How I Am Setting Up VMs On Hetzner Cloud - Gunnar Morling

Whenever I’ve need a Linux box for some testing or experimentation, or projects like the One Billion Row Challenge a few months back, my go-to solution is Hetzner Online, a data center operator here in Europe.

Their prices for VMs are unbeatable, starting with 3,92 €/month for two shared vCPUs (either x64 or AArch64), four GB of RAM, and 20 TB of network traffic (these are prices for their German data centers, they vary between regions). four dedicated cores with 16 GB, e.g. for running a small web server, will cost you 28.55 €/month. Getting a box with similar specs on AWS would set you back a multiple of that, with the (outbound) network cost being the largest chunk. So it’s not a big surprise that more and more people realize the advantages of this offering, most notably Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson, who has been singing the praise for Hetzner’s dedicated servers, but also their VM instances, quite a bit on Twitter lately.

So I thought I’d share the automated process I’ve been using over the last few years for spinning up new boxes on Hetzner Cloud, hoping it’s gonna be helpful to other folks out there eager to explore this world of cheap compute. I’ve had that set-up in a GitHub repo for quite a while and meant to write about it, with the recent attention on Hetzner being a nice motivator for finally doing so. Note I am not affiliated with Hetzner in any way or form, I just like their offering and think more people should be aware of it and benefit from it.

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