On the hardware side of things not using server grade stuff really isn't as big of a deal these days. I'd happily take a decent Ryzen 5 or 7 series over a "new" Xeon that has twice the power consumption and mysteriously the same specs as an older Xeon made a decade ago.
Even ECC - for 99% of applications (and especially on low-end VPS servers) its less likely to be a problem.
The only thing I have found to be an issue with Hetzner is on dedicated servers, and specifically the hard drives. I've had new servers provisioned and they've given me decade old drives that are on the verge of failure - it's less of an issue now as most of their servers are shipping with new nvme drives but I dare say in 3-4 years time it'll be a problem when they reuse those and have instant non-recoverable failures for some of the hardware range.
Agree it is definitely less of an issue. It also used be Xeon and EPYC ( or Opteron ) exclusive for higher core count. But Desktop CPU has caught up and now offer up to 32 vCPU for $600.
Although in 2025 AMD decided instead of people using Ryzen for server they launched EPYC Grado instead. Which is similar if not slightly cheaper than Ryzen at 32 vCPU and offer official ECC Memory support.
I had similar issues, raid 1 on two hdd and the server would randomly reboot and be slow because it was resyncing the raid. Have to pay extra to get new refurbished drives.
It’s great for throwaway machines, e.g. CI. But don’t rely on them
In Hetzner's defence, it happened twice on RAID 1 setups on one of our servers, and after dropping a ticket basically saying "look, this is the second time, can you give us a drive that isn't a dinosaur please" they did put a brand new one in.
These days I'd take their ampere VPS servers over the dedicated ones though, the performance and reliability is way better (mostly just due to it being brand new hardware).