Hetzner cloud servers are now available in Ashburn USA

I run some machines on Hetzner with 10x disks sw-RAIDed in a very hands off fashion. From time to time I look how they're doing.

Usually a few disks have blown up, or are erroring or have smart errors. I then need to open 1 ticket per disk to get it fixed. They get replaced with really old disks (25k+ hours) which suffer same failures soon after.

At one point support complained that I was making too many requests to change their broken disks as if it was my fault that 20% were screwed.

Then they treat you like an idiot as much as they can. They ask you to provide disk slots numbering for disks which are impossible to get/know for a customer because they cannot read the serial number labels on the chassis and generally assume customer's fault to not know where they plugged something.

Sometimes machines do not restart after changing the disks and they don't realize so have to follow up again.

Network isolation doesn't exist so any weird network behavior from the machines towards then LAN gets you blocked.

If something is wrong you have to beg for some console access that they need to enable on demand only to find they plugged something wrong.

But they're cheap so...

Any notable competitive advantages over DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, and all the other "starting at $5" copycat options in the U.S.?

Looking at their price sheet, and converting Euro to U.S. Dollar, it appears that their "$5 droplet" currently costs $4.05. You'd have to make sure you pay with a credit card that doesn't charge foreign transaction fees, and you'd have to hope that the currency exchange rate doesn't shift in a less favorable direction later.

If you're a company operating larger VM's or larger numbers of VM's, then maybe? I guess. But if you're a self-propelled company or an investor-funded startup, then you're probably on AWS, Azure, or GCP anyway. And for personal side project use in the U.S., I'm just not seeing any real reason to jump for a 95 cent discount that will fluctuate.

EDIT: A thank you to the people who actually answered the question, or gave their own personal experience, rather than just downvoting. Looking more closely at the price sheet, I can see that while the smallest option is not very distinguishable from DO or Linode, Hetzner does get more competitive at larger VM sizes.

It appears this is only for Hetzner cloud.

Hopefully this means dedicated servers will come soon.

For those unaware, Hetzner truly has unbeatable pricing. Pricing that's even substantially cheaper than OVH.

I welcome competition.

EDIT: what's odd is that on their FAQ [0] they state dedicated AMD servers are available in Ashburn, but when I go to their actual dedicated server page [1] - no US locations are listed for any dedicated offering.

[0] https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/general/locations/ ↗

[1] https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver ↗

This is great news, this finally means Hetzner has ambitions beyond Europe.

It is also interesting that Linode, DO, Vultr and UpCloud are all moving up the value chain and try to be a simplify, mini AWS with managed services. Hetzner will now take their place and becomes the more affordable cloud hosting provider with very little features.

And I am surprised at all the dedicated box comments, really wish Hetzer will some day do that on US or may be Canada. But my guess is that it would require something like OVH with huge investment on Datacenter.