Hetzner Online GmbH is a company and

data center A data center is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. Since IT operations are crucial for busines ...

operator based in

Gunzenhausen Gunzenhausen (; ) is a town in the Weißenburg-Gunzenhausen district, in Bavaria, Germany. It is situated on the river Altmühl, northwest of Weißenburg in Bayern, and southwest of Nuremberg. Gunzenhausen is a nationally recognized recreation a ...

Bavaria Bavaria, officially the Free State of Bavaria, is a States of Germany, state in the southeast of Germany. With an area of , it is the list of German states by area, largest German state by land area, comprising approximately 1/5 of the total l ...

, in Germany.

History

Hetzner Online

GmbH (; ) is a type of Juridical person, legal entity in German-speaking countries. It is equivalent to a (Sàrl) in the Romandy, French-speaking region of Switzerland and to a (Sagl) in the Ticino, Italian-speaking region of Switzerland. It is a ...

began operations in Germany in 1997 under the name Hetzner Online Services. Between 2000 and 2015, Hetzner Online in Germany operated under the legal status AG ("Aktiengesellschaft"). In 2015, it changed its legal status to

. In addition, Hetzner Online expanded its chief executive team with Stephan Konvickova and Günther Müller at the beginning of the year 2019. The company is named after its founder Martin Hetzner. Hetzner Online owns and operates four data center parks in

Nuremberg Nuremberg (, ; ; in the local East Franconian dialect: ''Nämberch'' ) is the Franconia#Towns and cities, largest city in Franconia, the List of cities in Bavaria by population, second-largest city in the States of Germany, German state of Bav ...

and Falkenstein (Germany),

Tuusula Tuusula (; ) is a municipality in Finland, located in the southern interior of the country. Tuusula is situated in the centre of the Uusimaa region. The population of Tuusula is approximately . It is the most populous Municipalities of Finland, ...

(Finland),

Ashburn, Virginia Ashburn is a unincorporated settlement and census-designated place (CDP) in Loudoun County, Virginia, United States. At the 2020 United States census, its population was 46,349, up from 3,393 in 1990. It is northwest of Washington, D.C., and par ...

(United States), and

Hillsboro, Oregon Hillsboro ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of Oregon and is the county seat of Washington County, Oregon, Washington County. Situated in the Tualatin Valley on the west side of the Portland metropolitan area, the city hosts many High tech, high-te ...

(United States). In 2024, Hetzner expanded its global footprint with a new data center in

Singapore Singapore, officially the Republic of Singapore, is an island country and city-state in Southeast Asia. The country's territory comprises one main island, 63 satellite islands and islets, and one outlying islet. It is about one degree ...

(Singapore). In addition, Hetzner Online is a co-investor in the Cinia

C-Lion1 C-Lion1 is a submarine communications cable between Finland and Germany. The cable is owned and operated by the Finnish telecommunications and IT services company Cinia Oy. It is the first direct communications cable between Finland and Central ...

project, which connected Helsinki and Rostock, Germany together with a 1,100 km long submarine fiberglass cable. The cable provides a high-speed connection between Hetzner's German and Finnish data centers.

Services

Hetzner Online provides dedicated hosting, shared web hosting,

virtual private server A virtual private server (VPS) or virtual dedicated server (VDS) is a virtual machine sold as a service by an Internet hosting company. A virtual private server runs its own copy of an operating system (OS), and customers may have superuser- ...

s, managed servers,

domain name In the Internet, a domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services, and more. ...

SSL certificate In cryptography, a public key certificate, also known as a digital certificate or identity certificate, is an electronic document used to prove the validity of a public key. The certificate includes the public key and information about it, informa ...

s, storage boxes, and cloud. At the data center parks located in Nuremberg, Falkenstein and Tuusula/Finland, customers can also connect their hardware to Hetzner Online's infrastructure and network with the company's colocation services. The company operates a server auction site online where the chance to rent older dedicated servers (not purchase or colocate) are auctioned off in the form of a

Dutch auction A Dutch auction is one of several similar types of auctions for buying or selling goods. Most commonly, it means an auction in which the auctioneer begins with a high offer price in the case of selling, and lowers it until some participant accep ...

. According to W3Techs, Hetzner is used by 2.7% of all websites. Hetzner Online has a

domain name registrar A domain name registrar is a company, person, or office that manages the reservation of Internet domain names. A domain name registrar must be accredited by a generic top-level domain (gTLD) Domain name registry, registry or a country code top-l ...

arrangement with

ICANN The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN ) is a global multistakeholder group and nonprofit organization headquartered in the United States responsible for coordinating the maintenance and procedures of several dat ...

(for registering domains under .com,

.net The .NET platform (pronounced as "''dot net"'') is a free and open-source, managed code, managed computer software framework for Microsoft Windows, Windows, Linux, and macOS operating systems. The project is mainly developed by Microsoft emplo ...

and .org and others),

DENIC DENIC eG is the manager of the .de domain, the country-code top-level domain for Germany. It was founded in 1996 and is organised as a non-regulated not-for-profit cooperative. DENIC provides the Domain Name System (DNS) as well as registrat ...

(for .de), and

nic.at nic.at GmbH, based in Salzburg, is the domain name registry for the country code top-level domain .at. "AT" is the ISO 3166 country code for Austria. Nic.at is owned by the Internet Foundation Austria and has 30 employees. From 1988 until 1998, ...

(for

.at .at is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Austria. It is administered by nic.at. Second-level domains The .at top-level domain has a number of second-level domains: However, it is also possible to register directly at the to ...

Infrastructure

Hetzner Online's datacenter projects are coordinated and implemented in-house with as little outsourcing as possible. Data center units served by multiple redundant uplinks, including 1300

Gbit/s In telecommunications, data transfer rate is the average number of bits ( bitrate), characters or symbols ( baudrate), or data blocks per unit time passing through a communication link in a data-transmission system. Common data rate units are mu ...

to DE-CIX and

fiber optic An optical fiber, or optical fibre, is a flexible glass or plastic fiber that can transmit light from one end to the other. Such fibers find wide usage in fiber-optic communications, where they permit transmission over longer distances and at ...

links to Nuremberg and

Frankfurt Frankfurt am Main () is the most populous city in the States of Germany, German state of Hesse. Its 773,068 inhabitants as of 2022 make it the List of cities in Germany by population, fifth-most populous city in Germany. Located in the forela ...

. Colocation facilities are sited at all data center parks in Nuremberg, Falkenstein (

Vogtland Vogtland (; ) is a region spanning the German states of Bavaria, Saxony and Thuringia and north-western Bohemia in the Czech Republic. It overlaps with and is largely contained within Euroregio Egrensis. The name alludes to the former leadershi ...

) in Germany and Helsinki in Finland. In 2021, a datacenter in

, was opened, marking Hetzner's first American server. By 2024, the company took a significant step by opening a datacenter in

, marking Hetzner's first Singaporean server. In March 2025, Hetzner and MHB Montage launched HT Clean Energy, a solar initiative for data centers, marking a significant move toward reducing the carbon footprint of the company's data center operations.

Network

The backbone is set up in the form of a ring network between the datacenter locations Nuremberg and Falkenstein as well as the most important Internet location, Frankfurt. All locations are connected to central exchange nodes such as DE-CIX, AMS-IX, DATA-IX and V-IX via the company's own fiber optic network. All Hetzner's dedicated servers had a minimum 20 TB monthly cap for full speed on their servers with the option for an extra fee for full speed past that point. However, they have lifted the bandwidth cap on 1 Gbit/s connection speeds as of October 1, 2018. In 2025, Hetzner began upgrading its core network infrastructure using

Nokia Nokia Corporation is a Finnish multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications industry, telecommunications, technology company, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, originally established as a pulp mill in 1 ...

routing technology. The upgrade includes the deployment of 7750 SR-1x routers, which support 100G connections and are compatible with higher-capacity interconnects such as 400G and 800G.

Incidents

Hacking

In June 2013, Hetzner Online suffered from a security breach where customer information was exposed to attackers who had compromised Hetzner Online's monitoring systems.

Russian complaints about Glavcom.ua

In early August 2014, the Russian

Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media The Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media, abbreviated as ''Roskomnadzor'' (RKN), is the Russian federal executive agency responsible for monitoring, controlling and censoring Russian mass media. ...

(Roskomnadzor) sent a demand to many news agencies prohibiting any mention of the demonstration that was being arranged in the Siberian city of

Novosibirsk Novosibirsk is the largest city and administrative centre of Novosibirsk Oblast and the Siberian Federal District in Russia. As of the 2021 Russian census, 2021 census, it had a population of 1,633,595, making it the most populous city in Siber ...

in support of the federalization of Siberia. A number of such messages were sent to Ukraine, which was in the midst of undeclared war with Russian paramilitaries in the Donetsk region. Since the Ukrainian online newspapers did not remove the article, Roskomnadzor sent letters to their internet providers demanding removal of the news item. Hetzner Online complied with the demands and sent a notice to glavcom.ua, saying "Please solve the problem and reply within the next 24 hours to avoid suspension. This is the final deadline." This story was widely reprinted in news sources. The Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement expressing solidarity with glavcom.ua owners and journalists. Vassily Zvarych, vice-head of the Communications Department of the Foreign Ministry, gave a press conference saying that he was surprised by Hetzner Online's compliance with the Russian complaint. The German chapter of

Reporters Without Borders Reporters Without Borders (RWB; ; RSF) is an international non-profit and non-governmental organisation, non-governmental organization headquartered in Paris, which focuses on safeguarding the right to freedom of information. It describes its a ...

also issued a statement condemning Roskomnadzor. The notices to suspend Glavcom.ua were issued by Hetzner Online August 6, 2014; on August 10 Hetzner Online issued apologies, denying that any censorship was planned and that their technical support made a mistake, which they regretted. However, by that time the story was widely published in German mass-media, and Glavcom.ua already migrated from Hetzner Online to another hosting provider.

no.spam.ee lawsuit

In 2013, an

Estonia Estonia, officially the Republic of Estonia, is a country in Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland across from Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea across from Sweden, to the south by Latvia, and to the east by Ru ...

n anti-

spam Spam most often refers to: * Spam (food), a consumer brand product of canned processed pork of the Hormel Foods Corporation * Spamming, unsolicited or undesired electronic messages ** Email spam, unsolicited, undesired, or illegal email messages ...

activist

Tõnu Samuel Tõnu Samuel (born 3 July 1972) is an Estonian hacker commonly cited by mainstream media in topics regarding network security. Samuel was born in Tallinn. Between 1979 and 1988, he attended the Tallinn Secondary School of Science. In 1990– ...

posted a blog entry about an alleged spammer Silver Teede on his website no.spam.ee. In retaliation, Teede wrote a complaint to the blog's service provider, Hetzner Online, who decided to terminate services for the blog. In an ensuing court case, Estonian courts found the complaints to be baseless and awarded Samuel

damages At common law, damages are a remedy in the form of a monetary award to be paid to a claimant as compensation for loss or injury. To warrant the award, the claimant must show that a breach of duty has caused foreseeable loss. To be recognized at ...

from Silver Teede for the loss of Samuel's servers.

Duplicate Ed25519 SSH keys

From April 2015 to December 2015, many of the OS images used by Hetzner's installation program installimage had used duplicate Ed25519

SSH The Secure Shell Protocol (SSH Protocol) is a cryptographic network protocol for operating network services securely over an unsecured network. Its most notable applications are remote login and command-line execution. SSH was designed for Un ...

keys. This could potentially mean that an attacker could use a

man-in-the-middle attack In cryptography and computer security, a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack, or on-path attack, is a cyberattack where the attacker secretly relays and possibly alters the communications between two parties who believe that they are directly communi ...

to compromise an SSH connection that was using Ed25519 keys. Hetzner sent an

email Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...

to all affected customers with any potentially affected servers on information about the issue, and how to fix it.

Blocking "Novaya Gazeta"

On January 11, 2016, Hetzner blocked the

St. Petersburg Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad, is the second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. The city had a population of 5,601, ...

site of ''

Novaya Gazeta ''Novaya Gazeta'' (, ) is an independent Russian newspaper. It is known for its critical and investigative coverage of Russian political and social affairs, the Chechen wars, corruption among the ruling elite, and increasing authoritarianism i ...

'', the leading opposition, non-government newspaper in

Russia Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia. It is the list of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the world, and extends across Time in Russia, eleven time zones, sharing Borders ...

. The newspaper alleged the act was political censorship without any legal justification.

Blocking Ukraine War information

On March 7, 2022, during the

2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine On 24 February 2022, , starting the largest and deadliest war in Europe since World War II, in a major escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War, conflict between the two countries which began in 2014. The fighting has caused hundreds of thou ...

, Hetzner allegedly blocked servers belonging to a Ukrainian state-affiliated war information website (war.ukraine.ua), which was posted by the official Ukraine Twitter account. Hetzner initially denied blocking the website in question, stating that Cloudflare informed them that the IP does not belong to their network. Two days later, Hetzner confirmed via a press release that they had erroneously suspended the servers due to "anomalies" found in the account by an employee, which came from a not yet fully developed "plausibility check" and stated that their actions had not been politically motivated. The press release has since been deleted from the Hetzner website.

Blocking Russian Users

In December 2023, Hetzner allegedly sent an email to its users informing them that they will be ending contractual relationship with customers from Russia. Policy was scheduled to take place on January 31, 2024.

References

{{reflist, 2 1997 establishments in Germany Internet hosting Web hosting Data centers Companies based in Bavaria Internet properties established in 1997 Weißenburg-Gunzenhausen