If you're running a small setup and don't need any value add products or multi-AZ/multi-region this might work, but Hetzner and major cloud providers are by no means comparable.

Hetzner offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee only on their network. AWS has SLAs for every product offering - EC2 for example starts paying out credits if they fall below 99.99% uptime.

If you're a user of various managed cloud products, these will cost quite a bit to replicate on Hetzner and you'll be spending money on personnel to build these out and maintain them instead of just paying for the cloud product on AWS/GCP/Azure.

Managed is good, but opensource is decent these days.

You need postgres? Use crunchydata postgres operator or cloudnativepg. Need multiple regions? setup wireguard.

IT's more work, but might not be a lot of work.

Was doing some research this weekend on cloud exit. Hetzner is attractive, but our company is pretty much limited to the US (no international companies due to our current business model). How practical would it be?

Also, I've seen a lot of concern over blocked IPs, especially for lower-cost hosts. Is that an issue with Hetzner?

Hetzner cloud supports us-west and us-east.

I was looking at dedicated hardware. If I decide to stay in anyone's cloud, I'd stick with AWS.

Yeah Hetzner doesn't have dedicated in the US, and not sure if it will in near/mid future.

Still, Hetzner cloud is pretty good option, and there's more support coming on building on Hetzner.

https://www.ubicloud.com/ (from founders of citus) is mainly/currently targeting hetzner, for example.

There's alternative companies with similar offers, like Deft:

https://deft.com/dedicated-servers/

I imagine one reason I didn't hear about them before is that they don't seem to offer self service. I absolutely don't want to talk to anyone when I am buying object storage, cloud vms, or even dedicated.