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Hetzner AG is highly profitable. They have to publish a balance sheet at http://www.bundesanzeiger.de/ (German only)

Annual net profits:

    2008:  4.077.791,31 €
    2009:  4.448.824,49 €
    2010:  8.925.128,81 €
Accumulated profits:

    2008:  9.030.980,10 €
    2009: 13.479.804,59 €
    2010: 22.404.933,40 €
key facts:

- cheap energy + human resources by building custom colocation facilities in regions where cheap cooling+power is available

- cheap self-made servers, no 19" form factor for decicated servers (they have 19" racks for colocation customers)

- hardware has to be refinanced in a couple of months. That's why the charge 149€ setup upfront.

- growing out of cash flow

- CEO and founder still CEO. Sometimes still interacts with customers regarding new ideas in their forum (German only).

see http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/presse/center for corporate press releases.



Similar to French OVH in a lot of way


Except OVH is a haven for nefarious use (seedboxes, etc.) and Hetzner most certainly is not!


> Except OVH is a haven for nefarious use (seedboxes, etc.)

Particularly through certain resellers, including the own "budget line" (http://www.kimsufi.co.uk/). Not that I'd know anything about nefariousness, 'onest guv.


Their french site has slightly better prices for some reason: http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/


Kimsufi was launched to fight against french Dedibox (now online.net), which at the time had lower price than the lowest OVH server. They stayed at the same level as them since then.


Could that be due to differences in VAT?

If not it might just be that they like to quote nice round figures (£14.99 and €14.99 perhaps) - this happens sometimes when the pound and the euro are (or recently have been) near parity.


What makes you say that Hetzner isn't "a haven for nefarious use" ?


Hetzner specifically prohibit the use of file sharing services (see the service agreement for root servers: (http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/legal/system-policies-rs).

Not sure if it's still the case, but they also used to have a policy of blocking port 6667.




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