For most public cloud providers you have to give them your credit card number so they can charge an arbitrary amount.
For Hetzner, instead of CC#, you give a scan of your ID (of course you can attach your CC too or Paypal). Personally I do my payments via a bank transfer. I recently paid for the whole 2025 and 2026 for all my k8s clusters. It gives unimaginable peace of mind when compared to AWS/GCP/Azure.
Plus, their cloud instances often spin up much faster than EC2.
Hetzner.
For most public cloud providers you have to give them your credit card number so they can charge an arbitrary amount.
For Hetzner, instead of CC#, you give a scan of your ID (of course you can attach your CC too or Paypal). Personally I do my payments via a bank transfer. I recently paid for the whole 2025 and 2026 for all my k8s clusters. It gives unimaginable peace of mind when compared to AWS/GCP/Azure.
Plus, their cloud instances often spin up much faster than EC2.
For bare metal I’ve been using tier.net to get 192 GB RAM, 4TB NVME and 32 cores for $219/mo.
Data centers all over the country and I get to locate under 10ms from my regional audience.
Just a data point if you want some bigger iron than a VM.
I have used Knownhost previously, it served me really well.
Before that, I used to go for Linode, but I think they've become more pricey?
Linode was bought by Akamai. They immediately raised prices, and they have been, if anything, less reliable.
Ahh, yes, I remember now! I think it's almost 8 years now? Stopped using them after the buy out.
Too bad, actually, their service was pretty good.
Hetzner! They do ask for ID though.