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Creating A Server

Hetzner

Hetzner is a cheap, EU-based host with a good balance of reliability, decent admin UI, and often one of the cheapest options.

https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/

You can expect to pay between $6-15 Euro/mo. for a simple server following this guide.

Their VPS offerings start a bit larger than what a service like DigitalOcean provides, but at lower cost.

Open your Hetzner Cloud dashboard and navigate to Cloud > Servers, then c.lick Add Server.

Here are suggested settings for your server, everything else should probably be left as-is.

Server Type

Servers are spec'd by:

  • number and speed of processor,
  • amount of RAM
  • disk space
  • bandwidth

The most important stats to consider are processor and RAM.

If you aren't sure what you need, the smallest available server (1-2 processors, 1-2GB of RAM) is plenty. If you'll be running multiple processes or have specific needs like full text search or geospatial support, you might want to go up a size or two.

Note: Additional disk space can be configured later, for now pick based on processor/RAM.

Location

This matters less than you think. You can pay more for a server closer to you if you want, but transatlantic latency is fine for most cases.

Image (Operating System)

Pick the latest Debian or Ubuntu unless you are familiar with another OS.

The rest of this guide will assume you picked Debian 13, but if you're familiar with another OS it should be trivial to translate the commands to your OS of choice.

SSH Keys

Make sure you add your public SSH key.

Volumes

If you have a need for a large disk, you can attach a volume of up to 10TB here at an additional cost.

Firewalls

You may want to add a firewall here.

It is also possible to configure a firewall on the server, but anything configurd here can be easily fixed if you accidentally lock yourself out, and prevents traffic from even reaching the server.

TODO: show suggestion

Backups

Name

Finally, give your server a meaningful name. Then create your server.

Configuring the Server

After a minute or so, you should have an IP address that you can use to connect to your server with SSH:

ssh root@YOUR-IP-HERE