Hi, professional sysadmin here. I've run production deployments across hundreds of machines in Hetzner; it scales fine. The only real problem is that Hetzner is so much cheaper than anything else that it's easy to get a little bit stuck. (Honestly, that was a fun job in a lot of ways. Oh well.)
Never said it couldn't be done. I forgot that they have ventured into the iaas space and are doing more than just dedicated boxes now. For a small startup with a simple app, managing five dedicated nodes and building your own orchestration on top of deployments, load balancing, networking etc feels like the juice ain't worth the squeeze. For their cloud offering, it is more compelling.
