I love the price, I hate the control panel

Been with Hetzner for 18 months now. The pricing is genuinely unbeatable for what you get—4GB RAM, 2 vCPU, 80GB SSD for the price of a sandwich monthly. Uptime has been solid. Support responds in under an hour usually.

But that control panel. Oh my.

It's this proprietary thing they built in-house, and it feels like it was designed by someone who heard about cPanel secondhand. Basic tasks take 3x as many clicks. The file manager times out on archives over 50MB. DNS editing requires a page refresh between each record. No API for the longest time.

I stay because I'm cheap and the underlying infrastructure works. But I have a checklist of workarounds:

- I manage DNS at Vultr instead, point everything there
- I deploy via SSH/Git rather than touch their file manager
- I wrote a small Python script to poll their (newly added, half-baked) API for basic status checks

Did you test your restore? I keep 3-2-1 backups because I don't trust that panel for one-click restores. The one time I tried, it "restored" an empty database.

Anyone else found clever workarounds? Or ported anything useful to their API?

Cara, I stay with Hetzner too, vei, that price is insane kkkkk

I going to tell you my workaround, cara: I not use the panel at all kkkkk I manage everything by command line, vei. The panel is trash, this is true, but the server behind works fine.

Someone needs to make a better wrapper for the api, tho. Right now is painful, vei. I try your script if you share, cara

The panel is bad the price is good you stay this is the way

I made a thing it polls the api and restarts services via ssh no panel needed

Did you test your restore 3-2-1 rule I have 4 copies now one in my fridge

@bellaauc your python script can I see

Your control panel hatred is justified, but you're solving the wrong problem if you're still using their nameservers.

For what it's worth, I moved DNS to HostHatch years ago for all my budget hosts. SPF and DKIM management through most proprietary panels is actively broken; I've seen panels that append trailing dots incorrectly, or let you create TXT records that exceed 255 characters without splitting them. Both will tank your deliverability.

The Hetzner API, from what I've reviewed, lacks any email-related endpoints anyway. No queue inspection, no authentication logs. If you're running mail at all, you're flying blind.

My actual workaround: I don't use budget hosts for mail. I use dedicated mail hosting with proper reputation monitoring, and keep the cheap VPS for everything else. The control panel becomes irrelevant because I only touch it to check invoices.

Someone should port a proper control panel installer to their stack. Not their API—the server itself. Then you ignore their panel entirely.

Their api has dns endpoints tho?