated server catalogue and pricing (AX/EX/RX series) · 2026-05
3. Hetzner Cloud pricing (CX, CCX, CAX) · 2026-05
4. Hetzner data centre overview – Falkenstein, Nürnberg, Helsinki · 2026-04
5. ISO 27001 certification – Hetzner Online · 2026-03