Hetzner — German hosting and cloud provider
Hetzner Online is a German hosting and cloud provider headquartered in Gunzenhausen in Bavaria, operating data centres in Germany, Finland and the United States. Founded in 1997, Hetzner has grown into one of the largest European hosting providers by physical footprint, with a price level that is consistently below the major hyperscalers for comparable raw compute and storage. The business is privately held and has historically reinvested operating cash flow into capacity expansion rather than aggressive sales and marketing. For ERP buyers Hetzner is rarely the right choice for vendor-managed SaaS ERP — products such as SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud or Dynamics 365 are not hosted on Hetzner because the vendors operate their own infrastructure. The relevant scenarios are different: self-managed open-source ERP, ERP partner-hosted infrastructure where the partner operates the stack on Hetzner, and adjacent workloads such as web shops, file storage and backup repositories that surround an ERP environment.
About
Hetzner Online GmbH was founded in 1997 by Martin Hetzner and remains in private ownership. Headquarters and the largest data-centre footprint are in Bavaria (Gunzenhausen, Nürnberg, Falkenstein/Vogtland). Additional data centres operate in Helsinki, Finland and Ashburn, Virginia (United States). Headcount sits in the high hundreds. The product portfolio covers three categories: dedicated root servers (bare-metal physical machines), Hetzner Cloud (Linux virtual machines, block storage, object storage, load balancers, managed Kubernetes), and managed services such as managed servers and shared hosting. The pricing model is straightforward and published: there are no opaque consumption tiers and no egress-traffic surcharges at the volumes a typical Mid-Market workload generates. Hetzner holds ISO 27001 certification and operates EU data centres under the European data-protection framework. The provider does not market itself with SAP, Microsoft or other major-ERP certification badges — the customer is responsible for what is deployed on top.
Service offering
For ERP-adjacent workloads the relevant capabilities include dedicated bare-metal servers with AMD Epyc and Intel Xeon CPUs at fixed monthly prices, Hetzner Cloud virtual machines provisioned by API or web interface, block-storage volumes attached to cloud instances, object storage for backups and large files, and managed Kubernetes clusters. Network capacity is generous and egress traffic is not metered at typical Mid-Market volumes, which is structurally different from hyperscaler pricing. Open-source ERP products that customers commonly run on Hetzner include Odoo, ERPNext, Dolibarr and the open-source editions of selected vendors. Self-managed deployments of commercial ERP (such as Sage 100, selected mid-market German ERP products) also appear on Hetzner where the customer or partner operates the stack directly. Backup and disaster-recovery configurations are the customer's responsibility; no managed-ERP service layer is offered by Hetzner itself.
DACH positioning
In the German hosting market Hetzner is the cost leader for raw compute and storage and has a strong following among technical operators, system integrators and open-source-oriented customers. The provider competes against IONOS (which is positioned closer to the Mid-Market as a hyperscaler alternative), Open Telekom Cloud (which is positioned for sovereignty-sensitive enterprise workloads) and the global hyperscalers in scenarios where price-per-CPU matters. GDPR-compliant operation is the default since all relevant data centres are in the EU. For GoBD-relevant tax data the customer remains the responsible controller; Hetzner provides the storage and snapshot capabilities that GoBD-compliant operation requires, but the audit-trail and immutability configuration is the customer's responsibility. German-language support is available; technical documentation is bilingual. The provider is not SAP-certified for SAP HANA workloads, which limits its role in the SAP ecosystem.
Strengths and selection considerations
Strengths to consider: structurally lower price level than the hyperscalers for raw compute and storage, transparent fixed pricing without egress surprises, German jurisdiction and EU data centres, mature operational track record. For self-managed open-source ERP and for ERP-adjacent workloads such as web shops, file storage and backup repositories, Hetzner is a credible cost-optimised choice. Limitations to consider: Hetzner is not SAP-certified for SAP HANA workloads, so it should not be evaluated as an SAP S/4HANA host; the service catalogue is much narrower than AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, with no managed database services beyond the basics and no managed-ERP layer. Customers without in-house operational skills should not run ERP directly on Hetzner without an integration partner who takes responsibility for stack operation. For a Rise with SAP or Dynamics 365 SaaS scenario, Hetzner is not the right choice at all.
Related Topics
Vendor homepage of Hetzner Online
Current view of the website https://www.hetzner.com/de/
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Frequently Asked Questions
Can I run SAP S/4HANA on Hetzner?
Not in the certified sense. Hetzner is not part of the SAP-certified hyperscaler list, so SAP HANA workloads on Hetzner would run without SAP infrastructure certification and would generally fall outside SAP's standard support envelope. For SAP S/4HANA the supported hyperscaler choices are AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, with German regions available on all three. Hetzner remains relevant for self-managed open-source ERP and adjacent workloads.
Is Hetzner GDPR-compliant?
Yes for EU data centres. Hetzner operates data centres in Germany and Finland that fall inside the EU data-protection framework, and the provider offers a standard data-processing addendum for customers. The U.S. data centre in Virginia falls outside the EU boundary and should not be used for personal-data workloads subject to GDPR data-residency expectations.
Is Hetzner suitable for Mittelstand ERP buyers?
It depends on the deployment model. For self-managed open-source ERP and for ERP-adjacent workloads (web shop, backups, file storage) Hetzner is a credible cost-optimised choice if the customer has the operational skills in house or contracts an integration partner. For SAP S/4HANA or Dynamics 365 SaaS scenarios Hetzner is not the right counterparty; the relevant hyperscalers or vendor SaaS clouds are.