It appears I misremembered this a little bit - the issue was with license ownership, not license type. The answer we got from Hetzner support was: " we don't o

It appears I misremembered this a little bit - the issue was with license ownership, not license type. The answer we got from Hetzner support was: " we don't offer MSSQL licenses, if you want it you need your own license for MSSQL and also for Windows server 2008 R2, because you can't use your own licenses with our Windows license. " And yes, it is reasonable to expect the customer to provide the licenses for the software, but hosting companies can also sell monthly software usage to their customers - we ended up choosing a host that did exactly this. The monthly cost we pay for Windows + MSSQL will not reach the total cost of a full MSSQL license for three years.