What Hetzner asks for, when it asks
The pattern reported consistently by new customers looks like this:
- A payment method in your name. A card or SEPA direct debit. This is the real gate: it links the account to a verified identity through the bank, which is why an unverified prepaid card often triggers everything below.
- An identity document, requested by email after signup, usually before the account's limits are raised — sometimes before the first server is released.
- Occasionally a selfie or a video check for accounts flagged as higher risk.
What appears to raise the odds: signing up from a country far from the billing address, a free-mail address with no history, an IP that resolves to a VPN or Tor exit, a payment method that does not match the account name, and ordering several machines on day one.
None of this is unusual or improper. Hetzner is a German company operating under German and EU law, they carry real fraud exposure, and an identity check is the ordinary tool for it. It is only a problem if an identity check is the specific thing you are trying to avoid.
What "no KYC" honestly means for a host
The phrase is used loosely, so here is the version that survives contact with reality.
No host is outside the law. What differs is where the identity sits. A provider that bills you directly needs a payment relationship with you, and a payment relationship is an identity check performed by a bank. A provider that resells has already done that — once, for its own account — and what it needs from you is a way to pay and a way to be reached.
That is the entire trick, and it is worth stating plainly instead of dressing it up as privacy engineering.
Running Hetzner hardware without the signup
We resell Hetzner. When you pick it as the backend, the server is a real Hetzner machine in a real Hetzner datacenter; the account it belongs to is ours.
What that changes for you:
- No card. You top up a balance in crypto and the balance pays by the hour.
- No identity check. An email address opens the account. There is no verification step and no phone number at any stage.
- No separate signup. Hetzner sits next to Vultr, DigitalOcean and Linode in the same picker, on the same balance.
What it does not change:
- Hetzner still sees the server. Its address and its traffic cross their network. What they do not see is you — their records point at us.
- Abuse reports still land. They arrive at our door instead of yours, and they get answered. Skipping an identity check is not the same as being unaccountable, and a host that told you otherwise would be lying to both of us.
- You are paying a reseller. Going direct to Hetzner is cheaper. It is cheaper because you did the identity check yourself.
When to go direct instead
Be honest with yourself about which of these you are:
- You have a card in your own name, you are in the EU, and an ID check is a non-event. Go direct. You will pay less for the same machine.
- You want Hetzner's dedicated servers, their storage boxes, or their full location list. Go direct. We resell cloud instances, not their whole catalogue.
- You want the machine without handing an identity document to a company you have never dealt with, or you do not have a card that matches your name and country. That is what we are for.