The best supported answer is: Boat uses third-party virtual-machine hosts, including Hetzner and OVH. Its privacy policy names “OVH, Hetzner, and similar VM providers” as infrastructure hosts used to run Boat. That rules out a claim that Boat is known to run only a self-owned data center. It does not establish that every Boat service, or the public website, runs on Hetzner or OVH at this moment. ^[1]

The follow-up is a different layer of the stack. Hetzner and OVH supply infrastructure; the layer above them could include Boat’s VM system, operating system, container runtime, routing service, and internal deployment tools.

Boat publicly describes that product layer quite clearly for its customer sandboxes. Each sandbox is a full Linux virtual machine, not a container. Boat specifies Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Linux 6.8, and x86_64 hardware. The VM has its own kernel, supports systemd, and gives the user root access through passwordless sudo. ^[2]

Docker is installed inside each sandbox VM, with BuildKit. That lets users run Docker containers and Compose-style local stacks inside their own VM. In other words, Docker is a workload tool available to the customer; it is not evidence that Boat runs its production control plane on Docker. ^[2]

Boat also says the sandbox uses KVM-style virtualization. Its documentation calls the underlying standard machines “baremetal” and says CPU virtualization extensions are passed through, allowing nested tools such as QEMU/KVM, Firecracker, and the Android emulator. A sandbox is still a VM, rather than a bare-metal server assigned directly to the customer. ^[2]

So the supported stack description is roughly:

• Infrastructure suppliers: Hetzner, OVH, and potentially similar VM providers. ^[1]
• Boat product layer: a system that creates, snapshots, resumes, forks, and manages persistent Linux sandbox VMs.
• Inside a sandbox: Ubuntu 24.04, its own Linux kernel, Docker with BuildKit, networking, and normal Linux services. ^[2]
• Customer workloads: containers, databases, preview servers, coding agents, and other software the customer runs in that VM. ^[3]

There is one important limit. The published material does not identify the technology Boat uses to deploy and orchestrate its own backend. It does not establish Kubernetes, Nomad, Docker Swarm, a particular Linux distribution for Boat’s hosts, or a specific control-plane database. Those would be guesses.

What the hosting documentation does establish is that Boat has a backend service which creates public routes for sandbox ports and registers them using the machine’s current address. That is a Boat-managed control and routing layer, but it does not disclose its internal implementation. ^[4]

There is no evidence in the material provided that identifies AWS as Boat’s infrastructure provider. The same privacy policy leaves room for other providers through “similar VM providers.” So the careful conclusion is:

• Hetzner: explicitly disclosed as an infrastructure host.
• OVH: explicitly disclosed as an infrastructure host.
• AWS: not identified in the available first-party disclosure.
• Self-hosted data center: not supported by the available evidence.
• Exact current provider for a particular server or service: not publicly established here.

A public DNS or IP lookup would normally show only the network serving a domain. It may reveal a CDN or proxy rather than the origin machine, so it cannot by itself prove where Boat’s backend or customer machines run. ^[5]

In short: Boat appears to sell and manage persistent Ubuntu VMs, with Docker available inside each VM, on infrastructure that it says includes Hetzner and OVH. Its public materials do not reveal the orchestration stack Boat itself uses above those providers.

Sources

1. 1.Boat privacy policy boat.dev
2. 2.Boat machine capabilities docs.boat.dev
3. 3.Docker sandbox overview boat.dev
4. 4.Boat hosting documentation docs.boat.dev
5. 5.DNS Robot dnsrobot.net