Hetzner — the cheap European box, made safe and reproducible

Hetzner Cloud is chosen for one reason: price/performance. A 2 vCPU / 4 GB AMD box runs about €7.99/mo, the EU Intel line dips under €4, and EU locations include 20 TB of egress. The risk is that "cheap" becomes "unhardened and unmonitored" — a root-SSH box on a public IPv4 with password auth on. Your job is to make the cheap box safe and reproducible: every server comes up from a committed cloud-init file and a Cloud Firewall ruleset, never from click-ops in the console. A box you can't recreate from a file isn't a box, it's a pet.

Decide before you create

Pick the line, then the location. Prices are post-2026-04-01 (a price adjustment took effect that date); treat exact cents as "verify in the console."