How is this possible? With the HW and operational costs they have to be in deep minus.. Eg linode.com is considered good and they seem to be more expensive by an order of magnitude. Can somebody tell me what the catch is?
Annual net profits:
2008: 4.077.791,31 €
2009: 4.448.824,49 €
2010: 8.925.128,81 €
2008: 9.030.980,10 €
2009: 13.479.804,59 €
2010: 22.404.933,40 €
- cheap energy + human resources by building custom colocation facilities in regions where cheap cooling+power is available
- cheap self-made servers, no 19" form factor for decicated servers (they have 19" racks for colocation customers)
- hardware has to be refinanced in a couple of months. That's why the charge 149€ setup upfront.
- growing out of cash flow
- CEO and founder still CEO. Sometimes still interacts with customers regarding new ideas in their forum (German only).
see http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/presse/center for corporate press releases.
Particularly through certain resellers, including the own "budget line" (http://www.kimsufi.co.uk/). Not that I'd know anything about nefariousness, 'onest guv.
If not it might just be that they like to quote nice round figures (£14.99 and €14.99 perhaps) - this happens sometimes when the pound and the euro are (or recently have been) near parity.
Not sure if it's still the case, but they also used to have a policy of blocking port 6667.
Get a discount for buying in bulk, calculate your operational cost and failure rate, and go for volume. They have years to make their money back on this..every month their investment in new hardware gets closer and closer to being profitable.
http://a1.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/405734_294418...
it's linked on: http://www.facebook.com/HetznerOnline
and probably shows: http://www.datacenterpark.de/index_en.html
Here's a list of all data centers: http://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Rechenzentren_und_Anbindung...