Expert Overview
German hosting company
Hetzner is a hosting company based in Germany. The company appears to have won quite a few awards including the GreenIT best practice award 2011, Bayerns Best 50 in 2012, and EMEA 2012 finalists. That being said, however, their website is very simple and poorly designed, which is unfortunate. They do offer a number of different services that will likely meet your needs, and they have hosting based in Germany, which will be nice for many companies who are targeting that country or anywhere in Europe.
Uptime & Reliability
Not much information on uptime
I looked through their site and could not find any type of uptime guarantee or an approximate history of their uptime. They do seem to use high quality hardware and data center facilities, which will likely limit any issues. When I looked for reviews, and on their social media pages I did not find any indication that they are having any significant issues. There was one person who commented that his site was down, but no matter how good the hosting is, you will have at least a few people complaining.
Features
Plenty of hosting options
This company offers basic shared hosting, VPS and dedicated hosting options (if you looking for WordPress hosting, click here). They also have colocation options, domain registration and more. Most of the features in each package they offer are fairly standard. One really weird thing about their packages is they offer them based on levels, but not in a normal way. For example, the entry level package is Level 1, but the next step up is Level 4 and then they jump to Level 9. This just makes the whole thing more confusing than is needed. There are limits on disk space and transfer volume, though bandwidth does become unlimited after the level 1 package. Most everything you could want in a package will be included at no extra charge, which is nice.
Support
Good quality support features
This company has a lot of options when it comes to getting the support you need. You can email them directly, or use their ’email support robot’ which can answer many issues. THey also have a lot of documentation avaialble to help you with self-service. If you want to talk to a real person, they have a ticketing system that gets quick responses. Overall, they do a good job of supporting the hosting that they provide.
Pricing
Fair pricing model
The prices are in Euros and are pretty much either in line with industry standards or slightly lower. Level 1 starts at 1.90 Euro per month, and then the highest level of shared hosting is $19.90 Euro per month. This includes the 19% VAT, which makes the pricing even more acceptable. Overall, however, there is not much to complain about regarding their pricing structure.
Summary
Overall nice hosting option
When you look at their site you may think that they are a very basic/simple hosting company because of the design. It looks like they created the website years ago and never had it updated. Once you get past that, however, you can see that they offer a good service at a fair price. If you are looking for German based hosting, this isn’t a bad option to consider. Pros:
- Fair prices
- Easy to understand features
- Won multiple awards
Cons:
- Outdated looking site
- No uptime guarantee
