I've read several reports from customers saying that their customer service is really bad. Difficult to know with online reviews of course. Does anyone have positive stories to share? I am looking at Australian hosts specifically and Hetzner doesn't have any data centers here.

Using them for production for years, never dissapointed.

What you should be aware of is their new exploration of s3 storage. I mean, the s3 works and everything but it's still too eaely - the servers are kind of slow and sometimes fail to upload/download. They are still tuning out the storage architecture. The api key management is kind of too primitive (although much more headache free than configuring aws), and the online file browser is lacking

But for vps servers - they are battletested veterans

We use them heavily for test boxes and running experiments. Standard off-the-shelf machines are provisioned almost instantly, and never had any problems.

More custom stuff (eg 100Gb/s NICs) takes a bit longer, but they've always been super responsive and quick to sort out any issues!

The price / performance you get from something like their AX162 is just crazy, although unfortunately with the whole RAM / NVMe shortage the setup fee has gone up quite a lot.