There is actually a catch (besides very little customer service, which is par for the course with cloud stuff anyway), but it's not really their fault. Hetzner doesn't peer with a lot of bigger players, and therefore its datacenters can have really lousy / inconsistent bandwidth and latency for people outside a relatively small area in Europe (and can occasionally have bizarre outages that are presumably related to partitions). If that's not a dealbreaker for you, then they're one of the best deals out there if you don't want to manage your own hardware and don't need really efficient access to other cloud services like S3 (which obviously work much better within Amazon's datacenters).

No catch. Cloud services are extremely expensive when it comes to computing. If you need raw power, rent a dedicated server.

Edit: For a little more a month, you can get a Ryzen 3600, 64GB of RAM and much faster NVMe SSD: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax41-nvme

Ehh you can get cheaper compute in Fremont if you're willing to rent >=1 rack. I'm guessing you only think €23.53/mo is cheap because you've been getting reamed by AWS pricing :P

They are second hand servers - if you want brand new servers you pay a setup fee, and more pr month. Once you upgrade, or cancel, that (once new) server goes into the auction at a lower price.

Those are ancient servers, long since paid for, you're paying for 1.50 worth of bandwidth and basically some electricity and a little bit of "support"

They are in a separate category called Serverbörse [1]. The cheapest currently available is for 28€ a i7-3770 with 16GB RAM and 2x3TB spinning rust.

[1] https://www.hetzner.com/sb

If the cheapest is $25/month, I think it would just make sense to get a used school/office PC. I was able to pick up a used Haswell i5, 8GB of memory PC for $200, which you would probably get better performance out of, and break even at ~8 month mark. That being said, pandemic prices might shift those numbers.

I can see few options for 23.53 EUR right there

Either way, it's auction page, may not always have the deals you're looking for in this price range

When someone cancels their old server and they recycle it into the auction system

Note, looks like oracle cloud has a nice free tier, but that's not a dedicated arm server, but a vm (but still, with 24 cores):

https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/?source=:ow:o:p:nav:0916BC...

> Infrastructure

> 2 AMD based Compute VMs with 1/8 OCPU* and 1 GB memory each.

> 4 Arm-based Ampere A1 cores and 24 GB of memory usable as one VM or up to 4 VMs.

> 2 Block Volumes Storage, 200 GB total.

> 10 GB Object Storage.

> 10 GB Archive Storage.

Just to compare with Hetzner - you would typically be able to get 16 or 32gb ram, an i7 with 4 cores and 2x1tb disk (no ssd). I'm guessing single core performance might be higher than the arm offering - and a better fit for minecraft.

Ed: although maybe core count would win out with PaperMC?