It is cheap, it is fast, and the dashboard does not try to upsell me on AI. That is, increasingly, all I want from a host.
I have used most of the usual suspects over the years — the hyperscalers, the developer-friendly PaaS layers on top of them, the indie clouds. For the small static sites and one-box apps I tend to build, almost all of them are overkill in different ways: too many services, too many free tiers that turn into surprise bills, too many menus pretending to be a product.
Hetzner is the opposite of that. A box is a box. It costs a few euros. You SSH into it and put your files there. The control panel has roughly six buttons. None of them are an AI assistant.
What it actually costs me
This site runs on a CX11 in Nuremberg. It is €3.79 a month. It serves static HTML through Caddy, which handles TLS automatically. I deploy by running rsync. There is nothing else.
For a personal site that needs to load in under a second and stay up while I am asleep, that is the entire stack. Hetzner does not have a clever marketing story for this. The story is just — here is a Linux machine, here is the bill.
If you are starting something small, pick the boring infrastructure. The interesting part of your project is your project. The infrastructure should disappear.