In the early days, web hosting in Germany was quite expensive when compared with the US and Great Britain. While demand boomed, German customers had few choices — and all were pricey.

Motivated by the large difference in hosting prices in the late ’90s, Martin Hetzner launched one of the country’s first hosting companies. At first, according to International Marketing Assistant Katie Snow, the main challenge included investing in expensive hardware and building the company’s own datacenters.

“People here were using the internet, but they were paying very high prices for it,” she said. “They were either storing things at home or weren’t able to do much with web hosting on their own. That’s where our drive came from.”

Since 1997, however, Hetzner Online has expanded to offer countless dedicated server configurations, along with virtual servers and web hosting in cloud and shared environments