A2 Hosting vs. Hetzner Online 2019

g ago). They do have weaknesses though. In the beginning I had dedicated servers, since several years I only use virtual ones (called cloud servers by now).
Short summary (mostly for their cloud servers):
++ Flexibility. Being able to create, scrape, expand and downsize servers in minutes is just so useful
++ User Interface. One of the best I have seen. Clean, functional, easy to use, lots of options and new ones are added regularly
+ Prices. They aren't actually the cheapest ones out there for virtual Servers on a performance per dollar rating, but they are close enough and the fact that your server is paid per hour and can be canceled at any time can easily result in lower bills too
+ Reliability. It's fine. But it's also what I expect from any professional Hoster
o Transparency. Not as verbose as I'd like to. For example a year or two ago there was a major outtake in one of their main datacenter due to power loss. Something that obviously should never happen. I want to know what exactly happened, where the problem was and what they have done to make sure it's not happening again, but I never saw a follow up on this incident.
- Blacklisted IPs. Lot's of IPs you get assigned for a cloud server are blacklisted on mailing lists, which is a huge problem for certain sites. I realize there is not much Hetzner can do, one spammer is all it needs to burn an IP, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a problem. If you have a shop and the sent invoices never reach the customer you are in trouble
- Backups. Their backup options are good (although a bit expensive). I'd like to be able to export and download backups/snapshots however. As much as I trust them to keep them safe, I'm not trusting enough to rely on a single company as a single point of failure for a total data loss
- - Support. Their support itself is fine (although they have done catastrophic errors before, like changing a broken RAID card with an incompatible model, resulting in data loss, but that was quite the exception). But the support times for cloud servers are unacceptable, in particular the fact that there is no emergency support even if you are willing to pay for it. Nearly all the problems I had with cloud servers were errors on Hetzner's side, like faulty routing, misconfigured hardware and so on. If such a thing happens on Friday evening you are out of luck. Which is just not an option for certain use cases. Does it happen usually? No. But the fact that it could happen is the problem.
Again, even if the negative points came last, all in all I'm fairly happy with them and do use them as my main hoster for nearly all my projects.

from heroku to a2 and it got as bad as it could get. First of all It says it costs $4.90/month, but when purchased it, I had to, for someone reason, pay $7, thought I initially thought it'll be alright, later I realized It was only for the 1st month, and after that I'll have to pay $13/ month. That's straight cheating, I would've sued them if it had happened in a larger scale. And I think it's currently true for php/wordpress hosting as well.
Furthermore, documentation for node is very very bad, I was initially very gald as someone was giving node hosting at reasonable price, but hey nothing is free.

e unhelpful to say the least. They could not bring themselves to provide any useful information on request, and could not be bothered to write more than one line responses. It was like pulling teeth. Sure, they are cheap, but from what I have read, the hardware is not server grade kit. IPv6 support is patchy at best. Happily moved away.