I don't think describing Hetzner as IaaS is very accurate. They do offer that as well, but also dedicated servers, VPS and more.
Personally I use Hetzner exclusively for their cheap and unmetered dedicated servers, as I don't like paying per GB used or similar, I want one static cost per month regardless of anything.
In fact, when I think about it, most other Hetzner users I've met have similar objectives and I don't think I've met anyone around me in real-life that was using the IaaS part of Hetzner.
Yes, they are infrastructure but not Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). IaaS is typically referring to the sort of services you don't really care about the underlying hardware at all, nor the OS.
So while you can build your own IaaS by using dokku, Kubernetes or whatever on top of dedicated servers, dedicated servers (or VPS) by themselves aren't part of IaaS.
> Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a cloud computing service model where a cloud services vendor provides computing resources such as storage, network, servers, and virtualization (which emulates computer hardware). This service frees users from maintaining their own data center, but they must install and maintain the operating system and application software.
Thanks for asking! The infrastructure is actually the less interesting part for us, since our platform is written to be completely portable. The USP is the platform itself, that means the managed aspect. You can run your workload on our platform without having to worry too much about servers or infrastructure. Deployment can be done either through Git Integrations or our 1 click deployment option for popular open source services. You can scale your application up and down in seconds and additionally we try to offer every important component as an all in one solution inhouse. Think managed dbs, transactional emails, etc., those are all products we offer today.
We actually started out in 2019 by colocating our own network/server equipment in a colo facility in Frankfurt (InterXion). We are bootstrapped and since our USP is the software, not the infrastructure, we decided to partner with a reliable infrastructure company that is available globally, flexible enough and for data privacy reasons is an EU based company (there are not many!) so we could roll out our platform faster. Since we still own our own IP space and are a RIPE member, we can migrate to our own infrastructure down the road.
In this business the focus shouldn't be to own the whole "supply chain", but to deliver a reliable solution to customers. Everyone is a reseller of someone.
Nodion -> Leaseweb. Leaseweb -> Iron Mountain. Iron Mountain -> electricity companies, dark fiber, etc.
Heroku/Vercel -> AWS. AWS also uses colo facilities like Equinix, InterXion, NTT or e-shelter in Frankfurt.
I quite like the low-end offering, €5 can get you a managed ValKey, a managed Postgres and a 512MB RAM Linux VM. In most other PaaS offerings you start at $10 just for a managed database.
If you don't mind answering, how do you handle those low-memory databases? For i.e. DS-G2-256MB, you get a 256MB VM with a dedicated Postgres installation, or you get an user/db in a shared Postgres server?
Disclaimer: I am the founder of Nodion.