What Changes When a Personal Site Moves to a €4 Hetzner Box

Managed platforms bundle a lot of decisions for a fixed markup: TLS renewal, OS patching, scaling, a dashboard. Moving to a bare Hetzner CX23 unbundles all of it — which is either a good trade or a bad one depending entirely on how much of that bundle was ever being used.

What gets cheaper

A CX23 costs a few euros a month, flat, regardless of traffic. A managed platform's free tier is usually generous right up until a build minute limit or a bandwidth cap is hit, at which point the bill has a step function in it. For a personal site with predictable, low traffic, flat and cheap beats "free until it isn't."

What gets more expensive — in time, not money

Every layer a managed platform used to own is now a decision: which reverse proxy, how certificates renew, how the process comes back up after a reboot, how logs get rotated so the disk doesn't fill. None of it is hard in isolation, but it's ongoing — a security patch cadence to keep up with, disk space to watch, a firewall config that's now this project's problem and no one else's.

The actual trade being made

It isn't "cheaper" versus "more expensive," it's "pay with money" versus "pay with time and attention." That's a fine trade for someone who wants the operational reps and treats the server itself as something worth understanding — which is the actual reason to make this move for a low-stakes personal project rather than a client's production system, where the managed platform's markup buys back exactly the attention this move spends.