There are multiple "catches" here. 1. Ease of use -- Bare metal servers are harder to use than VMs; you can't trivially snapshot your bare metal server, you ca

There are multiple "catches" here. 1. Ease of use -- Bare metal servers are harder to use than VMs; you can't trivially snapshot your bare metal server, you can't trivially clone it, there aren't tons of AMIs available. Hetzner has fewer UX designers and has less control of the platform to provide a better UX / console experience / onboarding experience. 2. Cost/availability of personal -- More people know AWS than how to PXE boot machines. Sure, you might not actually have to do complicated stuff for Hetzner's bare metal, but it's still more complicated. You might have to get some real ops people (rather than just saying the word devops and pretending everything is okay). 3. Other cloud services (ELB, RDS, etc) -- Sure, you can connect a hetzner machine to an RDS endpoint, but it's slower and harder than just using the AWS ecosystem. People want S3, ELB, RDS... They don't want to hire 5 more guys to run Ceph, HAProxy, and database clusters. 4. Ecosystem of tools -- People have used AWS and its APIs for so long that you can find pre-built tooling to do all sorts of things, from libraries to make lambda functions, to terraform modules to manage machines. I don't even know if Hetzner has a real API. It certainly has a smaller ecosystem. 5. Mindshare -- The cheaper/better service doesn't actually steamroll people who have mindshare / brand recognition in every case, so even if hetzner were better, AWS already might have enough critical mass. 6. Easier "region expansion" -- With AWS, if you want to reduce latency to some customers for application servers, moving between regions is trivial. Hetzner, not so much. Also, hetzner's networking is qualitatively worse for reaching other services (most of which are on AWS). I think the main issue here is that people are comparing two things that can't really be compared. AWS includes S3, ELBs, RDS, etc. Hetzner does not help. AWS offers robust APIs and features. Hetzner, not so much. AWS has brand recognition, and no one will get fired for going with AWS. I know how to run my own servers, I know how to use AWS. For a startup that had a focus on software, not hardware, I'd still absolutely go with AWS because I know for a fact the ecosystem of services and tools, coupled with the ease of finding more people who know AWS, make it the much safer choice.