Buying a Cloud Instace from Hetzner is Hard But Worth It

My first take on buying a Cloud Instance was Digital Ocean because of their great marketing of being developer friendly, Yes they are developer friendly but you can get more for the same amount you pay for Digital Ocean.

Some time ago I was trying out Vultr with their free trial which was amazing because Digital Ocean does not give you a free trial without providing your card details which in my opinion is a big turn off.

I was looking for cheaper and good alternatives for Vultr too, Because of it's low bandwidth. The $5 cloud instance has only 50 GB of Bandwidth, Which isn't lot if you look at the bigger picture. Even the top end cloud instance has like 10 TB or so bandwidth. It's like having a big gun and not knowing how to use it. Vultr is not that bad though, I would still recommend it to someone who is starting to learn how to use and manage cloud instances.

When it comes to unlimited bandwidth, There are only handful of cloud instance providers, Which are small but somewhat trustable and good. But they are slightly costly and overpowered for my use case. So my final choice was Hetzner after a lot of research.

A little background on Hetzner

Hetzner Online GmbH is an Internet hosting company and data center operator based in Gunzenhausen, Germany(citing from wikipedia).

Hetzner is a german company which is trusted by lot of developers in the open source community, Also they provide 20 TB Bandwidth for any cloud instance you buy from them.

My First Attempt on Registering with Hetzner

In the first attempt they asked me a scan of my government identity. So I sent a photo of my government ID to them. They notified me that they would call me back in 1-2 business days. I was really hoping to clear their security clearance but nope this is the email I get along with my Hetzner account disabled forever.

My Second Attempt on Registereing with Hetzner

With respect to my first attempt, I sent a photo of my original government ID to hetzner verification email itself. But still no hope of enabling my account.

So I re-registered with Hetzner with my alternative email and this time without verification I got security clearance and I was greeted into my cloud instances dashboard.

I really have no idea how they verified me when I used a different email address, but anyhow I was happy I'm finally registered with Hetzner.

Was it Worth it?

If I've gone with Vultr I would have got started in 10 minutes at maximum but with Hetzner I had to give my ID and wait for like a week to get a cloud instance. But I really think Hetzner was worth it.

If you are also verifying with Hetzner, I know it's frustrating but still Hetzner is the best cloud instance provider out there. But if you really want to get your hands dirty, I recommend you to try out with Vultr for free.

Conclusion

Having successfully registered with Hetzner, my current server which hosts this domain and other software made by me cost me about €2.34 which is way less than $5(exactly $2.75 at the time of writing). Also with that price I get a lot of bandwidth than what Vultr and Digital Ocean provides. I suppose Hetzner was worth the wait.