Nope, not common, except for prepaid mobile plans which are kinda ubiquitous. I have never had to prepay anything for Hetzner, not 20y ago for servers and not

Nope, not common, except for prepaid mobile plans which are kinda ubiquitous. I have never had to prepay anything for Hetzner, not 20y ago for servers and not for the last 5-7 years for Cloud VPS. Maybe for recent-ish signups? Some hosters support prepaying (for example INWX where I have my domains) but I am reasonably sure you could also do other forms of payment