How to Migrate from Hetzner to a Cloud Server with HA and Human Support

Hetzner is one of the most popular hosting providers in the developer community, and for good reason. Their price-to-performance ratio is genuinely impressive. A CX32 cloud server with 4 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM, and 80 GB of disk space costs under $15/month. For personal projects, dev environments, and hobby servers, that is hard to beat.

But there is a pattern we see repeatedly: developers and businesses start on Hetzner, grow their applications into production workloads, and then discover that raw specs are only part of the equation. When a node fails at 3 AM and your application is down for hours with no automatic recovery, the $10/month you saved suddenly looks like a very expensive decision.

This guide is for anyone running production workloads on Hetzner who has started asking: "What happens if my server dies?" We will be transparent throughout. Hetzner is cheaper on raw specs. The question is whether the price difference is worth the risk, and what you actually gain when you invest in high-availability infrastructure with real human support.

Why Developers Choose Hetzner — And Why They Eventually Leave

What Hetzner Does Well

Credit where it is due. Hetzner built their reputation on a few genuine strengths:

• Aggressive pricing — Their cloud servers and dedicated boxes offer some of the lowest per-spec pricing in Europe. A dedicated server with 64 GB RAM can cost under $50/month.
• European data centers — Facilities in Falkenstein, Nuremberg, and Helsinki with strong GDPR positioning.
• Solid hardware — Modern AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon processors, NVMe storage on newer offerings.
• Simple API — A clean, well-documented API for provisioning cloud resources.
• Developer community — Extensive community tutorials and a culture that appeals to self-sufficient engineers.

For a developer spinning up a side project or a startup running non-critical staging environments, Hetzner is a reasonable choice. The problems emerge when you depend on that server for revenue.

Where Hetzner Falls Short for Production

The limitations are not bugs or oversights. They are fundamental to Hetzner's business model: keep prices low by providing minimal services beyond raw compute.

• No automatic failover — If the physical node hosting your cloud server fails, your VM goes down. There is no live migration, no automatic restart on another host. You wait for Hetzner to fix the hardware, or you manually rebuild from a backup. This can take hours.
• Oversubscribed shared CPUs — Hetzner's CX-line cloud servers use shared vCPUs. During peak hours, you may notice significant performance degradation because your "4 vCPU" server is competing with dozens of other tenants on the same physical cores. Hetzner offers dedicated CPU instances (CCX line), but those are priced significantly higher.
• Minimal support — Hetzner's support model is essentially: here is your server, good luck. Ticket responses can take 24-48 hours for non-critical issues. There is no phone support. There are no managed services. If your server is misconfigured, you are on your own.
• No storage replication — Local NVMe storage with no built-in replication. If a disk fails, your data is gone unless you set up and maintain your own backup strategy.
• No DDoS protection beyond basic — Hetzner offers basic DDoS mitigation, but it is not configurable and has been known to null-route IPs under sustained attack rather than scrub the traffic.
• No managed offerings — No managed databases, no managed Kubernetes (beyond a basic offering), no OS patching, no security hardening. Everything is DIY.
• Limited scaling flexibility — Cloud servers cannot have resources independently scaled. Want more RAM but the same CPU? You upgrade the entire plan. Want to add a second disk? You use their volume product, which runs on slower Ceph storage.

The Hetzner model works when your time is free and downtime is acceptable. When either of those stops being true, the calculus changes.

The Real Cost of Downtime: Why HA Matters

Let us do the math that Hetzner's pricing page does not show you.

Calculating the True Cost

Suppose you run a SaaS application or an e-commerce store generating $10,000/month in revenue. That works out to roughly $14/hour. A single 4-hour downtime incident — which is entirely realistic when a Hetzner node fails and you need to restore from backup, reconfigure, and verify — costs you:

• Direct revenue loss: $14/hour × 4 hours = $56
• Engineering time to diagnose and recover: 4-8 hours at $75-150/hour = $300-1,200
• Customer trust and churn: Difficult to quantify, but real. One study by Gartner estimates the average cost of IT downtime at $5,600 per minute for mid-size businesses.
• SEO impact: Extended downtime signals to search engines that your site is unreliable. Google has confirmed that sustained downtime can affect rankings.

Even conservatively, a single serious incident costs $500-2,000+. The annual price difference between a Hetzner CX32 and a comparable MassiveGRID H/A Cloud VPS is far less than that. You are not paying more for cloud hosting with HA. You are paying less than the cost of your next outage.

How MassiveGRID's HA Architecture Protects You

MassiveGRID's infrastructure is built from the ground up for high availability. This is not a marketing checkbox — it is the core engineering philosophy:

• Proxmox HA clusters — Your VM runs within a cluster of physical nodes. If any node fails, the HA manager automatically migrates your VM to a healthy node. Typical failover time: under 2 minutes. No manual intervention required.
• Ceph distributed storage with 3x replication — Your data is replicated across three independent storage nodes in real time. A disk failure, or even an entire storage node failure, causes zero data loss and zero downtime. This is the same storage architecture used by CERN, Bloomberg, and Deutsche Telekom.
• NVMe-only storage — All storage nodes use enterprise NVMe SSDs. No spinning disks, no SATA SSDs mixed in. Pure NVMe performance with Ceph replication.
• 12 Tbps DDoS protection — Enterprise-grade DDoS scrubbing at the network edge. Traffic is cleaned, not null-routed. Your application stays online during an attack.
• Multiple data center locations — New York, London, Frankfurt, and Singapore. Deploy where your users are, with the same HA guarantees everywhere.
• Independent resource scaling — Need more RAM without changing your CPU allocation? Scale individual resources (vCPU, RAM, SSD, bandwidth) independently. No forced plan upgrades.

Step-by-Step: Migrating from Hetzner to MassiveGRID

Migration does not need to be a weekend-long ordeal. With proper planning, most migrations from Hetzner to MassiveGRID can be completed in under an hour with minimal downtime. Here is the process.

Step 1: Audit Your Current Hetzner Setup

Before you migrate anything, document what you have. SSH into your Hetzner server and gather the essentials:

# Check CPU, RAM, and disk usage
lscpu | grep "^CPU(s):"
free -h
df -h

# List running services
systemctl list-units --type=service --state=running

# Check installed packages (Debian/Ubuntu)
dpkg --get-selections | grep -v deinstall > ~/installed-packages.txt

# Check installed packages (CentOS/RHEL)
rpm -qa > ~/installed-packages.txt

# Document cron jobs
crontab -l > ~/cronjobs.txt

# Note your current OS and version
cat /etc/os-release

# Check total data size for transfer time estimate
du -sh /var/www /home /opt /etc 2>/dev/null

Write down your current specs: vCPUs, RAM, disk size, monthly bandwidth usage, and the OS version. This tells you exactly which MassiveGRID tier to choose.

Step 2: Choose Your MassiveGRID Tier

Based on your audit, select the appropriate product (see the detailed recommendations in the next section). For most Hetzner cloud server migrants, the H/A Cloud VDS with dedicated CPU cores is the best match — it solves the oversubscription problem while adding HA failover.

Step 3: Provision Your MassiveGRID Server

Sign up at the MassiveGRID portal, select your desired configuration, and choose the data center closest to your users. Your server will be provisioned within minutes. Make note of the new server's IP address and SSH credentials.

Step 4: Prepare the New Server

SSH into your new MassiveGRID server and set up the base environment to match your Hetzner setup:

# Update the system
apt update && apt upgrade -y   # Debian/Ubuntu
# or
dnf update -y                  # CentOS/RHEL/AlmaLinux

# Install the same packages as your source server
# Use the package list you exported in Step 1

# Set up your web server, database, and other services
# Match the configuration from your Hetzner server

Step 5: Migrate Your Data

Use rsync over SSH to transfer your data. This is the most reliable method and supports resuming interrupted transfers:

# From your LOCAL machine or from the Hetzner server itself:
# Sync website files
rsync -avzP --progress /var/www/ root@NEW_SERVER_IP:/var/www/

# Sync home directories
rsync -avzP --progress /home/ root@NEW_SERVER_IP:/home/

# Sync configuration files
rsync -avzP /etc/nginx/ root@NEW_SERVER_IP:/etc/nginx/
rsync -avzP /etc/apache2/ root@NEW_SERVER_IP:/etc/apache2/

# Sync SSL certificates (if using custom certs)
rsync -avzP /etc/letsencrypt/ root@NEW_SERVER_IP:/etc/letsencrypt/

# Sync cron jobs
crontab -l | ssh root@NEW_SERVER_IP "crontab -"

Step 6: Migrate Databases

Database migration requires a dump-and-restore approach to ensure consistency:

# MySQL / MariaDB
mysqldump --all-databases --single-transaction --routines --triggers \
  > ~/all-databases.sql
rsync -avzP ~/all-databases.sql root@NEW_SERVER_IP:~/
ssh root@NEW_SERVER_IP "mysql < ~/all-databases.sql"

# PostgreSQL
pg_dumpall > ~/all-databases-pg.sql
rsync -avzP ~/all-databases-pg.sql root@NEW_SERVER_IP:~/
ssh root@NEW_SERVER_IP "psql -f ~/all-databases-pg.sql postgres"

# Redis (if applicable)
redis-cli BGSAVE
rsync -avzP /var/lib/redis/dump.rdb root@NEW_SERVER_IP:/var/lib/redis/

Step 7: Lower DNS TTL and Switch

This is the critical step for minimizing downtime:

1. 24-48 hours before migration: Lower your DNS TTL to 300 seconds (5 minutes). This ensures that when you change the IP address, the update propagates quickly.
2. Verify the new server works: Test your application on the new server by editing your local /etc/hosts file to point your domain to the new IP.
3. Do a final data sync: Run rsync one more time to catch any changes since the initial transfer. Then do the final database dump and restore.
4. Update DNS records: Point your domain's A/AAAA records to the new MassiveGRID server IP.
5. Monitor: Watch your application logs and monitoring tools for the next few hours to ensure everything is running correctly.

# Quick pre-switch test using /etc/hosts (on your local machine)
echo "NEW_SERVER_IP  yourdomain.com www.yourdomain.com" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

# After DNS update, verify propagation
dig yourdomain.com +short
# Should return your new MassiveGRID IP

Step 8: Verify and Decommission

After DNS has fully propagated (give it 24-48 hours even with low TTLs for edge cases):

• Verify all pages, APIs, and services are responding correctly on the new server.
• Check database connectivity and run a few test transactions.
• Confirm that SSL certificates are working (renew via Let's Encrypt if needed).
• Restore your DNS TTL to a normal value (3600 seconds or higher).
• Keep the Hetzner server running for 7 days as a fallback, then cancel the subscription.

Choosing the Right MassiveGRID Tier

MassiveGRID offers several product tiers, each designed for different use cases. Here is an honest mapping based on what you are probably running on Hetzner today.

Developer Who Wants Cheap + Reliable: H/A Cloud VPS

Starting at $3.99/month — View Cloud VPS Plans

If you are currently on Hetzner's CX line (shared vCPU cloud servers) and your primary concern is reliability rather than raw performance, the H/A Cloud VPS is the closest equivalent. You get shared vCPUs like Hetzner, but with a critical difference: automatic HA failover and Ceph 3x replicated storage.

The pricing is comparable to Hetzner's CX line. A 2 vCPU / 4 GB RAM configuration is in the same ballpark. But on MassiveGRID, if the physical node dies, your VM automatically restarts on another node in under two minutes. On Hetzner, you wait and rebuild.

Best for: Development servers, staging environments, personal projects, low-traffic websites, and any workload where you want HA protection without paying for dedicated resources.

Developer Burned by Oversubscribed CPUs: H/A Cloud VDS

Starting at $19.80/month — View Dedicated VPS Plans

This is the tier we recommend most often to Hetzner migrants, and for good reason. If you have ever noticed your Hetzner CX server slowing down during peak hours, you have experienced CPU oversubscription firsthand. The H/A Cloud VDS gives you dedicated CPU cores — physical cores allocated exclusively to your VM, with no sharing and no noisy-neighbor problems.

Compared to Hetzner's CCX dedicated CPU instances, MassiveGRID's VDS is competitively priced while also including HA failover and Ceph storage replication that Hetzner does not offer at any price on their cloud platform. You get consistent, predictable performance with the safety net of automatic failover.

Best for: Production web applications, SaaS platforms, API backends, CI/CD runners, any workload where consistent CPU performance matters. This is the primary recommendation for anyone running revenue-generating applications on Hetzner.

Business Tired of Being Unsupported: H/A Managed Cloud Servers

Starting at $27.79/month — View Managed Cloud Server Plans

This is the polar opposite of Hetzner's philosophy. Where Hetzner gives you a server and leaves you to figure it out, MassiveGRID's Managed Cloud Servers include 24/7 expert sysadmin support. Server hardening, security updates, performance tuning, troubleshooting — all handled by experienced engineers who respond in minutes, not days.

The management fee adds to the base cost, but compare it honestly: what do you currently pay in engineering time to manage your own Hetzner servers? If you or your team spend even 2-3 hours per month on server maintenance tasks, the managed tier already pays for itself.

Best for: Agencies managing client sites, small businesses without dedicated sysadmins, e-commerce stores, anyone who would rather focus on their application than on server management. If you have ever Googled "how to configure nginx" at 2 AM because your site went down, this tier is for you.

Hetzner Dedicated Server User: H/A Managed Cloud Dedicated Servers

Starting at $76.19/month — View Managed Dedicated Plans

If you are running a Hetzner dedicated server (AX line), you already understand the value of bare-metal performance. But Hetzner dedicated servers have a fundamental problem: they are single points of failure. When the hardware fails, you are down until it is repaired or replaced, which can take hours or even days.

MassiveGRID's Managed Cloud Dedicated Servers give you dedicated physical resources within an HA cluster. You get bare-metal-class performance with the resilience of cluster-based failover and 3x replicated storage, plus full 24/7 management. It is what Hetzner dedicated servers would be if Hetzner invested in redundancy and support.

Best for: High-traffic applications, databases with demanding I/O requirements, workloads that need guaranteed resources and zero tolerance for downtime, businesses that have outgrown shared infrastructure entirely.

Hetzner vs. MassiveGRID: Honest Comparison

We believe in transparent comparisons. Here is how Hetzner and MassiveGRID stack up across the dimensions that matter for production workloads:

The comparison is straightforward: Hetzner wins on raw price. MassiveGRID wins on everything that determines whether your application stays online when things go wrong. The question every Hetzner user needs to answer honestly is: how much is uninterrupted uptime worth to your business?

Free Migration Assistance

If the step-by-step guide above feels like more than you want to tackle yourself, here is something Hetzner will never offer you: MassiveGRID's team will migrate your servers for free.

This is not a limited-time promotion. Free migration assistance is a standard part of the MassiveGRID experience. Here is how it works:

1. Contact the MassiveGRID team — Reach out via the contact page or live chat and let them know you are migrating from Hetzner.
2. Share access details — Provide SSH access to your current Hetzner server (or a recent backup). The MassiveGRID team will audit your setup and plan the migration.
3. Sit back — The engineering team handles the data transfer, service configuration, database migration, and DNS switchover coordination. They test everything before cutting over.
4. Verify and go live — You review the migrated setup, confirm everything works, and approve the DNS switch. The team monitors the transition.

The migration is handled by the same sysadmins who manage MassiveGRID's infrastructure daily. These are not outsourced L1 support agents reading from a script. They are experienced engineers who understand Linux, networking, databases, and web stacks at a deep level.

For businesses running complex setups with multiple services, custom configurations, or databases that require careful handling, this free migration service alone can save thousands of dollars in engineering time and eliminate the risk of migration errors.

Conclusion

Migrating from Hetzner to MassiveGRID is not about finding a "better" provider in some abstract sense. It is about making a deliberate decision to prioritize availability, support, and resilience over raw cost savings. Hetzner serves a real market — developers who want cheap compute and are comfortable managing everything themselves. That market is valid.

But when your application grows beyond a side project, when real customers depend on your uptime, and when the cost of an outage exceeds the cost of your entire annual hosting bill, the economics flip. The cheapest hosting is not the one with the lowest monthly price. It is the one that never costs you a customer.

MassiveGRID's cloud infrastructure is built for that reality. Automatic failover, replicated storage, enterprise DDoS protection, and human support that actually responds when you need it. The migration is straightforward, and the team will even handle it for you at no cost.

Your production workloads deserve infrastructure that does not treat high availability as an afterthought. Explore MassiveGRID's plans and see how the numbers work for your specific setup. And if you have questions, the support team is available 24/7 — something you will never get from Hetzner.