For some reason I got a free version of PCTipp, a Swiss PC magazine. Within the last issue, I found a promoted article about Hosttech GmbH, which now offers a virtual datacenter. Interesting enough for me to register and try it out.

Why Hosttech GmbH and what is it?

Hosttech is a company based in Switzerland and offers a bunch of services like Websites, Servers, vServers, dns servers and online backup. As mentioned in a sponsored article in the latest issue of PCTipp, the new Hosttech Virtual Datacenter was mentioned. As Swiss, I am obviously pleased to see a swiss-based cloud provider, where your stuff is protected by the Swiss data protection law.

By the way, they have two datacenters, whereas one is 15m below ground, in an old military hospital bunker.

Unfortunately there are no detailed princing on their website, nor a price calculator. This makes it a bit hard to compare to other solutions, but nevertheless it’s worth a try. I will come back to the pricing, a bit later in this post.

First impressions

Creation of an account is not immediate, but you have to order an account. Hosttech will eventually reach out to you and aks if you already have some projects and if you need some cloud expert which helps you. After that, the account is created for you - they were even so generous to give me 50 CHF to play around!

The user interface is very clean and intuitive, and very quickly you can create a server instance. I recommend to switch to Expert Panel as it offers some more options, which are not visible in the Easy Panel

Like Hetzner, Hosttech, compared to bigger cloud providers, offers only “basic” services like severs, storage (SSD or object-storage) or loadbalancers. Hoever, to my surprise, you also can create Kubernetes clusters, which is not something you see often.

As usual, there is also an API - unfortunately this is not publicly available but only once you are logged in:

One thing that I also like is - even so they already provide a bunch of ISO images - you actually can add your own ISO image. It costs about 0.19 CHF per iso.

Pricing

The pricing is fair, definitively not as cheap as Hetzner, but similar to other cloud providers like Google Cloud, Azure or AWS. Similar to these, you only pay what you use. There is a nice dashboard, but I did not find a way to set budget limits

Here some ideas about their pricing

cluster refers to these details:

• 1x master with 4 CPUs, 8GB RAM
• 3x workers with 4 CPUs, 16GB RAM
• Master Storage: 50GB Insane
• Master Recovery-Storage 5GB
• Worker Storage 3x 30GB Insane
• 1 IPv4 Addresses (Master)
• 3x IPv4 Addresses (Worker)

Conclusion

I like the data center of Hosttech cause it gives you all important resources at hand and the UI is very intuitive to use. When it comes to the pricing, it’s less attractive for me as a hobbyist, but for Swiss-based companies, I would say it’s an attractive way to start your cloud journey, especially if you concerned about data protection, cause everything stays in Switzerland.