I recently moved some APIs for my side projects from AWS EC2 to a Hetzner self-hosted VPS. It's a great alternative because you get about 90% of the performance with 10% of the prices of AWS. If you know your way around Linux then self-hosting is the way (and not vercel).

Creating an account

You can sign up for an account with Hetzner on their website. From there, fill up the relevant info and move to the payment method form. If you are in India, the page might only show a Credit card as the option but you can use a debit card as well if it has international transactions enabled. Fill in the card info and after a couple more steps your account will be created.

Verfication

Hetzner requires you to verify your identity before you can use their services. To do this from India, you can use any of Aadhar, PAN, or Passport. If using Aadhar, enter the Aadhar number and wait for verification. More than likely you'll be met with a screen saying manual verification is required. At this screen you can take a picture of your face with the webcam and then scan the front and back of your Aadhar, aligning it within the frame. Submit these and the manual verification should be completed in ~5 minutes.

Provisioning a VPS

After the verification process is completed, you can create a project from the Hetzner console. Then add a server to this project. Choose a region, OS image, etc. Choose vCPU or a dedicated CPU depending on your workload. Then check the IPv4 box if you need a public IPv4. It will increase the cost slightly (still much cheaper than EC2 public IPv4).

If you want public key auth for ssh then add your local public key in the next step. Otherwise, they will also email you the root password for ssh. The rest of the settings can be left as is for now. Click on Create Server.

SSHing

If you used public key auth then you can ssh into your box using ssh root@<your ip>. Otherwise, use the ssh password you received in your mail.