Cheap self-hosted Kubernetes on Hetzner cloud (2025)

When people are talking about 50 EUR per month or 100 EUR per month of server expenses, are these problems that do require Kubernetes or is K8s overkill at these levels?

A very good friend of mine runs 1400 pods but his company (by that I mean the company he owns) spends something like 10 K EUR / month in servers. It's all Kubernetes and Talos (which another poster mentioned already) etc.

But at 50 to 100 EUR per month!?

Don't get me wrong: I'm excited to see people using Kubernetes with such low server budgets... I'm into VMs and containers, but haven't tried Kubernetes yet (despite my friend trying hard to convince me it's really not that complicated).

Using the same software you might use at work and getting better at it, perhaps even exploring simpler distros like K3s, k0s, Minikube or whatever people use nowadays.

Setting up Kubernetes (eg with Talos) really is a one-time investment in the sense that you have to figure out what you're doing (what operators to add, how to connect them to they work together, etc.) and is a valuable skill also for work.

Of course then there's the maintenance - updating operators, Kubernetes, whatever else you have, but you don't have to do it and if you want to do keep up with recent versions then it's just as much work as on Ubuntu or any other distro. The upside with k8s is that you can definitely roll back (I'm just assuming you're using GitOps).

Besides, you'll probably want to add all of that Kubernetes functionality at some point anyway - eg you may just at first deploy your server/app via ClickOps, have some issue, decide GitOps is the way to go, then decide that you really need to have automatic certs, then decide that DB backups would be good to have. With Kubernetes you just keep extending it and never really have to "rethink" the approach cos it's really difficult to shoot yourself in the foot unless you really want to and have a shred of understanding (and to clarify I'm speaking about small deployments), and of course because you're using it yourself your knowledge grows meaning that your expertise grows.

It made it trivial for me to deploy reproducible blocks that are also nicely integrated and automated on certain axes (DNS, LetsEncrypt, load balancer / reverse proxy, storage management, PostgreSQL databases with backups).

All of that with considerably easier to understand and debug mechanisms in my experience than doing it with old school configuration management or, even worse, manually.

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