I’m personally wary of uploading too much private data to any host. I am also a customer of Hetzner, and rent a couple of bare metal servers. But I mostly use it to store data that it wouldn’t be that big of a deal if it was stolen by someone.

I’ve previously experimented a bit with encrypted volumes that I manually decrypt over ssh, and even full disk encryption that I manually decrypt over ssh.

My experience with Hetzner has been good. It is really rare that the servers go down on their own. Reboots are usually my own doing, so I am already “around” to decrypt encrypted volumes.

I have experienced critical, unrecoverable hardware failure on Hetzner servers a couple of times over the years. But I’ve had offsite backups in place since day one, so I never ultimately lost any important data. Had to deprovision the broken server, reprovision a new one and restore from my offsite backup. Which is a bit of a hassle, but no biggie because the only one that relies on my servers is mostly myself. A few days of downtime because I am too busy to set up a new server right away is therefore also ok for me, with how infrequently it has happened.

A single Hetzner server should never be the only place hosting a copy of all your photos or other data you cannot afford to lose. But that applies to any host really. Not unique to Hetzner.