I’ve been a customer of Hetzner Cloud for a few years. The TLDR; is that it’s a solid service that is worth taking a look at if you want low prices for virtual machines if you don’t mind rolling your own solutions for many things.
Prices are very competitive. A basic system with 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM and 20 GB of disk is €2.89 ($3.42). This includes 20 TB of traffic which is plenty for most small projects. The higher spec systems are more but still reasonable. The charges are per hour, so if you just need a system a short time, you only pay for that time. Since they do bill in Euro, you should sign up with a card that doesn’t charge foreign exchange fees.
The features are quite limited compared to something like AWS. But the basics are there including load balancing, internal networking, mountable volume storage, snapshots, backups, etc.
You can do just about everything via the API and they have a Terraform provider that works well.
I’ve found the service to be very reliable and access is low-latency from the US (the servers are located in Germany or Finland). I’ve had systems run out there for over a year with the only downtime from when I applied patches to the OS.
The selection of images is limited but they cover the essential Linux flavors in the latest versions (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and CentOS) and you can install a bunch more by jumping through a few hoops.
In sum, I’m a fan of Hetzner for deploying small open-source projects where you want to be able to turn all of the knobs. For example, it’s perfect for understanding how to set up a small K8s cluster. However, it’s not nearly as easy as using something like EKS because you have to do most of the setup yourself. As a learning experience, it’s great. However, it’s definitely a roll-you-own situation.
If you want to give Hetzner a try, here is a referral link. Signing up for this gives you €20 in cloud credits. In full disclosure, I get €10 credit also.