Reliability and customer support are unbelievably good. 99.995% uptime for the past 10 years. Hetzner will happily customize your servers however you like, and at their low prices you can have hot standbys for everything and still save money.
My friend went onto Hetzner for the performance/price, unfortunately the machines drive died within 2 months iirc. Seems like if you're buying on auction you'll get a wiped drive and if you're unlucky it's been written to a lot already, don't remember the specifics but he really wasn't a happy customer afterwards.
I think the last sentence you have there is pertient though, maybe don't go for Hetzner unless you can also afford to have a hot-spare (but for the performance/price you probably can compared to any public cloud). In my friends case he was boot-strapping but needed the CPU so he was really penny pinching.
