Can only speak for their dedicated servers. We have one there for almost two years now. Excellent price for the hardware you get. Had a few support requests (nothing hardware-related), all answered in a few minutes. Very good control panel too.
Know a few people using their dedicated boxes for quite some time too. All happy. :)
Recently we leased a Kimsufi/OVH dedicated box with ProxMox installed. Similar price (without setup fee) and it's been running without an hiccup. Had to make a phone call to support about a billing issue (my mistake) and it was immediately resolved.
From my experience, it doesn't get much better quality/price wise than these two, in Europe.
I can attest to the unreliability of AWS Micro instances for production environments. Two examples:
Ex 1: We had a request triggering an asynchronous job that would take 3-4 seconds of processor time. Several times, this job was being throttled, so even in a low traffic situation each time one of those requests came, a whole micro instance was consumed on it making it unavailable for anything else. Switching to small instances solved the problem.
Ex 2: When launching a new load balancer, due to some sort of wrong DNS/elastic-ip configuration, it's not uncommon to be hit hard by traffic coming for the last owner of the given ip. We've seen this happen several times in the past. Again, switching from 10+ micro instances to 2 small instances cleared the problem.
Adding to that, AWS does have its own PaaS: Elastic Beanstalk. We've been using it for several months now without a single hiccup. It's Java only, but it just works: load-balancing out-of-the-box, auto-scales beautifully and replaces dead instances in a couple of minutes. You can easily launch new environments for testing new features and app updates are a breeze. And you're still close to all the AWS services like S3 and CloudFront which adds a lot of value to the package.
This sounds almost like a commercial but, yes, being used to manage our own servers, this was one of the greatest moves we did. We still have a server hosted at Hetzner (mentioned by the OP), but have moved pretty much everything to the cloud. It's good to know that updating MongoDB is now just a matter of sending an e-mail to the guys at MongoHQ (which also runs on AWS) and they do it in a few seconds.
It may not work the same for everyone but from our experience it does pay off even if we're burning a few more dollars every month, as we're not spending long unexpected hours on server management anymore. And for a small team trying to focus on product development, that's gold!
Recently we leased a Kimsufi/OVH dedicated box with ProxMox installed. Similar price (without setup fee) and it's been running without an hiccup. Had to make a phone call to support about a billing issue (my mistake) and it was immediately resolved.
From my experience, it doesn't get much better quality/price wise than these two, in Europe.