Until now, I had mainly used HostEurope as an Internet provider for my websites. In addition to the vServers, I have also gained experience with the classic web hosting (Webpack). I was a loyal customer of Hosteurope for many years, but I will slowly move my services, the reasons for this I have briefly mentioned here:

HostEurope

If you host a website with HostEurope and want to secure your internet presence with SSL certificates, you have to pay extra for this with classic web hosting. This is different when using a vServer: Thanks to Plesk and a plugin, free web server certificates from LetsEncrypt can be used for the website. Although the vServers have provided stable operation for years in several generations for my purposes, there is one small thing that bothered me:

New releases and their availability.

Among other things, the vServer runs on Ubuntu and new releases are not available from HostEurope until up to 12 months after the release of a new release. As an example, Ubuntu 20.04 was released on April 23, 2020. Almost a year later, until April 7,2021, the current available Ubuntu version for a HostEurope vServer was: 18.04: an operating system released 3 years ago.

(Source: www.hosteurope.de/Server/Virtual-Server/ as of April 07, 2021).

I have always skipped a release in the past to at least use a supported version. For example,if 20.04had not been available before the expiration of support for 16.04, I would have had to use the 18.04 version in the meantime, and thus insert a server change more than planned. This thought was then also the reason why I briefly looked around on the market.

Comparison of available Ubuntu LTS versions for virtual servers

("discovered", is the date we first discovered the version on the vendor's website, this may differ slightly with the actual release.

Hetzner

After a short research I came across the provider Hetzner: www.hetzner.com. At the beginning I was not sure, if my pages can be operated there in the current form without further ado. After creating the user account at Hetzner, the modern user interface motivated me to consider a serious switch scenario. The cloud servers are billed per hour: Thus, nothing stands in the way of a test:

Hetzner cloud server vs. HostEurope vServer

A cloud server is not directly comparable with the HostEurope virtual server: The Hetzner cloud server basically consists purely of the operating system, without Plesk or other customizations. This is probably also the reason why Hetzner can provide the servers not only cheaper but also faster new OS versions. If you are confident installing directly on the operating system, you are certainly in good hands with Hetzner: The choice of server variants and additional options and the pricing model are much more flexible here. I have described a variant of how the installation without Plesk with Docker could look here: Docker vs. Plesk, for running websites. For me, the only thing standing in the way of switching from HostEurope to Hetzner is the annual cancellation period on the part of HostEurope.

Conclusion

The comparison is perhaps not entirely fair, the viewpoint possibly one-sided and my motives very subjective, but I currently feel better off with Hetzner and I think Hetzner is currently the better provider for my requirements.