Not my experience. Hetzner is really a discount provider, though they may have gotten better.
I used to work for a team that rented dozens of servers from them and we had disk failures almost every other week, which required creating a support ticket and asking them to swap out the drive so we could rebuild the RAID array.
They used regular SATA consumer drives and they were probably pretty old or refurbished or something.
The expectation with AWS and GCP is that the constant intermittent failures are shouldn’t be visible to end users. * So filing tickets is a big difference in user requirements.
* Though GCP (back when it was just AppEngine) wasn’t always this way and as GAE users inside Google we had to write our own code for what we expected to fail, retries, backoffs etc.
I still have a few times per month mails from AWS with an "instance retirement", for which then you have to plan accordingly (basically by not having a single instance as a single point of failure). If you do the same with Hetzner, you would not notice the failure either (failed disk on a single machine? just business as usual, it will eventually be replaced).
Obviously replacing AWS features like RDS multi-AZ masters is not going to be as easy and might be worth paying the whole AWS premium, but that really depends on the business size, traffic, internal experience and many other factors.
With AWS - failure means the instance is automatically retired, and your ASG causes a new instance to automatically be created and put in service without you having to do anything.
With hetzner - failure means your monitoring detected disk failure, sent you a pagerduty alert, which you then have to check the alert, figure out what has failed, and send in a support ticket to get the disk replaced. This will take a couple hours, after which you have to rebuild your RAID array, and hope no more disks fail. All the while operating with degraded performance.
(Don't get me wrong, hetzner is _great_, I've used them for years and highly recommend for numerous scenarios - but the idea that their failure and reliability is anything like "the cloud" is fanciful)
You're, In my real world experience their reliability beats out AWS reliability by a massive margin.
On AWS, something is constantly breaking. One of the 100s of services will always have performance issues, degraded availability or some other crap going on.
On Hetzner, the hard drive, CPU or RAM on one of the machines will die once every few years. Maybe.
(This changes as your service grows and scales out, but there's a stupid high amount of traffic a few machines can take.)
Neither of your anecdotes match my own personal experiences - so I'm sure the general truth is somewhere in between.
I've been responsible for millions of dollars of AWS spend over the last decade. I've had virtually zero AWS caused downtime in that period outside of the few major outages that affected the whole world (for example that major S3 outage) - but the "100s of services will always have performance issues or degraded availability" has literally never been true for me. I've had hundreds of instances be retired - but that is all automated and without downtime.
Over the last 18 months at my current company, we've had 100% uptime - there has not been a single AWS incident that has affected us in us-east-2. And since we're using ECS and fargate, we've also not had to worry about instance retirement.
On the other hand - I've also had numerous personal servers with hetzner over the years - and the hardware is _old_. I've had at least 3 hard drives go bad over the last ~8 years.
Again, I still strongly recommend hetzner for many cases - but I just think it's important to go in understanding the difference in responsibility for things like hardware level monitoring.
That's apples and oranges. With RAID the server is never retired and you don't need to set up auto-scaling and all the scale-out complexity that comes with it. It just keeps running. The replace/resilver cycle may degrade performance whilst the data is re-replicated, but bringing up a new VM will also degrade performance for a while whilst it replicates data from some other node onto itself.
Disk choices have been a thing for a very long time. You can see the options when you scroll down in the configurator. [1] On top of that, Hetzner offers custom builds, so if you have specific needs you can get specific builds. Just not through the point-and-click interface.
I used to work for a team that rented dozens of servers from them and we had disk failures almost every other week, which required creating a support ticket and asking them to swap out the drive so we could rebuild the RAID array.
They used regular SATA consumer drives and they were probably pretty old or refurbished or something.