It's a dedicated bare metal machine for you. The tradeoff with Hetzner is, that it's not expensive Server hardware, so you will encounter hardware problems more often compared to a Dell or HP server.
You just have to build high-availability into your software. I'm using six Hetzner servers for over 1.5 years now and the only problem I had was one disk failure - support needed 10 minutes to swap it. I can highly recommend them!
I pay them ~200 euros per month for what would cost me 2.000+ dollars on aws...
I'm curious about this statement : is that as opposed to cloud apps ? Wouldn't you need to build high-availability into your apps whether they're running in the cloud or on dedicated ?
If you mean that you can have a load balancer in front of it managed by Amazon, that's true for dedicated as well (Akamai, CDNetworks, Limelight, even Leaseweb). Managed databases are available from most providers (usually without an API, but you can find them with an API as well).
Failures will happen no matter what. About the only difference I think you'll see is that most of their servers don't use ECC memory, so you're technically more likely to hit a problem there.
I've had one server with them for about 3 years, and another for 2 years, and haven't run into a hardware issue yet. Obviously a hardware issue could happen at any time, so anything I can't live with being offline until I can restore from a backup is configured with redundancies, including a Digital Ocean VPS just in case the datacenter my servers are in goes offline.
From my monitoring, however, I tend to see a short network blip about every other month, but it's less than a minute at a time. All other outages I've had were my own fault.
Hetzner also has options for Xeons and Dell PowerEdge servers for a bit more a month, but I've also had great experience with their best value hosting servers, ran a site on it for a couple of years without running into any h/w issues before moving to AWS due to its easy managed RDS, S3, SES services. But if I'd just needed a single dedicated server with great specs I'd use Hetzner in a heartbeat.
I picked up one of their new ex41-ssd machines and I'm actually kind of nervous about it. I've bought a few auction machines and they all came with Samsung SSDs, but these new EX line machines are using Crucible, hence the low price. I have zero confidence in Crucible and I'm not sure if I will buy anymore EX machines, unless somebody tells me Crucible has a different reputation now.
Hetzner is towards the vey low end of pricing (downside: latency if your users aren't in Europe), but dedicated servers from most providers end up far cheaper than AWS or GCE.
