Hosting at Hetzner: Root-Servers and Colocation as the Middle Ground

Your own server room has limits: power outages, air conditioning, bandwidth. A data center solves that — and Hetzner makes access to it affordable. Root servers and colocation are the bridge between cloud convenience and on-premises control.

Root Server: Dedicated, Not Shared

A root server at Hetzner is a physical server that only you use. No neighbors on the same CPU, no noisy-neighbor problem. You get root access, install your OS, and run whatever you want on it.

The prices for this are astonishing: A solid server with 64 GB RAM, AMD EPYC cores, and NVMe SSDs costs less than a comparable cloud VM at AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud — per month, not per year.

# Hetzner Robot — Install server
ssh root@<server-ip>
# Proxmox, Ubuntu, whatever

This is the foundation for virtualization: Proxmox on the root server, then your own VMs for mail, helpdesk, monitoring. Full control, no hypervisor neighbors.

Colocation: Your Hardware in Someone Else's Data Center

Colocation goes further: You buy the hardware yourself — the GPU workstation with RTX 5090, the storage server with 12 HDDs — and place it in Hetzner's rack. Power, cooling, network, and physical security come from the data center.

This is the model for AI inference with your own GPU: You buy the card once, the server stands in Nuremberg or Falkenstein, and the monthly bill covers only power and uplink.

What We Use It For

• Root servers for anything that doesn't require special hardware: web server, mail gateway, helpdesk, monitoring, Metabase
• Own on-premises servers for latency-critical services and AI inference with GPUs — in Kufstein, right at the workplace
• Hetzner Storage Box as an external backup target — affordable, connected via SMB/NFS, automated via Proxmox Backup Server

What Hetzner Cannot Do

Hetzner is not a managed service provider. The root server comes bare — OS installation, hardening, monitoring, updates are your responsibility. If you don't want that, you must turn to managed hosting or cloud — and pay for it.

The network connection is good, but not a global SDN. Multi-region setups with automatic failover between Nuremberg and Helsinki require your own effort.

The Cost Comparison

Three years of a root server (EX101 with 64 GB RAM) cost less than one year of a comparable AWS EC2 Reserved Instance — and the root server has dedicated NVMe performance without I/O throttling.

Conclusion

Hetzner is the pragmatic middle ground between "own basement" and "everything in the cloud". Root servers for standard workloads, colocation for specialized hardware, storage box for backups. Combined with on-premises infrastructure, this yields a hybrid stack that saves cloud costs and simplifies compliance.