Activities on or around December 3, 2024. Published January 2026.

By early December, 2024, I had decided to try setting up a personal server using Hetzner’s cloud hosting. I would use FreeBSD as the operating system. This page describes my initial experiences with Hetzner Cloud: creating an account, creating the first server, and creating a couple of other temporary servers to choose the best location.

Creating the account

Creating the account was mostly straight-forward. The few hiccups were things like these:

• Hetzner did not recognize my nine-digit zip code as valid; I had to use the five-digit version.

• I tried a few times to enter a passphrase, but each time it was rejected. I carefully scrutinized the list of acceptable characters, and believed I was using only them. Finally I conjectured that space (’ ’) was not a valid character. I removed the spaces from my passphrase, created a password, and all was well.

• Before I could create a server I had to prove my identity. Hetzner uses the most rigorous form of identification I have yet encountered in any online business, and they farm this work out to another company, the name of which I have forgotten. I had to take a picture of my driver’s license (or another ID) with my smartphone; scans would not be acceptable. Further, I had to take a picture of the back side of my driver’s license. Until then, I didn’t even know there was anything on the back side! Finally I had to take a picture of myself. I think the comparison of pictures is usually done by AI, but in my case the AI could not do it, and I was told to wait a few minutes for a human agent to inspect it. I took a break, and when I came back, my identity was confirmed.

The whole process, from initial account creation to verified identity, took less than two hours. It was probably more like one hour, including the time it took me to find and install a QR code scanner on my phone. But it was certainly less than two hours, because uptime told me that was how long my home desktop computer had been running.

Creating a server

I want to create a FreeBSD server, but I understand that I first have to create a server with some flavor of Linux and then send them a link to an ISO which they’ll then attach to the virtual machine and I can reboot it and install.

For the initial OS, I’m choosing Debian 12. My other options on Dec. 3, 2024, are Ubuntu 24.04, Fedora 41, CentOS Stream 9, Rocky Linux 9, and AlmaLinux 9.

For the virtual machine hardware, I’m choosing a CX22 (2 Intel VCPUs, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB SSD) based in Helsinki for $3.99 per month. Since I choose to have a public IPv4 address, they will charge me an extra 60 cents per month, bringing the total to $4.59. This is unexpected, but not a serious issue.

The hourly rate is $0.006 plus $0.001 for the IPv4, and they will charge me for a full hour even if I have it for only a few minutes. That’s reasonable, because my setting up the server places some load on their systems. Seriously, an hour’s usage rounds up to a penny; could they bill me for less than an hour and bill me at all?

It took less than a minute to create the server. Its public IPv4 address is 135.181.28.205; IPv6 is 2a01:4f9:c012:1cd1::/64. (I deleted the server later, so those addresses are no longer mine.)

The Hetzner console (on a web page) shows a login screen, but what is my user name and password? I didn’t specify any when I created the server. Aha! I have to login as root (ssh root@135.181.28.205), using the ssh key I provided during server configuration, so there is no password needed. If I had not provided an ssh key, they would have mailed me the password, and I would have had to change it immediately after logging in.

By editing ~/.ssh/config I can avoid having to type the IP address.

Choosing a location for the server

I wanted to choose a server location with good response times from where I live, in Ohio, U.S.A.

Pinging the IPv4 address of the server I created in Helsinki takes 135–137 ms. By contrast, pinging google.com takes 33–35 ms.

I then created another server in Ashburn, Virginia; its ping time is 25–31 ms. So there is definitely value in having the server close to home. And another in Hillsboro, Oregon, ping = 81–83 ms.

In addition to ping times, I looked at file copy times.

Time to copy OpenBSD’s install76.iso file (671 MB); “local” means my desktop computer at home:

Oh! these servers in America are a slightly different product: CPX11, 2 AMD VCPUs, 2 GB RAM (not 4), 40 GB SSD, $0.008 per hour = $4.99 per month, plus the IPv4, total $0.009 per hour, $5.59 per month.

Summary: ping times are best to Virginia, worse to Oregon, worst to Finland. Upload speeds are fairly slow to each location, likely because my ISP provides me with slow upload speeds. Download speeds are best from Virginia; from Oregon about twice as slow, and from Finland still slower.

My package includes 1 TB of “inclusive traffic” in the US; it would be 20 TB in the EU. For each additional 1 TB the charge is $1.20 in EU and US.

If I find I’m getting really heavy traffic, or needing the extra 2 GB RAM, I could switch to Finland and suffer the slower speeds. But for now I’m choosing to base my server in Virginia.

Testing completed, I deleted the extra servers.

Finding FreeBSD

Hot dog! Hetzner has a list of many more ISO images that can be attached to the server, including two for recent FreeBSD, one each of mfsBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. So I won’t have to provide a link to the ISO image. The list is only accessible if you have a Hetzner account.

I did not give the server in Ashburn, Virginia, the name I really want to use, and there does not seem to be a way to rename it, so I’ll just delete it and create a fresh one when I’m ready to proceed.