Composition: the NordBastion polar-bear mascot in tactical Nordic armour standing before four cyan-lit data-fortresses under aurora light, opposite a stark Bauhaus-red corporate edifice marked with a passport-and-Videoident emblem, evoking the migration from a German corporate-KYC host toward a Nordic constitutional-jurisdiction host

Migration target · Updated 2026

A Hetzner alternative.
Without the passport scan and the German jurisdiction.

Hetzner is the European low-cost king — and the signup is a full EU-corporate KYC including passport upload and Videoident. NordBastion is the same shape of VPS, KYC-free, crypto-paid, under one of four Nordic constitutional jurisdictions.

Spec-by-spec table Skip to the migration plan

TL;DR

01
Hetzner requires full EU corporate KYC at signup — passport scan, address verification, occasionally Videoident. NordBastion runs zero KYC.
02
Hetzner is cheaper per spec — that part is honest. NordBastion ships pinned cores and NVMe at every tier and is competitive at the dedicated CCX line.
03
Nordic constitutional protection (Sweden, Finland, Norway, Iceland) — distinct from the German parent jurisdiction that owns even the Hetzner Helsinki DC.

Spec by spec

Same European VPS shape. No passport at the door.

	NordBastion This site	Hetzner Reference
KYC	None — email + password only	Required at signup — name, address, passport, sometimes Videoident
Billing	Crypto prepaid — BTC, XMR, ETH, LTC, USDT, USDC + more	SEPA / credit card / PayPal — no crypto rail
Jurisdiction	Nordic constitutional (SE / FI / NO / IS)	Germany — BND oversight, EU framework (even at FI-Helsinki DC)
Entry tier	$5.90 / mo · Sentinel · 2 vCPU · 4 GB · 120 GB NVMe	CX22 · €3.79 / mo · 2 vCPU · 4 GB · 40 GB SSD
Dedicated CPU tier	$11.90 / mo · Garrison · 4 vCPU · 8 GB · pinned	CCX13 · €12.49 / mo · 2 vCPU · 8 GB · 80 GB · dedicated
vCPU policy	Pinned, reserved on every tier	CX = shared/overcommitted; CCX = dedicated (premium)
Storage	Local NVMe included in tier	Local SSD; Cloud Volumes as add-on
Bandwidth	Unmetered, 1–10 Gbps uplink by tier	20 TB / mo included; €1 / TB overage
Regions	4 Nordic bastions · STO, HEL, OSL, RKV	DE-Nuremberg, DE-Falkenstein, FI-Helsinki, US, SG
Bare-metal auctions	No — fixed bare-metal tiers $99 – $1,099 / mo	Yes — famous auction marketplace
Warrant canary	Yes — monthly, PGP-signed	No
Managed services	No — infrastructure only by doctrine	Cloud Volumes, Load Balancers, Storage Boxes

Hetzner prices and policies reflect publicly listed values in early 2026 and may have changed since.

Where each one wins

Two genuinely different products. Pick the axis that matters.

KYC-free + jurisdiction

NordBastion is the answer.

No passport upload, no Videoident, no German parent jurisdiction. The Nordic constitutional regimes are not the EU framework — that distinction is the entire reason this product exists.

Lowest per-spec price

Hetzner is unbeatable.

Per-spec, Hetzner is the cheapest serious European host. If price is the only thing you care about and KYC + German jurisdiction are acceptable, the math says stay. We are not going to pretend otherwise.

Auction bare-metal

Hetzner has the marketplace.

The Hetzner server-auction marketplace consistently produces 64 GB / 1 TB SSD machines for under €40/mo. NordBastion bare-metal is fixed-tier at $99–$1,099/mo and deployed in 30 minutes — different shape, no auction sniping.

How to move

The Hetzner → NordBastion migration. Five steps, about forty minutes.

01

Snapshot + Rescue dd

Take a Hetzner snapshot, then boot into Rescue mode and dd the root disk over SSH to a remote host or a temporary bucket. The result is a raw image ready for restoration.
02

Top up in crypto

Create the NordBastion account (email + password), top up a prepaid balance in Bitcoin or Monero, no identity check.
03

Order the matching tier

Pick the Nordic bastion of your choice, order the equivalent NordBastion tier (the spec table above maps Hetzner sizes directly) and supply the image URL for a custom-image install.
04

Re-point DNS

Lower the TTL on the affected A/AAAA records 24 h before the move. At cut-over, swap the A record to the NordBastion IPv4 — propagation typically completes in minutes.
05

Cancel Hetzner

Cancel the Hetzner server, Cloud Volumes and any Storage Boxes once the NordBastion server is serving production traffic. Final invoice closes at the end of the month.

Verdict

Hetzner is cheaper. NordBastion is a different product entirely.

Hetzner wins the cents-per-spec comparison and we will not pretend otherwise. What it does not offer is KYC-free signup or Nordic constitutional jurisdiction — and those are the only two reasons most NordBastion customers move.

Move the compute. If you depend on Cloud Volumes, Storage Boxes or auction-priced bare metal, keep those on Hetzner for now — there is no equivalent on NordBastion, by doctrine and by product scope. As your stack consolidates around the Nordic bastions, the bridge shortens.

NordBastion will not be Hetzner. It will be a KYC-free, crypto-paid, Nordic-constitutional VPS with a published canary, and that is exactly the part you came here for.

FAQ · Migration

Migration questions, answered.

The questions privacy-seeking European teams actually ask before moving a workload away from Hetzner.

Hetzner is cheap and European. Why would I leave?

Two reasons that have nothing to do with price. First, Hetzner runs full EU-corporate KYC at signup — full legal name, verified address, sometimes a passport scan, occasionally a recorded video identification call (Videoident). Second, the parent jurisdiction is Germany — meaning BND oversight, EU-wide data-sharing frameworks, and the broader EU surveillance footprint that Nordic constitutional regimes are explicitly designed to sit outside of. If price is the only thing you care about, Hetzner is excellent. If KYC-free + Nordic constitutional jurisdiction is the thing you care about, it is the wrong host.

Is NordBastion competitive with Hetzner on price?

Hetzner is cheaper per-spec; that part is honest. A Hetzner CX22 is €3.79/mo for 2 vCPU, 4 GB and 40 GB; a NordBastion Sentinel is $5.90/mo for the same vCPU/RAM with 120 GB NVMe. At the dedicated tier the gap is narrower: a Hetzner CCX13 at €12.49/mo (2 vCPU, 8 GB, 80 GB) is in the same range as a NordBastion Garrison ($11.90/mo). You are paying a small premium for KYC-free signup, Nordic jurisdiction, the warrant canary, and pinned-NVMe-at-every-tier.

Hetzner has a Finland data centre. Is that not already Nordic?

Helsinki, geographically yes. Jurisdictionally no. The data centre is operated by Hetzner Online GmbH, a German company; legal process flows through the German parent and the EU framework, not through Finnish constitutional law. \"Where the metal is\" and \"who can compel access to the metal\" are two different questions. NordBastion's Helsinki bastion is operated under Finnish jurisdiction by design — that is the whole point.

Can I pay without a credit card or SEPA mandate?

Yes. NordBastion bills exclusively in cryptocurrency — Bitcoin, Monero, Ethereum, Litecoin, USDT, USDC and others. You top up a prepaid balance, the cost of running servers is drawn from it. Hetzner requires either a SEPA direct debit, a credit card, or PayPal — all routed through a verified, KYC'd account.

How do I move my Hetzner cloud server to NordBastion?

Hetzner snapshots can be exported via Rescue mode + dd over SSH to a remote host (or a temporary object-storage bucket). Top up a NordBastion balance in crypto, order an equivalent NordBastion tier in the Nordic bastion of your choice and supply the image URL for a custom-image install. Re-point DNS, cancel the Hetzner server. Total wall-clock for a small server: about 40 minutes.

Will the performance be similar?

At the entry tier, comparable — Hetzner ships strong hardware and good network. NordBastion ships pinned vCPU cores and local NVMe at every tier; Hetzner's shared-vCPU CX line uses overcommitted cores, while the dedicated CCX line (more expensive) gives reserved cores. At equivalent dedicated tiers the two are in the same ballpark on raw benchmarks.

Does NordBastion have Cloud Volumes, Load Balancers, Storage Boxes or server auctions?

No to all four. NordBastion is deliberately infrastructure-only: VPS and dedicated servers, snapshots, networking, DNS, panel. Hetzner has Cloud Volumes, Load Balancers, Storage Boxes and a famous bare-metal auction marketplace. If those are part of your stack, run them yourself on top of NordBastion or split.

Can I keep my existing tooling — Terraform, Ansible, hcloud CLI?

Terraform and Ansible: yes — NordBastion exposes a REST API v1 with first-class server / snapshot / SSH-key / network resources, plus a Terraform provider in development and SDKs in Python, TypeScript, Go and Rust. The CLI is `nb` instead of `hcloud` and reads NB_API_KEY from the environment. If you script Hetzner today, you will script NordBastion the same way tomorrow.

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