[HN Gopher] Hetzner continues its growth in the US with a new lo...
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Hetzner continues its growth in the US with a new location
Author : matteocontrini
Score : 500 points
Date : 2022-12-05 10:12 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hetzner.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hetzner.com)
| m3drano wrote:
| As a long time customer of their dedicated servers first and
| their Cloud offering now, I can only recommend them and be glad
| they are growing.
|
| Simple UI, certainly robust infra (for my case at least) and the
| best, by far, prices in the market.
| heipei wrote:
| That's great to hear, happy Hetzner customer for many years. Now
| if they start offering dedicated servers in US locations with
| equally competitive pricing as for their Germany and Finland DCs
| then a lot of other players are going to feel the heat.
| [deleted]
| Hetzner_OL wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback about our dedicated root servers. It's
| great to know that we have fans there that would like to also
| see these products in the States. Installing the infrastructure
| for our own dedicated root servers in the USA means a much
| bigger investment in terms of making sure the DC/DC parks are
| up to our very high standards. For now at least, we are
| concentrating on gradually adding a few more cloud locations,
| and then we may test the waters when it comes to other
| products. But of course, if and when we do that, we'll let you
| know once it goes live! We hope you have fun today generating a
| few servers in our new location in Hillsboro, Oregon. :) :)
| --Katie
| alberth wrote:
| You should create a HN poll on who all wants dedicated
| servers in the US.
|
| I'd definitely vote on that!
| coder543 wrote:
| Your dedicated servers are by far the most interesting
| product to me. The US server market needs more price
| competition, and Hetzner's dedicated servers would bring a
| _lot_ of competition here if they were priced similarly to
| how they are priced in Europe.
| eloff wrote:
| I'm also waiting eagerly for Hetzner dedicated servers in the
| US ever since before your expansion plans initio the US were
| announced. There's just nothing like your EU dedicated
| offering in the states.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > Installing the infrastructure for our own dedicated root
| servers in the USA means a much bigger investment
|
| but you are hosting cloud offering on some physical servers
| already, so you can start selling these servers as
| dedicated..
| FpUser wrote:
| This is for sure. I currently rent dedicated from for my client
| OVH because of strict data location requirement. Exactly the
| same dedicated on Hetzner is 2.5 or so times cheaper. Either
| beats the crap out of AWS price wise. Unfortunately we are in
| Canada and what are the chances of Hetzner to come here ;(
| kamikazechaser wrote:
| Overall it is a good provider. Performance/cost ratio is better
| than linode/DO/Scaleway by a huge margin. That being said, its
| anti-abuse is super strict. Any heavy p2p networking usually
| triggers their anti-ban e.g. IPFS. They have a 0 crypto policy
| that includes making a HTTP(s) call to any external crypto API. I
| find this a very weird TOS enforcement tbh. Not an issue, but a
| general observation is that their block ranges are more
| aggressively scanned by bots.
| nov21b wrote:
| I've run trading bots on Hetzner without issue (Binance and
| Bybit api)
| pfoof wrote:
| We were using Hetzner in one of the companies and we had pretty
| good performance per price. After acquisition the parent
| corporate decided to switch to AWS because "procedures". Imagine
| the shock when my manager saw how much it would cost per month,
| not to mention that corporate had their own special IT department
| for which we also had to pay because of "procedures".
|
| Changes needed on Hetzner took less than a day, like buying a new
| server from auction.
|
| Changes through corporate took somewhere around a week.
|
| P.S. Sorry for digression
| philliphaydon wrote:
| Sounds like an issue with the company and not AWS.
| jlokier wrote:
| Their server auction is great if you find one you like.
|
| Much less than a day. I found new auction servers took only a
| few minutes to be up and running after selecting them. Same
| with default config new servers (no extra SSDs etc).
| pcdoodle wrote:
| Wow, these are fast. I use XRDP on EC2 and thought i'd try
| hetzner again. It's like i'm sitting in front of a linux desktop,
| better than EC2.
| vondur wrote:
| Ooh, when are the NextCloud bundles coming to the US? I see they
| have them on the German based datacenters.
| nshm wrote:
| Seems related to energy prices in Europe. They try to diversify.
| Feels like a lot of German companies will move to US soon.
| tommek4077 wrote:
| And german customers will just endure the added latency? Seems
| more like opening the company to new markets.
| frenchman99 wrote:
| If data centers have to temporarily shut down due electricity
| shortage, people won't have a choice but endure the latency.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| ~100 ms isn't that bad. Doubt it matters at all for most web
| apps. I've even played FPS games on US East servers a lot to
| escape eurotoxicity.
| tommek4077 wrote:
| Yeah, with your standard web-app making 50+ calls to fetch
| JSON from your backend. This will play out nicely.
| riku_iki wrote:
| most calls run in parallel likely?..
| tommek4077 wrote:
| Try for yourself. Sounds good in theory...
| sgjohnson wrote:
| It would be great if they'd support BGP.
|
| I love their pricing. I'd love it even more if I could announce
| my IPs on their dedicated offerings.
| Hetzner_OL wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback on both of these points. I will make
| sure to share these suggestions with the team! :) -Katie
| UnnoTed wrote:
| I used to be a Hetzner customer for a few years (2018-2020), one
| day my card stopped working, while I tried to get a new one I
| ended up with a 5 EUR invoice, once I got a new card I tried to
| pay the invoice but they had blocked my account, so I had to
| transfer the money to their account to pay the invoice, once paid
| they told me to create a new account, I did and was asked for a
| picture of my passport after being a customer for years, I
| stopped trying to use their service at that moment. Now paying
| twice the price at Linode but at least they only ask for a phone
| number.
| nigma1337 wrote:
| Does anyone have any experience running kubernetes on hetzner?
| We're currently using DOKS, but are strongly considering setting
| something up on bare metal servers, as digital ocean are rather
| expensive (compared to hetzner that is)
| derfabianpeter wrote:
| My company [1] offers this as a managed services and we're very
| happy with hetzners offerings for the K8s ecosystem. Fairly
| easy to use a variety of tools to get K8s up and running
| reliably (we roll our own solution though)
|
| [1] https://www.ayedo.de
| jlokier wrote:
| Hey Katie :-) If taking requests, it would be great to be able to
| test occasional root servers before committing, even if it's only
| a few hours access.
|
| I have my eye on one of those new ARM many-core servers, but I'm
| not going to pay the setup fee and month rent in advance only to
| measure the performance and find out quickly that it's not what
| I'm looking for (because the AMD line is really good).
|
| You offer a refund policy by writing to support, but I always
| felt a bit dirty at the idea of using it, as though it's abusing
| the process if I know before I buy that I'm probably going to
| return the server.
| icelancer wrote:
| This is great news. Hetzner is our choice for inexpensive
| redundancy, especially on non-US soil for data duplication on
| other continents. They've been very good with us on customer
| service and their auction prices can't be beaten.
|
| The latency to the EU somewhat stops us using them for
| production-level work, but this deployment to the US (especially
| on the West Coast, how lucky) will definitely shift our spend
| from DigitalOcean (which has been garbage lately both in terms of
| customer service and product offerings being much worse than
| advertised) to them.
|
| Hetzner's control panel and automated systems are pretty bad, but
| that's a small thing when the price is right and customer service
| is much better than other offerings.
|
| EDIT: I am a consumer of dedicated servers from them only. I
| don't really believe in cloud-based / AWS-type services for small
| businesses, and would like to get off most of our VPSes as well.
| seydor wrote:
| I am embarrassed to report that my server has 760 days uptime. I
| wonder if they ll just forget that it exists and stop charging me
| wizeman wrote:
| You never update the kernel? What about security flaws?
| andyp-kw wrote:
| The prices seem cheaper than Digital Ocean and AWS Lightsail.
| What's the catch ?
| jebronie wrote:
| No catch, which is why Hetzner is so popular.
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| Less greed. This is the catch
| ducktective wrote:
| You can't _easily_ increase the balance of your account! I kid
| you not, the advocated method of paying is clearing the invoice
| at the end of the month.
| Hetzner_OL wrote:
| We are, indeed, very careful about new customers and limits,
| but we do this not to be mean, but to prevent abuse.
| Preventing abuse also means improving the overall performance
| for all of our customers. So by being careful about limits,
| we are also trying to make your experience -- in the end -- a
| much more positive one. --Katie, Hetzner
| dhdgrygev wrote:
| I've seen a lot of customers frustrated with the limits and
| how reluctant you are to raise them, I assume because
| people weren't paying their invoices.
|
| Perhaps it could be an option to let people back up their
| words with money up front? I.e. put $10k in the account,
| proves you can probably afford more than 10 servers.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| Given that they mention abuse elsewhere in this thread, I
| assume the problem is related to stolen cards and thus
| can't really be fixed by accepting money upfront.
| ducktective wrote:
| I mean, is there a feature in the UI to charge the account
| by like 20$ for old customers? Last time I checked the FAQ,
| you can only do so by direct wire transfer of your bank not
| Hetzner UI.
| kuschku wrote:
| Well, why not? With SEPA ICT wire transfers are instant
| and cheap, why build a custom web UI with fraud handling
| and all that if you can just use SEPA transfers?
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| It's slightly more work, in my experience, to set up and
| administrate a Hetzner VPS, than to do the same with DO or AWS.
| Slightly. Trivially slightly. I use Hetzner and I have been
| nothing but happy with their product and service.
| christophilus wrote:
| Yeah. For me, the only thing I miss when using Hetzner is the
| lack of a good startup script. Hetzner has something like an
| Ansible YML file you can use, but then if you want to reimage
| your machine, it doesn't give you any choice (that I've
| found) except to reuse the original script.
|
| What I'd like to have is something like Linode's start
| scripts feature which I've always found to be very nicely
| implemented.
| capableweb wrote:
| Why have startup scripts when you can run your very own
| images? `Installimage`
| (https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/operating-
| sy...) allows you to install and run your own custom
| images, so run any bootstrapping once, create image from
| the results and then install that on the machines.
|
| If you really really need startup scripts, it'll be trivial
| to add it to your own image. Packer (and similar tooling)
| makes it trivial to create your own images as well.
| Hetzner_OL wrote:
| Hetzner Cloud also has an extensive ISO library, and if
| there is something that is missing from that library that
| you would like to have -- including a specific custom
| image -- customers can write a support ticket on Cloud
| Console and our team can upload it for you. --Katie
| e1g wrote:
| I'd love for the available images to be
| regularly/automatically updated - e.g. Alma/Rocky Linux
| is available at v8.5, and v9 came out 5-6 months ago.
| christophilus wrote:
| It's just a minor gripe, but... a simple bash script
| (like Linode's start scripts) is a lot easier than what
| Hetzner offers-- a custom ISO? Nah. I'll just scp my
| script when the server is ready and run it myself.
| konha wrote:
| Their cloud offering isn't as polished yet. No managed
| databases for example. Other than that they've got a long track
| record and a good reputation for providing competitively priced
| servers.
| habibur wrote:
| Hetzner was launched [or may be got popular] after DigitalOcean
| took off.
|
| Since then they priced their boxes competitively relative to
| DO. A little bit less. That's still holding.
|
| Also note that at that time hosting in Europe wasn't a popular
| option, unlike what we see now.
| senko wrote:
| You may be talking about their VPS offering.
|
| Dedicated servers there were an option way before
| DigitalOcean, if I remember correctly (I recall at one point
| having some Linode and some Hetzner servers, DigitalOcean was
| not in the picture).
| christophilus wrote:
| Hetzner has been around for 20 years, IIRC. Their cloud
| offering is newer, though.
| berkes wrote:
| In my experience there's no real "catch". Just trade-offs.
|
| Hetzner offers "managed bare metal", for extremely competitive
| prices. But, in my experience, exactly what I'd expects: "pay
| peanuts, get peanuts". I love, and chose them for some proof of
| concepts, early phase and hobby projects. But would not choose
| them for anything that requires serious stability and
| availability.
|
| Not because they have flakey or even unpredictable service, but
| because the trade-off is that "bare metal" requires more work
| done by me, more responsibility for me, less options for quick
| failover and so on.
|
| Just like for some situations, a server in your attic is the
| perfect fit, yet for others a managed cloud infra is the
| perfect fit, hetzner has some sweet spots.
| usrusr wrote:
| Nobody is getting "trickle down"-level rich from it. It's an
| organically grown company that bootstrapped without any big
| high risk/high reward investment that expects massive returns
| in absence of failure. Basically a mom&pop from what in the US
| would be considered flyover that just happens to have found its
| way to large scale competetiveness. Through a unique
| combination of frugality and decisive spending I think.
|
| Early example: a weirdly memorable ad captaign around 2000 that
| for many years occupied the single most expensive computer
| related print ad slot in Germany (decisive spending) with a
| series of ads that seemed not _quite_ "high production values",
| but also not _deliberately_ grungy, a weird "definitely trying
| to be high gloss perfection, but somehow not quite there" (like
| in-house best effort or some local design house, certainly not
| the big-name agency you'd expect for ads on that slot). More
| recent example: their hardware seems to be a continuation from
| early-Google style "desktops on shelves" that's now a custom
| rack design (still noticeably lower density than typical 16")
| that's all about finding good price/reliability spots in cheap
| CotS parts, e.g. according to certain "begins the scene"
| blogger visits they sort for publicity, price-optimized custom
| versions of desktop mainboards (same PCB but not placing any
| parts they don't need). Chances are company with big investor
| backing would either go all standard rack parts (from a
| supplier like Dell or something like that) or go all in
| designing their own.
| mythz wrote:
| We're a long time Hetzner dedicated server customer currently
| transitioning from their dedicated servers in Germany to their US
| Cloud product (for reduced latency) which we can highly recommend
| as it was the best US Cloud provider we've found that works out
| to be an order of magnitude less expensive than equivalent specs
| on Azure/AWS and also includes 20TB free bandwidth that would
| cost a fortune in AWS/Azure's artificially inflated egress costs
| [1].
|
| The UX behind managing instances is delightfully pleasant where
| new instances are available faster than any other cloud provider
| we've used, within seconds of creating an instance you can
| immediately login with your configured SSH keys. Another nice
| feature is being able to "rescale" your instance to higher specs
| after a restart [2], so you can confidentially start with a small
| instance that just meets your current workload knowing that you
| can easily scale up your instances as your workload increases.
|
| AWS RDS was the only critical service keeping us on AWS, a
| service we no longer need in our new Apps which we're building
| with SQLite thanks to the effortless replication in Litestream
| [3] that we're using to replicate to Cloudflare R2 - another
| great value S3 alternative with $0 egress fees [4] where you can
| get even greater value & performance when hosting behind their
| free CDN.
|
| [1] https://servicestack.net/blog/finding-best-us-value-cloud-
| pr...
|
| [2] https://bizanosa.com/how-to-upgrade-resize-hetzner-cloud-
| ser...
|
| [3] https://docs.servicestack.net/ormlite/litestream
|
| [4] https://www.cloudflare.com/products/r2/
| Archelaos wrote:
| > Cloudflare R2 - another great value S3 alternative with $0
| egress fees
|
| I don't understand their price page. They claim $0 egress fees,
| but their free "Class A operations (mutate state)" and "Class B
| operations (read state)" have a mothly cap. After that you pay
| by the number. Isn't that an egress free?
| heipei wrote:
| Not if you download a small number of large files ;)
| sam1r wrote:
| Adds up really fast!
|
| One time I hosted a new movie (mkv, 23gb+), that cost like
| $17 to "rent" on Amazon prime... so my extended family
| could just take the link, download it, or just watch it in
| their mobile browser or laptop.
|
| The egress of the streaming alone (not downloading), while
| they aircasted, definitely adds up much more than one would
| expect!
| foolswisdom wrote:
| No, because you pay by the operation, but by the amount of
| data in that operation. S3 also has operations costs, but
| those are separate from the egress costs, which are throb the
| roof.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Does anyone know what the actual margin on outbound data /
| egress is?
|
| S3 is charging $0.023 per GB, right?
|
| IIUC - there's not a fixed cost for sending 1 GB of data.
| The cost differs based on where you send from and send to.
| So it'd be hard to have a really good estimate - but I'm
| wondering if anyone has a good ballpark figure.
|
| My understanding is that transferring data on the same
| continent (vast majority of traffic) should be <$0.0005 -
| meaning the margin is _really_ high.
|
| I know it's more in Amazon's interest for your cloud usage
| to be as inefficient as possible - so they can charge you
| as much as possible and get as much margin as possible.
|
| However, this product doesn't seem to make sense to me.
|
| Why would you even pick your S3 regions? Shouldn't AWS
| balance your data for you across continents so that your
| data egress is automatically optimized?
|
| Is that how Cloudflare works?
| Medowar wrote:
| Amazon egress changes depends on the region of the s3
| data location.
|
| Bandwith cost highly depends on the scale and target
| network. Cloudflare has a good blogpost on relative
| bandwith cost: https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-
| costs-around-the-world...
|
| To put numbers to the relativity, for a somewhat smaller
| datacenter in Central Europe with a 100Gbit/s connection,
| the running Cost of transit is somewhere around
| 0.00004EUR per GB, on a theoretically fully sustained
| connection(not realistic, also with no redundancy or
| hardware). Peering is basically free(after initial
| buildout) with around 3kEUR per 100Gbit/s
| (https://www.ams-ix.net/ams/pricing). This all excludes
| cost of investment for initial buildout and hardware. On
| a scale on amazons level this becomes even cheaper, since
| operating your own network is cheaper than buying
| transit.
|
| Hetzner charges 1,19EUR per TB, amazon 90$(on the first
| 10 TB). So amazon probably doesnt really care about the
| price differences per region and went with a mixed
| calculation, since their margins are so absurdly huge.
|
| also, major parts of the cost are in hardware and
| staffing/development, of which amazon has way more, due
| to the demands of SDN.
| eloff wrote:
| That $0.023 per GB is for storage. It's $0.09 per GB for
| egress (varies by region). It's charged the same as all
| other egress from AWS.
| hobs wrote:
| First thing on signup: YOU HAVE TO DO ADDITIONAL IDENTITY
| VALIDATION, yes, even though we took your home address and
| credit card and phone number already.
|
| No thanks, I'll keep using Digital Ocean or someone who doesn't
| make me jump through hoops.
| bachmeier wrote:
| Thanks for the notification. I came to ask if they were still
| doing this. I found this to be an exceptionally shady
| practice. They took my information first, then they wanted
| some ridiculously personal information that they didn't need.
| I assumed at first that I had gone to the wrong URL. I don't
| even know how that additional information would have helped
| them with their "identification". The only thing it did was
| expose the information of legitimate users to being stolen.
| AnonCoward42 wrote:
| eBay did this to me. They let me enter everything and then
| said they can't validate my ID without any way to fix that
| even. It's a nice way to provoke people for sure.
| isodev wrote:
| Your address and phone point to a location, not necessarily a
| valid identity but I understand you may be hesitant to share
| personal info with just anyone. If you are a EU citizen you
| can ask them exactly how long your data is retained and who
| may have access to it (it's actually published on their
| website). They use it only as a 2nd level verification to
| prevent spam (not shared with 3rd parties). As a German/EU
| company, Hetzner is subject to all regulatory requirements
| for handling of personal information and so when leaving, you
| can also request the deletion of your data.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| This is a problem with Hetzner yes. Last time they wanted a
| copy of my ID. I blacked out my social security number as
| this is considered private for Dutch citizens (even the
| police advises people to black this part out) and it took
| some arguing for them to accept it. I sent them the police
| advisory and that helped.
|
| German law can be really invasive though. Germans are very
| focused on privacy when it comes to private companies (e.g.
| google/facebook) but I noticed they trust their government
| with everything. Thus there are not many challenges to laws
| about the government requiring personal data.
|
| In Holland we're kinda the opposite, people give all their
| data to google willingly (not me though!) but they are very
| suspicious of the government. And rightly so, to be fair.
| There was a recent scandal where the tax office bankrupted
| thousands of people for 'crimes' they didn't even commit.
| Some even committed suicide. The government fell over it when
| it all came to light but the same people are back in power
| again: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/world/europe/dutch-
| govern...
|
| PS: Recently I signed up for something else from Hetzner
| (needed temporary storage) and they didn't request anything
| even though I had closed my account before so I created a new
| one. So perhaps they have mended their ways.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Interestingly, I've never used Digital Ocean because when I
| went to sign up (in my memory it would be circa 2015, but my
| memory is not what it once was) you had to give them
| something like your Twitter or Github name, which I didn't
| feel like sharing.
| jmartrican wrote:
| I signed up to DO about 2 years ago. They didn't ask me for
| Twitter or GitHub. As I recall, it was a normal setup
| process.
| danw1979 wrote:
| A one-off hoop that maybe helps to keep spammers off their
| systems ? Fine by me.
| hobs wrote:
| If your fraud detection cant do anything with name,
| address, phone number, and credit card and you need Drivers
| License/Passports then you probably need to pay for a
| better one.
| Aeolun wrote:
| What do you expect a German company to do with a copy of
| your drivers license or passport? Is this one of those
| situations where it contains your your social security
| number and it therefore becomes direct access to your
| bank account?
|
| The only thing I imagine someone could do with the copy
| of my passport is pretend to be me when they sign up for
| a similar service.
| hobs wrote:
| Yes, pretend to be me and charge me for their actions. We
| call this identity theft and it is a rampant problem.
| karlerss wrote:
| I'll add a +1 to managed database product. We've migrated all
| workloads except main application servers to Hetzner. Having a
| managed DB service (with backups, point-in-time recovery, etc)
| would have us quitting AWS in an instant.
| aflukasz wrote:
| I was considering something similar and then found this: http
| s://gist.github.com/frozenice/fafb1565f8299a888f94d11137...
| (benchmarking Hetzner's cloud volumes, with unfavorable
| comments from people trying PG and MySQL deployments).
|
| I emphasize that I personally did not run any such tests,
| yet. But was wondering, since this is Hetzner thread, that
| maybe someone can share their experience, in particular
| comparing AWS's gp2/gp3 based deployments vs Hetzner's
| volumes.
|
| I would also add that on AWS, for example, you can nearly
| seamlessly expand EBS volumes in size without downtime. Last
| time I checked, not an option on Hetzner - you must take care
| of expanding the file system yourself. Which makes sense, as
| Hetzner is more basic service, but it's worth remembering
| that there are various differences like that, when comparing
| the day to day operations between such providers.
| tpetry wrote:
| > I was considering something similar and then found this:
| https://gist.github.com/frozenice/fafb1565f8299a888f94d1113
| 7... (benchmarking Hetzner's cloud volumes, with
| unfavorable comments from people trying PG and MySQL
| deployments).
|
| Network volumes always have lower iops than local disks.
| Thats expected, except when you pay a huge price.
|
| > I emphasize that I personally did not run any such tests,
| yet. But was wondering, since this is Hetzner thread, that
| maybe someone can share their experience, in particular
| comparing AWS's gp2/gp3 based deployments vs Hetzner's
| volumes.
|
| AWS GP3 has a baseline performance of 3000 iops, and from
| there on you have to pay for each iop/s. To reach the
| performance of hetzner volumes you have to add 20$/month.
| But with AWS you can get higher than the hetzner value. But
| the iops performance of the dedicated machine is not
| possible with gp3 (max. 16k, compared to hetzner 30-40k for
| local disks).
|
| With io2 devices you can get higher than 16k iops, and
| higher than the hetzner local disk.
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/de/ebs/general-purpose/
| no_wizard wrote:
| why not use Hetzner for compute and something like
| Planetscale with it?
| Hetzner_OL wrote:
| Thanks so much for the detailed recommendation! We're thrilled
| that you're with us, that you appreciate our low prices, that
| you find our Cloud Console pleasant to use, and that our
| rescale feature helps you grow so easily! --Katie
| dtx1 wrote:
| Please do a managed Kubernetes next. I couldn't convince any
| of our customers to switch to Hetzner because they'd need to
| do "everything themselves". A managed Kubernetes instance
| would instantly make Hetzner an alternative for at least 75%
| of our customers. And honestly it's quite a cheap way to earn
| a bonus on your server instances.
|
| Edit: And if you do manged Kubernetes and managed Kafka
| Instances the number would go up to like 95%. Oh and those
| Videos with der8auer? Really awesome to see, do Linus Tech
| Tipps or Level1Techs next!
| whage wrote:
| Never heard of Level1Tech, just looked them up. Man...
| These people are so likeable! Great content!
| hakman wrote:
| For Kubernetes, maybe give kOps a try. It's quite close to
| managed. The Hetzner integration is quite good (I spent
| about 6 months getting it ready for my company). The
| community support is great also. It still needs autoscaling
| added though.
| simplotek wrote:
| > Please do a managed Kubernetes next.
|
| If we're taking requests, I would love a Fargate-like
| service. It would be absolutely fantastic if Hetzner
| provided a service where users uploaded a Docker image, and
| Hetzner took care of handling the networking bits and
| running it, and gather metrics.
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| Something like this is on my roadmap, would you mind
| telling me a bit about the metrics and the scale you'd
| expect? Would you expect always on or more of an
| ephemeral container?
| simplotek wrote:
| > Something like this is on my roadmap,
|
| Superb!
|
| > would you mind telling me a bit about the metrics and
| the scale you'd expect?
|
| It will depend mostly on what the service offers.
|
| If the service only supports running a single isolated
| container without any scaling whatsoever then it would be
| helpful if we could monitor basico stuff like CPU and
| memory utilization, and also network traffic, free disk
| space, and also disk IO. If the service supports auto-
| scaling then it would be helpful to track all resource
| utilization rates along with all alarms and events
| involved. Auto-scaling also implies load balancing thus
| if that's the case then it would also be helpful to track
| the basic load balancing indicators, as well as request
| logs.
|
| In the end it really depends on what services you're
| planning on offering, and how you'll charge for it. As a
| user I would need to monitor any metric which is directly
| and indirectly involved in determining cost, and on top
| of that I need to monitor performance.
|
| > Would you expect always on or more of an ephemeral
| container?
|
| The most pressing need would be always on containers to
| be able to go the lift-and-shift onboarding route to
| managed services, but ephemeral containers sound like
| function-as-a-service and those are pretty exciting as
| well.
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| Thanks for this incredibly detailed answer! All these
| points make a ton of sense.
|
| Free disk space would imply elastic block storage or
| something similar so I'll need to give that a think!
|
| V1 is very likely to be always on so great that it's the
| core use case for you!
| PaywallBuster wrote:
| AWS Fargate / GCP Cloud run
|
| Upload a docker image, specify container size (1cpu 2gb)
|
| go live
|
| scale from 1rps to 1000 rps any time
|
| stateless
|
| pay per request or pay per container
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| Combining what the original comment was, they also want
| some AppRunner-style ergonomics -- I'd like to see just
| how much of cloudwatch/monitoring would be expected to be
| available. Basic things like CPU and memory aren't _too_
| hard but it really does depend on how much of the VM
| (firecracker /etc) one would expect to be able to see, as
| well as higher level metrics like (RPS/Errors, etc).
|
| AppRunner, Fargate and Cloud Run have different
| ergonomics and specifics but thanks for this outline. v1
| is likely to be pay per container but other than that
| feels doable.
| sofixa wrote:
| They could do it like GCP or Scaleway - provide a managed
| Kubernetes service, and provide managed Knative on top
| for the Container as a Service service.
| derfabianpeter wrote:
| If you need managed K8s and Kafka (and pretty much anything
| else you can self host), my company [1] provides just that
| with 5x16 real human support.
|
| [1] https://www.ayedo.de
| asmor wrote:
| Kubeone on Hetzner is honestly one of the smoothest non-
| managed experiences I've ever had with Kubernetes - better
| than some managed ones. Includes all of the things Hetzner
| already provides for Kubernetes (so I'm sure they're
| working on their own) - internal networking support, load
| balancers, volumes. And you scale worker nodes with a CRD
| too.
|
| https://github.com/kubermatic/kubeone/tree/main/examples/te
| r...
| xMudrii wrote:
| Hey y'all -- I'm one of the core maintainers for KubeOne.
| I'm super happy to hear you had an awesome experience!
|
| For folks wanting to learn more, we have this nice
| getting started tutorial covering all the cloud providers
| we support including Hetzner: https://docs.kubermatic.com
| /kubeone/v1.5/tutorials/creating-...
|
| And for folks asking about SLAs, support, and stuff like
| that, I recommend checking out our KubeOne Managed
| Offering: https://www.kubermatic.com/products/managed-
| kubermatic-kuber...
|
| I'm also happy to answer any questions y'all might have.
| :)
| dtx1 wrote:
| That's wicked cool, thank you. For me and a little more
| experimental customers, this is a nice option but for the
| more legacy customers out there, if it doesn't have an
| SLA, it doesn't exist. I know it doesn't make sense but
| it's how big companies tend to work.
| asmor wrote:
| Oh, I've been there. I just wanted to highlight an
| outstanding option.
|
| Though I'm sure if you ask and they have the money for it
| lying around, Kubermatic will sell you an SLA.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I don't think Hetzner is the company to provide that. The
| reason they're so cheap is that they limit themselves to
| hardware/VPS.
| rmoriz wrote:
| Managed k8s also requires stateful services like storage,
| database and ingress/LB which I recommended Hetzner to
| build like 8 years ago (community).
|
| Proof:
| https://forum.hetzner.com/index.php?thread/21421-docker-
| cont...
| dtx1 wrote:
| Hetzner S3 Storage would be great. I know Hetzner is slow
| moving when it comes to Software but it's so obvious that
| they would have explosive growth if they did that and
| most of it is available as FOSS Software already
| jmartrican wrote:
| They would also have explosive costs and expenses.
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| So I'm working on adding this on top of Hetzner -- it's
| service #2 and the beta should be out by the end of the
| month (Redis is first!) -- if you'd be willing to beta
| test I'd love to have you try it.
|
| You can find the link in my profile or here[0]
|
| [0]: https://nimbusws.com
| rmoriz wrote:
| IMHO this has to be offered by the platform, not by some
| other party/intermediary. Of course I could run minio,
| swift, etc by myself, but this is not the point.
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this, hopefully after the expansion
| finishes (and maybe some dedicated servers appear in the
| US), Hetzner could offer object storage natively!
|
| I have seen the "apps" in image selection in the Hetzner
| cloud console, so I'm convinced they're at least
| _thinking_ about going up the value chain.
| hakman wrote:
| There are some other pieces missing. The cluster-
| autoscaler implementation is quite basic. It doesn't have
| a way to managing multiple clusters inside the same
| project and no way to add custom tags. That makes it
| harder to track resources. The permissions/security is
| quite simple. Read/write tokens with full permissions on
| the project is very wide. Adding S3 like service without
| more security would be interesting. These are the most
| important ones, but I remember there were a few more nice
| to have feature (like server groups for scaling up an
| down and the ability to retrieve the userdata, image and
| ssh keys for a running server.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| https://symbiosis.host uses Hetzner for their underlying
| nodes as I understand. It certainly explains them being the
| cheapest managed Kubernetes offering I've ever seen.
| sebhook wrote:
| Are you going to be hiring in the US?
| nlittlepoole wrote:
| Doing the exact same for some side projects. It's been a
| delight.
| oblio wrote:
| How are their APIs for Configuration as Code?
| asmor wrote:
| Pretty good.
|
| https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hetznercloud/hcloud/.
| ..
| mdasen wrote:
| Hetzner Cloud is great, but I do wish they'd offer dedicated
| servers in the US as well, even if it was just a fraction of
| their European offering.
|
| Hetzner Cloud pricing is great, but their dedicated servers are
| even cheaper. For example, they offer a 16-core (32-vCPU) Ryzen
| 9 5950X for EUR103 with 128GB RAM and 2 x 3.84 TB NVMe SSDs.
| They offer a cloud server with 32 vCPU, 128GB RAM, and 600GB of
| storage for EUR296 - nearly triple the price and those CPU
| cores are probably not as good since they're likely Zen2 cores
| rather than the Zen3 cores of the Ryzen 9 5950X.
|
| https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+EPYC+7502P
|
| https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+9+5950X
|
| I know, benchmarks aren't everything, but the Ryzen is getting
| 1,432 per vCPU while the EPYC is getting 766.
|
| The AX51 costs EUR59 for 8 Zen2 cores (16 vCPU) and 64GB RAM
| while the CCX41 costs EUR154 for 16 vCPU and 64GB RAM.
|
| I know, the cloud servers come with flexibility, hourly
| billing, and no set-up fees. I also know that their cloud
| pricing is very good. Still, I wish I could get a few AX101s in
| the US. 3 AX101 servers would be EUR310/mo, each with 16 Zen3
| cores, 128GB RAM, and 2x 3.8TB of storage.
| unity1001 wrote:
| Their AX line has 32 core, 64 thread AMDs for ~200
| dollars/euro. That is unmatched by any major provider. So, so
| attractive.
|
| https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax
| ptman wrote:
| I wonder when Aiven https://aiven.io/ (or something similar)
| will start supporting hetzner.
| MaKey wrote:
| Whenever I hear Aiven, I think of an incident I witnessed 2nd
| hand in January 2020. They accidentally terminated the
| services for (at least) one big customer and had to restore
| them from backups. This lead to data loss in production
| (Kafka topic data and configuration gone) and was a huge mess
| for the customer to clean up. Of course they abandoned Aiven
| after that.
| js4ever wrote:
| You might be interested by Elestio, we support 13 managed DB
| and 170 other open-source software. We also support hetzner
| including this new Hillsboro region.
|
| https://elest.io/
|
| Disclaimer: I'm the CTO
| openplatypus wrote:
| A few months ago I heard that Aiven was warming up to
| collaboration with OVH, which is even better IMO.
| [deleted]
| woodson wrote:
| > The new location at Hillsboro will host Hetzner Cloud servers
| mounted with AMD processors
|
| A kind of interesting statement, given that Intel has a large
| presence in Hillsboro (>15K employees IIRC). Not that this would
| matter to Hetzner, but still curious.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| Are you worried Intel folks will drive over to their DC and
| smash their servers because "this is an Intel town"?
| woodson wrote:
| At no point did I say or imply anything to that end. I found
| it curious, as their other DCs offer servers with Intel and
| AMD processors, while in this new DC they specifically call
| out using AMD processors.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| I didn't think you were, I was just joking, pardon me.
| Hetzner_OL wrote:
| Hillsboro, Oregon's network connections have a lot of
| advantages. It's worthwhile checking it out here:
| https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ --Katie
| Hetzner_OL wrote:
| Thanks for sharing the great news! --Katie, Hetzner
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| Have been using Hetzner for the last three years for some medium-
| traffic (but growing) SaaS offerings, has been a fantastic
| experience and the pricing is very competitive. They offer only a
| small feature set but it's good enough for us. Looking forward to
| spawning some servers in the US region to reduce latency.
|
| Only thing that's missing are BGP sessions, would make it easier
| to build anycast networks with them. You can get it if you buy
| rackspace but I really don't want to manage my own servers
| anymore.
|
| Another thing that's missing is geo-redundant load balancing,
| i.e. the ability to spin up a single logical load balancer in
| multiple regions and dynamically route client traffic to the
| nearest DC via BGP. Currently LB targets need to be in the same
| DC, which is kind of weird. You can use DNS load balancing but
| given the larger footprint they should really invest in a proper
| anycast setup, I think.
| Filligree wrote:
| I ran a server there for years. Eventually it developed a fault
| on... either the PCIe bus, one of the paired NVMes, or something
| in that vein. This manifested as poor performance, followed by
| the NVMe falling off the bus, often followed by the machine
| rebooting. Upon doing so it would stall at the BIOS, complaining
| that it had been overclocked. It had not been overclocked... as
| far as I know, at any rate.
|
| I went back and forth on this with support for several months.
| They were not able to reproduce (it was a rare fault, happening
| on average only about once every few weeks), and blamed me for
| 'overclocking'. Eventually I shut off the account.
|
| Hetzner is cheap, but you're on your own if you need any form of
| help.
| jlokier wrote:
| I had a similar problem, where my AMD server kept freezing up
| about once a month. It was my critical mail server, and used by
| other people, so not good.
|
| Unfortunately I just kept reacting to it by rebooting, instead
| of writing to Hetzner support.
|
| When I did eventually write to them, they scheduled a date for
| complete replacement of the main hardware transferring over the
| SSDs without any fuss, and the problems have never reoccurred,
| so that was great.
|
| The reason I didn't write to them for a long time is I'd heard
| stories like yours, and I thought I'd have to gather lots of
| evidence to prove the server was unreliable. I did that and
| presented it, but I was still surprised at how instantly they
| just proposed a date for replacement without any discussion.
| [deleted]
| jacooper wrote:
| Can't wait for ARM VPSs.
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| As soon as I saw the "P" in their "guess where we're going"
| social media post, I was secretly hoping it was PDX!
|
| Hetzner has been my absolute favorite infrastructure/cloud
| provider to date, it's criminally underrated. They've also got a
| great list of community tutorials for new sysadmins to peruse[0].
|
| I like Hetzner so much I think it deserves a more varied managed
| service offering, so I'm building it[0].
|
| [0]: https://community.hetzner.com/tutorials
|
| [1]: https://nimbusws.com
| koolba wrote:
| Any plans for Hetzner dedicated servers in USA? This looks like
| it's only the cloud offering.
| adeptima wrote:
| Waiting for GPU dedicated hosting for inference at Hetzner prices
| with max 2x-3x markup ...
| rmoriz wrote:
| iirc Hetzner once had GPU offerings in Germany but it was
| discontinued. I guess it was hard to model a business case on
| short living hardware (from a business perspective as Hetzner
| hardware usually runs for a couple of years) and mad
| pricing/sourcing due to all the blockchain/ML hype. Today I
| guess eneregy is also an issue.
| sieabah wrote:
| My big question is whether any US based companies hosted are
| beholden to the German government because it's a German based
| company.
|
| This in turn makes everyone beholden to the EU regulations and
| German censorship regulations. Yeah no thanks!
| devmunchies wrote:
| Since they are making big moves toward US expansion, one small
| improvement would be to change the prices on the pricing page to
| show Dollars instead of Euros, either with a toggle or if my IP
| is in North America. It's more work for the customer to do price
| comparison with comparable cloud providers.
| staunch wrote:
| Please allow third-parties to add server apps to Hetzner!
| Currently there's like a dozen added by Hetzner (presumably), so
| many cool ones are missing.
| zac23or wrote:
| Seeing HN become "customer service" for many companies (including
| faang) is sad.
| nakedrobot2 wrote:
| Why? Customer service is marketing.
| replwoacause wrote:
| Exactly. Because it seems transparent. It would just be
| better if the customer service given through the company's
| support channels were adequate. Not these veiled attempts to
| market via customer support.
| unity1001 wrote:
| A managed kubernetes offering from Hetzner would be great. If
| they added managed databases, maybe even a managed shared
| filesystem (rwx volumes or something similar to Google filestore)
| then they would knock it out of the park...
| jbb67 wrote:
| I have one of their cheapest dedicated servers and a Sunday
| evening a few weeks ago the hard drive died.
|
| I put in a ticket and within about half an hour they had
| installed a replacement disk. I then had to reinstall everything
| because I'd messed up my raid config but that was totally my
| fault not theirs.
|
| I was very pleased with that efficiency on what is a very cheap
| server.
| chocolatkey wrote:
| Very happy about this as a long-time Hetzner dedicated and cloud
| customer. The only "issue" I've had with cloud is the lack of
| video memory due to the virtualized environment they run in, but
| that's a special case because I'm running a custom Windows server
| install due to Adobe products, which is not officially supported.
| I await the day they add object storage to the mix, then my
| (hosting) life will be complete.
| rglullis wrote:
| I mentioned it yesterday, but I will mention it again... take a
| look at Storj. [0].
|
| Storj pricing is basically unbeatable. $4/TB/month, $7/TB/month
| for egress bandwidth which (I heard, yet to try) can be saved
| further if you put something like cloudflare in front of your
| bucket.
|
| Speaking as someone who set up their own minio cluster (on
| Hetzner) as a way to have object storage at the lowest cost
| possible, if Storj was an option 3 years ago, I would have
| saved me quite a bit of money _and_ time.
|
| [0]: https://storj.io
| Hetzner_OL wrote:
| Object storage is, indeed, very high up on the list of hoped-
| for items on our customer wish list for cloud products. I can
| add a +1 to that for you and send it onto the dev team. As
| always, we don't announce roadmaps of upcoming features and
| when they will be ready. We prefer to announce things when they
| go live -- just like today! --Katie
| config_yml wrote:
| I wouldn't hold your breath for this. I think Hetzner wants
| to stick to compute offerings, they don't have the manpower
| to run managed services like object storage or databases.
| christophilus wrote:
| I'm personally fine with this, if it allows them to
| continue offering such solid value.
|
| Wasabi is a great, inexpensive object store for anyone
| who's looking for that. I've had a really good experience
| with them (we have a little over 80TB of data there), and
| have found their support to be top-notch especially when
| you consider the price.
| harrymit907 wrote:
| +1 to Wasabi. They are the only reason I was able to
| launch my product which wouldn't have been feasible on S3
| or other providers just based on the storage and the API
| cost.
| andix wrote:
| They could probably even outsource that service to some
| storage solution provider. They just need to have the
| servers located on site at Hetzner.
|
| It wouldn't even needed to be integrated to their API and
| billing.
| dhdgrygev wrote:
| You've been saying this for several years, and yet there is
| still no object storage. It's getting to the point where it
| seems more realistic to believe that it will never happen.
|
| Very happy with both the cloud and dedicated servers, but
| it's weird how bad the communication is on the object storage
| thing. If it's not going to happen, why not say so?
| andix wrote:
| And snapshotting for volumes!
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Hetzner customer for 20 (?) years.
|
| Wish they would add managed databases to their cloud.
| Hetzner_OL wrote:
| Wow! Twenty years in this industry is a lifetime! Thanks so
| much for supporting us all these years! I will pass on a +1 for
| you to the dev team about the managed databases. --Katie
| ancieque wrote:
| make that another +1
| senko wrote:
| +1 on managed DBs.
|
| I currently have hybrid DigitalOcean / Hetzner setup to take
| advantge of load balancer and managed database at DO. If
| Hetzner provided some of those, I'd gladly switch.
|
| I am _not_ managing replicated postgresql myself ever again.
| tarjei_huse wrote:
| We considered DO but found that it was cheeper to hire a
| sysops firm (Linpro) to manage the DBs on Hetzner. This has
| the added bonus of humans that you can call if needed...
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Yes, me too! (DO/H setup)
| martin-adams wrote:
| I absolutely love using Hetzner. Top of my wishlist is
| Managed Databases and Managed Kubernetes. This is the main of
| the reason why I'm using Digitalocean for production and
| Hetzner for more stateless use cases.
| Vespasian wrote:
| Managed K8s would be my dream as well.
|
| Am I you?
| huijzer wrote:
| Since everyone is all of a sudden voting for managed databases,
| maybe there is a reason why Hetzner is so cheap and the reason
| is that they focus on the core and not on satisfying all kinds
| of feature requests?
| oblio wrote:
| It's not "all kinds of feature requests", if you think about
| it.
|
| IT is basically 2 things, at its core:
|
| * compute
|
| * storage
|
| Hetzner offers cheap compute, which is great because modern
| applications can have stateless web/app servers.
|
| Now, the missing part is storage, and that's much harder and
| riskier since it's state, inherently. A server dies, you lose
| stuff if you misconfigure it.
|
| So people want a fully managed IT solution.
|
| It's simple and it's obvious conceptually, just hard.
|
| And I guess Hetzner won't do it because it's hard thus
| expensive to do.
| Aeolun wrote:
| There already are full managed solutions. They're 5x more
| expensive. It sounds to me like people expect the whole
| managed experience but 5x cheaper, which is never going to
| happen.
| juanse wrote:
| I want also support this request.
| raphaelj wrote:
| Scaleway has a similar pricing for VMs and dedicated, while
| providing additional managed services: https://www.scaleway.com
|
| I've been there for 2y, pretty happy with them so far.
| vedranm wrote:
| Hetzner's performance is arguably better (Epyc 2nd gen on
| Hetzner vs Epyc 1st gen on Scaleway), but their support for
| IPv6 is certainly much better: Scaleway doesn't offer PTR
| record and changes the IPv6 assigned to you when they
| relocate your VPS in the datacenter.
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| I'm working on this -- it will be a while till I get on
| Postgres (I really hope that's the managed DB you want), but
| I'd love to get you on the postgres beta list.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| <3 Yes it's Postgres, email should be in the profile, would
| love to participate.
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| Thank you! You've got mail ;)
|
| Postgres (and later some exciting flavors like Neon) is
| actually the only database I plan to support, at least for
| right now -- MySQL and MongoDB are not even on the roadmap
| really.
|
| I _might_ make an exception for RethinkDB since I loved it
| so dearly.
| fragile_frogs wrote:
| > I might make an exception for RethinkDB since I loved
| it so dearly.
|
| Don't get my hopes up... I haven't used RethinkDB in ages
| and have fully moved to Postgres though
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| You should definitely stick with Postgres -- you made the
| right call.
|
| But also...
|
| https://www.rethinkdb.cloud
|
| Don't know who is behind it -- a company named
| MostlyTyped (not sure if this has old RDB engineers in
| it), but warms my heart that the repo is still seeing
| commits and usage.
| elric wrote:
| Nice to mee another 20 year customer. When I first discovered
| Hetzner, I couldn't believe their dedicated physical servers
| were cheaper than the colocation costs I was paying in a
| Belgian datacentre (without the hardware!). Over the years,
| I've had some hardware failures, which have always been
| resolved very quickly. Every time I interact with their support
| crew, I'm pleasantly surprised by how knowledgeable they are.
|
| +1 for managed Cloud DBs. I'm surprised they don't exist
| already, given that they have managed DBs on their cheap web
| hosting platform. Shouldn't be a big step to make that
| available in Cloud.
|
| Another request I have is virtual routers, so I only need 1
| dedicated IP address and can NAT (or whatever) everything else.
| I get that I can do this with a small Cloud Instance and a
| private network, but those things are a pain to manage and I'm
| sure Hetzner could do a better job than myself :-)
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| They have extremely impressive prices, but I've always been
| hesitant to use them for anything important because they've
| historically been known for very aggressively shutting down your
| service if their automated systems detect e.g. suspicious
| traffic.
|
| The most recent and egregious example would be banning users who
| run cryptocurrency-related nodes, even if not mining, despite
| only mining and similar activities being prohibited in the ToS.
| Here's a reddit comment from the official account stating that
| trading is also prohibited:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/hetzner/comments/wucxs4/is_it_allow...
|
| While banning mining is perfectly understandable (the data
| centers are likely built around an assumption of normal usage
| patterns and not 100% CPU 100% of the time, and at least one
| cryptocurrency is infamous for wearing out SSDs with its mining),
| banning trading bots, proof of stake, and the operation of nodes
| for blockchain analysis is extremely surprising, even if you have
| read the TOS. And like in the earlier cases I've heard about, the
| servers seem to have been blocked without warning.
| mccorrinall wrote:
| I would totally understand this on VPS and dedis where the
| crypto is mining ssd blocks (I think it's name is Chia).
|
| But preventing me from running a normal bitcoin node on my
| server, which writes 400GB once and is done makes me left
| confused.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| Providing services to the crypto community probably makes you
| a huge target for cyber attacks and all kinds of fraud. It's
| the reason I would never get into that business, so I kind of
| understand why a company would prefer not to allow anything
| crypto related on their platform.
| unity1001 wrote:
| > Providing services to the crypto community probably makes
| you a huge target for cyber attacks and all kinds of fraud
|
| What will they do when a new form of fraud or a more potent
| way to do cyberattacks targets another online activity?
| Like ecommerce? Or blogs? Shut down all ecommerce sites?
| All blogs?
|
| I find such measures as foolish as blocking port 25 - it
| works until the attackers and the software they use update
| itself to abuse the same thing in another way. A temporary
| relief that just complicates things.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| While surprisingly banning a class of services that few
| others ban is a problem in itself, what's a bigger problem
| is that a) the ToS doesn't mention it b) it's enforced
| without warning.
|
| If these are not toy projects, outages can get expensive
| (due to networks imposing penalties on nodes that don't
| fulfill promises, or trading getting messed up).
| Aeolun wrote:
| I'm sure that Hetzner doesn't care about your problems
| with your magic internet money.
| bicijay wrote:
| This is not reddit sir.
| unity1001 wrote:
| > I've always been hesitant to use them for anything important
| because they've historically been known for very aggressively
| shutting down your service if their automated systems detect
| e.g. suspicious traffic.
|
| Yep, that's the fault of Hetzner that prevents them from being
| used by many startups instead of AWS, Azure GCP etc. AWS is
| very tolerant of what is being done on its network, for
| example. Whereas a startup that uses Hetzner services will have
| to make sure that their use case is not prohibited by Hetzner.
| Moreover, they would have to be vigilant to keep following the
| changes to Hetzner ToS and practices to avoid getting
| disconnected out of the blue one morning. With restrictive
| German laws and increasing Eu regulations, that is a major
| liability for any startup.
|
| It would be great if Hetzner had a full fledged US subsidiary
| that was subject to US laws - one that didnt have to get
| burdened by German law.
| mightybyte wrote:
| > They have extremely impressive prices, but I've always been
| hesitant to use them for anything important because they've
| historically been known for very aggressively shutting down
| your service if their automated systems detect e.g. suspicious
| traffic.
|
| I came here to say the same thing. I've had production servers
| shut down by Hetzner with zero warning. And I believe they also
| kept the hardware running and continued charging you for
| it...just without network. As a result of this experience, I
| now consider Hetzner unusable for production systems.
| sithadmin wrote:
| >I've always been hesitant to use them for anything important
| because they've historically been known for very aggressively
| shutting down your service if their automated systems detect
| e.g. suspicious traffic.
|
| FWIW, I've been running a seedbox in Hetzner's Falkenstein
| datacenter for yrears without issue. I only use private
| trackers + 1 public tracker focused on asian content, but
| they're definitely capable of figuring out that the my traffic
| is mostly torrent-related and have never taken action. The only
| time they've ever null-routed me was when I accidentally left a
| DNS resolver open to the world.
| _a9 wrote:
| Have a couple seedboxes for myself and friends. Sometimes
| public torrents are used, some of which are monitored.
| Hetzner just sends a notice about the report and gives you 24
| hours to reply without disabling the server. If you miss it
| then they null route the offending server. Never had any
| issues with them denying my responses, they're usually very
| quick to respond to clear the abuse report after submitting.
|
| Seriously love Hetzner, amazing prices and really fast human
| support.
| hnbad wrote:
| The concern with cryptocurrency-related services is probably
| more around scamming and illegal business operations than
| mining as -- as you say -- mining should be relatively easy to
| detect.
|
| I'd say if you want to run gray area services like crypto, porn
| or gambling, you should probably ensure in advance that the
| provider is okay with you running your service, not just that
| they don't explicitly list your use case in their ToS.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| A few years back, I used a hosting company that was pretty
| lenient with the stuff they allowed. It was used by a lot of
| gray area or slightly shady websites. I didn't really care
| about that, but they suffered frequent outages because some
| of the shady sites were constantly being attacked. So I
| switched to a different hosting company that was stricter and
| did not constantly suffer from outages.
| auston wrote:
| I'd say that crypto is not exactly gray area. But I am
| biased.
| fs111 wrote:
| I ran a very busy Tor node (not exit) that was also doing
| folding at home on the side on their cloud for years. Never
| have they complained or threatened to shut anything down. I
| have only good things to say about them
| rollcat wrote:
| This is becoming a trend. SourceHut has banned cryptocurrency-
| related software from its platform. While I'm a vocal opponent
| of cryptocurrency and related technologies, I'm a little bit
| torn on this particular issue - it's a soft form of censorship.
|
| The cryptocurrency market is currently already collapsing under
| its own weight. I don't think the idea should be attacked
| directly though (ideas are bulletproof), rather we should
| assess the side effects and ensure any harm is repaired. So if
| there was an opportunity to take direct action, it should have
| been at a regulatory level: carbon tax on the electricity,
| treat and regulate exchanges the same way you'd treat
| "brick&mortar" banks/exchanges/transfer services, tax mined
| coins as income, etc. GPU OEMs should've limited availability
| per buyer (no normal person needs more than 2 high-end gaming
| GPUs if they're actually just gaming). Even if you're a cloud
| provider, you should just charge extra for any excess wear on
| the hardware, maybe co-locate the "hot" nodes together, and
| leave politics at the door.
|
| So on one hand, this is a form of censorship. I can imagine
| that given a sufficiently broad definition of a blockchain, you
| could use it to shut down any distributed, log-structured
| database project. On the other hand, the service provider also
| has the full right to refuse service to anyone, no explanation
| necessary - I'm certainly happy my company did so, whenever
| approached by any cryptobros.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| It isn't censorship, it's freedom of association. Any
| business is free to decide who it does business with,
| offering trade and services requires consent from two
| parties, economic transactions are voluntary. Last time I
| checked sort of a leading principle of the whole
| cryptocurrency community.
| Beaver117 wrote:
| That's not true, a business can't discriminate on race,
| gender, etc. But crypto ownership is ok. We draw the line
| at race and gender, but it's not a free for all
| yakak wrote:
| Protected class is a meaningless distinction in this
| context. Hetzner is not checking your tax records to
| determine if you are a cryptoholder, they are denying a
| specific transaction based on its nature, not yours.
| reachableceo wrote:
| How is having lease terms for my private property in exchange
| for monthly consideration censorship ?
|
| I am not being antagonistic. I am quite serious.
|
| I myself have built out my own private on premise data center
| and have no contractual restrictions on what I can do. I'm
| only limited by US law.
|
| It was expensive . I did it because I didn't want to be
| restricted by Ovh etc lease terms .
|
| It's the same as owning your house vs renting.
| crote wrote:
| When I was moving my server to a new hoster Hetzner was on the
| top of the list, but they refused me as a customer.
|
| As it was going to host (among other things) my mail server, I
| could not use my primary (self-hosted) email address - because
| that's asking for trouble if I ever run into issues. It seems
| using Protonmail triggered something on their side.
|
| They asked me for a copy of my ID card, which I happily provided.
| But they still refused my account, without explanation. Oh well,
| their loss. I've been at OVH now for a few years without any
| issues. OVH's product is definitely worse, but at least they'll
| actually let you _use_ them.
| perihelions wrote:
| - _" They asked me for a copy of my ID card,"_
|
| That's their courteous treatment. They asked me to consent to
| an AI scanning my face!
|
| edit: Specifically with this startup,
|
| https://www.idenfy.com/identity-verification-service/
| throw7 wrote:
| I just tried signing up to instagram recently and they want a
| selfie with my name and hand in the picture. Yeah, ok there.
| ignaloidas wrote:
| I worked for them a couple of years ago. I can confidently
| say that as of 2 years ago, the only thing images of your
| face would've been used for is verifying if it's an actual
| human face (e.g. not a photo, mask, etc.) and performing a
| facial match with the photo on your document. Also, at least
| 2 years ago every identification flow had a human review, to
| weed out false positives and negatives. I'm fairly certain
| that these things have stayed the same, as the guys running
| it are a good bunch of people, and don't have any ulterior
| motives for using AI besides moving the SLA from humans to
| AI.
| vamega wrote:
| I used a fastmail account and also got denied. Perhaps they
| deny anything not using a domain that's from a big email
| provider?
|
| I too provided US State issued identification, which still
| resulted in my account being denied.
|
| I generally think highly of the company, and want to pay them
| for their services; but they made it impossible for me.
| Hetzner_OL wrote:
| hi there, I am very sorry that we could not approve your
| account. We also do not publish a list of things that may or
| may not make your account accidentally appear fake. So I can't
| confirm whether or not it was the Protonmail or something else
| that may have triggered a review of your account. I am very
| sorry for the lack of transparency on this. I understand that
| it is frustrating and disappointing to be rejected as a
| customer. We are purposefully non-transparent about what
| triggers a review of new accounts. Why? If we published a list
| like this, it would very quickly become much easier for
| scammers and spammers to create realistic-looking accounts that
| they could use to abuse our products, and naturally, we don't
| want that. I glad that you have found another provider who
| could use to host your mail server. --Katie
| electroly wrote:
| This level of account paranoia (which is infamous at this
| point; it's one of the primary things mentioned every time
| Hetzner comes up) is one of several reasons why Hetzner is
| doomed to be a second-rate provider. If you have a credit
| card, you can get an AWS account. I've never provided any
| kind of ID to any American hosting provider. They wait until
| _after_ you 've done something bad to ban you.
| jlokier wrote:
| It's more expensive to provide AWS-type "assume you can be
| trusted" service at a low-cost provider - and Hetzner is
| one of the lowest-cost big providers.
|
| Low-cost attracts more fraudulent customers, using stolen
| credit card numbers. Hosting is particularly bad for this
| compared with other low-cost services, because of the
| community of people who want to use rented servers for DDOS
| and such, ideally without paying or being tied to a real
| identity.
|
| It also attracts people who will do a card chargeback if
| the server isn't what they wanted or after they've used it
| for some temporary event. Some people don't appreciate that
| chargebacks are expensive for the low-cost supplier, and
| some people don't care.
|
| Low-cost also means the penalty cost of credit card
| chargebacks is a higher proportion of income, even if the
| number of them was the same. It might be so much higher
| that the business couldn't be profitable at the prices it
| offers if it didn't aggressively filter which customers it
| takes on.
| aflukasz wrote:
| Could some "insurance", paid extra, be a solution to
| this? As in saying to Hetzner, hey, I'm a legitimate
| consumer, willing to pay extra for, say, a year, so that
| you do some additional checks (EDIT: in advance) and/or
| switch me to a better tier of more relaxed "fraud
| detection", offering some hot line, like between Russian
| and American generals, to help avoid any accidental, hm,
| deletions?
|
| Or would that just not scale?
| Aeolun wrote:
| I'm not sure if reading this response made me feel better or
| worse.
|
| Clearly if you are rejecting legitimate customers for
| arbitrary reasons there's still some work to do on your
| approval process.
|
| I mean, I get that there are bad actors, and that it's
| rationally better for Hetzner to have false positives than
| false negatives. But it just feels wrong. Legitimate
| customers shouldn't be rejected until they prove they're
| malicious.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I hope they created an offspring company with no access to the
| Hetzner main infrastructure. It would be very inconvenient to
| lose the "hosted in Germany" - a.k.a. "not accessible data for
| the US" - aspect in terms of GDPR.
| ukutaht wrote:
| Yes, very important to understand the corporate structure and
| legal implications wrt to GDPR and the Schrems II decison.
| [deleted]
| devn0ll wrote:
| It is because of this, I had to move four of my customers away
| from Hetzner. Since they just did not want to be in the "sphere
| of US influence".
|
| Choices for EU only companies are getting smaller, and this is
| a real let-down.
| s_dev wrote:
| Some choices: https://european-
| alternatives.eu/category/cloud-computing-pl...
| aflukasz wrote:
| Non of them deliver equivalence of big cloud providers.
|
| Also, track record of at least some of them is not the
| best, if we are to believe, for example, comments on HN.
| I've made initial research about most of them. Just to give
| some examples about Scaleaway: prices moving up by 75%
| without notice
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25999148), zero
| notice of the removal of the ability to start ARM64
| instances (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22923413).
| sofixa wrote:
| As a counterpoint, i quite like Scaleway. I've been using
| them for a few years for a personal Kubernetes cluster,
| with some random experiments with their serverless and
| managed database offerings, and i didn't have any issues
| (for my minimal workloads). They've changed pricing quite
| a few of times which is far from ideal, but I accept that
| situations evolve (e.g. the latest one is due to the
| massive increase in electricity costs in France). Even
| with all the changes they're still cheaper than many of
| the alternatives, so it's still "a win".
| aflukasz wrote:
| This is becoming ridiculous. Sure, I may deploy to EU based
| provider, but then they will get bought or, like Hetzner,
| expand to USA, and now my business is at a legal risk all of
| a sudden.
| e61133e3 wrote:
| Same... hope to see a response from Hetzner on this!
| Kiro wrote:
| How can AWS claim they are GDPR compliant?
| Sander_Marechal wrote:
| They can't really, since the Schrems II decision.
| q-base wrote:
| To the best of my knowledge, this is already too late. I
| remember reading through their FAQ and seeing that hence they
| now have a US-based owner, they are then within reach of US
| 3-letter agencies.
| shafyy wrote:
| I can't find any info that they are owned by a US company.
| Can you link to a source?
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Hetzner is owned by a holding company owned by Ensoxx and
| Ensoxx is Martin Hetzner's company as far as I can tell.
| q-base wrote:
| From here: https://docs.hetzner.com/general/general-terms-
| and-condition...
|
| Conclusion:
|
| In summary, you as a customer do have influence - to a
| certain extent - on shaping who has access to the data on
| your servers. EU and US authorities do have to follow the
| laws and legal procedures in requesting data. However, this
| may give you a false sense of security since some
| authorities have been known to stretch or violate
| agreements. If you require a web hosting company that has
| absolutely no connections to the USA, then unfortunately,
| we may no longer be the best choice for you. Since Hetzner
| US LLC is part of the Hetzner Group, there certainly is a
| connection. We hope that we have explained things clearly
| from our point of view using the two above case studies.
| shafyy wrote:
| Ok, but: "US authorities do not have direct access to
| your server or its content in the EU. US authorities have
| to comply with the regulations of the EU legislation.".
|
| So, because Hetzner is not owned by a US company, stuff
| like the CLOUD act doesn't apply to them. So, if you have
| a contract with the German entity of Hetzner and use a
| German server, you should be fine in terms of GDPR.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| But what does "direct" mean here? Indirect could still be
| ordering them to give US authorities data and to keep
| silent about being ordered. Maybe (hopefully) that would
| be against EU regulations?
| fulafel wrote:
| Lots of EU countries have their intelligence agencies
| doing close cooperation with five eyes (NSA and
| equivalent agencies of the smaller countries) and willing
| to turn a blind eye or actively collude in compromising
| security of IT infra in the EU. Or going further, a oft
| reported pattern is that when they want to spy on their
| own citizens but are forbidden by law, they ask the
| foreign allies to do the dirty work of spying on their
| soil and pass back the intelligence.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| OK, be that as it may, in IT stuff, the question often
| becomes "Who is responsible?". If a state or its
| institutions violate the law, at least no one can blame
| you for GDPR violations, which you did not commit.
| fulafel wrote:
| The GDPR largely came about as a response to the Snowden
| revelations of pervasive surveillance of netizens
| globally, and it says you need to protect PI from non-EU
| state actors. So you're possibly right as far as EU state
| adversaries go but you for defending against foreign
| state actors it's different.
| shafyy wrote:
| Exactly this, and I think this is granted with Hetzner.
| q-base wrote:
| I think it depends on how you read the Schrems II ruling
| and how you read Hetzners words.
|
| Any of the big cloud providers can claim that they comply
| with EU legislation, but they also have to comply with
| US-legislation and if 3-letter agency wants to have some
| data from one of their subsidiaries in EU, then they
| can/will decide which contract to breach.
|
| I read Hetzners statements as being that they can no
| longer guarantee that they will not be forced to do the
| same - but that can be my reading of their statement that
| is wrong.
|
| If I already had them as hosting-partner for a solution
| that fell under Schrems II, I would have them confirm
| this, to be sure.
| [deleted]
| cstpdk wrote:
| The content of that link sounds fine in terms of GDPR if
| one only uses the EU servers. Am I missing something?
| q-base wrote:
| I read it differently, especially in light of Schrems II.
| EU-datacenters from any of the big US-based providers
| does not automatically make you comply either.
| Vespasian wrote:
| As I read it the issue is that the American HQ can order
| their European subsidiary to provide the data.
|
| Hetzner US does not have a European subsidary and
| therefore cannot violate GDPR (assuming US personal can't
| access EU customer data).
|
| Hetzner HQ is in Germany and is not allowed to enforce
| the CLOUD Act outside the US
| q-base wrote:
| That could also be correct.
|
| But if I was under legal/contractual obligations, with
| Hetzner as my hosting provider, I would have their legal
| department confirm this.
|
| Since Hetzner found the need for appending the paragraph
| I referenced, they must have become aware of something.
| Vespasian wrote:
| True.
|
| Now that they are entangled with US law there might be an
| incentive to be as a cooperative as possible.
|
| Yet, Hetzner is still a "better" option (with regards to
| data protection) than any of the big US-based cloud
| providers.
| baridbelmedar wrote:
| Not sure I follow, in what way are they better?
|
| Imho, as soon as you do business with the US or trade in
| US Dollars, you need to play nice with the relevant
| authorities.
|
| If I understood it correctly, Hetzner is now "infected"
| in the same way as the three US cloud providers are. The
| Schrems II verdict and Cloud ACT basically concludes that
| no European company can exist in the US and vice versa
| without having to deal with the same pesky legislation.
|
| An alternative could of course be that Hetzner created a
| new US based company where the EU parent Hetzner company
| only holds a minority ownership in the new US-based
| company. The EU based parent company in turn then "sells"
| its technology to the new US company. This way, the
| arrangement becomes more reminiscent of how IBM has sold
| its mainframe to European companies...
| welterde wrote:
| Why would it matter at all if it's a minority or majority
| stake in the ownership of the US subsidiary? As far as I
| understood it the combination of GDPR and CLOUD act only
| disallows the combination of US mother-company with EU
| subsidiary, but the inverse should be fine, since the US
| has no legal influence over the parent company?
| baridbelmedar wrote:
| The US-based cloud providers also have European
| subsidiaries. But that doesn't help because they are
| bound by US law. That is the root of the problem.
|
| What makes you think that a European company operating
| within US jurisdiction would not be subject to the same
| laws?
|
| If the European company receives a request from the US
| authorities for information, they need to follow the same
| legislation as the US companies do. Just because it's a
| subsidiary won't help. The authority will say "we want to
| know everything you know about the following person,
| please give us the information, otherwise...". The
| authority will not distinguish whether it is a subsidiary
| or the parent company.
|
| Of course have the choice to just ignore the request from
| US authorities, but then you have to be aware of the
| consequences, i.e. quickly give up and shut down the
| subsidiary and stop trading with US dollars.
|
| This is the root of the problem. CLOUD act has been ruled
| illegal in the EU just as you said, but it is also
| illegal not to comply with CLOUD act in the US. And
| companies operating on both continents in practice need
| to comply with both laws, regardless of whether it is a
| parent company or a subsidiary.
|
| At least that's how I interpret it...
| codethief wrote:
| Hetzner Online GmbH and Hetzner Cloud GmbH are fully owned
| (resp. majority-owned) by ENSoXX Holding AG of which Martin
| Hetzner is the CEO and which seems to be the parent
| company[0]. I cannot find any indication in the publicly
| available documents that any US company (or any other company
| for that matter) holds more than a 25% share in ENSoXX
| Holding AG. (25% is the reporting threshold.)
|
| In the 2022 annual financial statement they do mention
| expanding to the US, though they don't go into the legal
| details. As the link posted in the cousin comment mentions,
| though:
|
| > Hetzner US LLC, as a subsidiary of Hetzner Online GmbH,
| provides data center services within the USA for the parent
| company, Hetzner Online.[2]
|
| So there is no US owner.
|
| [0]: https://www.northdata.de/Hetzner+Online+GmbH,+Gunzenhaus
| en/A...
|
| [1]: https://www.unternehmensregister.de/ (enter "ENSoXX
| Holding AG" in the text field)
|
| [2]: https://docs.hetzner.com/general/general-terms-and-
| condition...
| PaywallBuster wrote:
| Quite impressive the numbers they're doing
|
| 78M profit on 290M revenue
|
| (See [0] above)
|
| _ edited figures _
| codethief wrote:
| I see 78M on 290M EUR but yeah, still very impressive!
| yread wrote:
| It's insane that they are so cheap and they could still
| have a third lower prices and not lose money somehow
| openplatypus wrote:
| Makes you wonder how much you are overpaying on AWS.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Hetzner is all about doing things efficiently, in
| unconventional ways.
|
| There are some Youtube videos of people getting tours of
| their data centers. It's a very custom setup, keeping
| both component costs and energy costs down. Their
| earliest servers were basically tower PCs on shelves,
| their more recent generations are more akin to custom
| rack designs with inhouse-assembled servers, with a
| datacenter design that exploits natural convection to do
| a lot of the cooling.
| ushakov wrote:
| They also distributed some 50M EUR to employees and
| management
|
| a friend of mine told some support staff got 20k EUR in
| bonuses last year because of that
|
| probably they figured out, it's easier to give some of
| the profits away than pay a higher tax
| wongarsu wrote:
| Finding good people is difficult, especially back in 2021
| when everyone was scaling IT like crazy. A good bonus is
| a good investment in employee retention. On top of that
| having employees participate in business success aligns
| incentives. It's just good business sense.
| akulbe wrote:
| Have any of you switched from Digital Ocean to Hetzner?
|
| I've been with DO for years, but after some problems and
| lackluster/non-existent service recently, I'm considering moving
| off to another provider.
| luckylion wrote:
| I really like Hetzner (very inexpensive and generally good
| quality), but their TOS are difficult and their DMCA is just
| broken.
|
| The TOS are vague. You're not allowed to "violate the rights of
| third parties", but they don't have a clear policy on what is a
| violation. If you review a product and the company files a DMCA,
| they may or may not say that naming a brand is a violation (I've
| experienced them coming down on both sides of the issue), when
| it's clearly fair use.
|
| For DMCA claims, they tell you to use a form to reply, but the
| responses from the form will not be received and/or read
| reliably, so half the time you get a follow up email after 24h
| saying you haven't replied, so they will now manually check
| resolution and might block your server.
|
| Tech and pricing are fine and I recommend them, legal is an
| issue, and I'd include some "but only if you're in an industry
| where DMCA claims are unheard of" caveat with my recommendation.
| nicexe wrote:
| Their ToS states that cryptocurrency mining is forbidden (which
| is fair). But, comments from hetzner officials on social media
| clarify that Ethereum nodes (even if they don't produce any
| blocks) are also against their ToS.
|
| This is like mentioning in your rule-book that metal toothpicks
| are forbidden because I don't know, people can short your
| batteries or whatever. But also banning wooden toothpicks
| without mentioning this in your rule-book.
|
| Their ToS are not always vague but the way their terms are
| executed is definitely arbitrary.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| I like the look of Hetzner's pricing and while its VMs and SSDs
| seem to have pretty good performance, its block storage volumes
| are basically unusable for most applications, I was seeing 70-80
| IOPS and something like 4mbps in fio.
| nickjj wrote:
| This is certainly interesting. I've been using DO for something
| like 8 years and I really like them.
|
| I don't plan to switch but Hetzner offers a CPU optimized server
| with 4 CPU cores and 8 GB of memory for $17 USD / month.
| DigitalOcean offers the same thing for $56 USD / month. It's hard
| to ignore how much of a difference that is.
|
| Even the smaller'ish instances have a huge difference. Hetzner
| has a 2 CPU core 4 GB of memory server for $6.75 USD / month. DO
| offers the same thing for $24 USD / month and that's using the
| worse grade CPU. If you pick the higher end AMD CPU it's $28 a
| month (which sounds similar to what Hetzen is using but ~4x less
| price). For perspective DO's $7 USD / month price point gives you
| 1 CPU and 1 GB of memory.
|
| _Edit: As someone brought up in the comments below, it 's
| possible that the Hetzner price ends up being ~25% cheaper due to
| not charging VAT. This will depend where you live. I converted
| Euros to USD on Google based on their public pricing page
| https://www.hetzner.com/cloud as a US site visitor._
| mythz wrote:
| The price increase of Digital Ocean is what prompted us to
| evaluate different US Cloud providers in which we found Hetzner
| offering by far the best value [1], what's even nicer was that
| the prices for the instances ended up being ~25% cheaper than
| what they're advertising, e.g. their 4x vCPU / 8GB RAM / 160GB
| HDD is advertised at EUR17.27 but when creating instances of
| them in their cloud console it only ends up costing EUR13.10.
| Not sure why that is, perhaps it's the difference of their
| hourly vs monthly cost.
|
| [1] https://servicestack.net/blog/finding-best-us-value-cloud-
| pr...
| nickjj wrote:
| That's a good point. The USD prices in my comment were from
| taking the publicly listed Euro price while visiting the site
| in the US and converting it to USD on Google. I didn't sign
| up and try to create these resources. I've updated my
| original comment to reflect this.
|
| That's good to know the prices are even more of a difference.
| Hopefully this sparks DO into being more competitively
| priced. If someone wants to throw up a few servers somewhere
| on the cloud and doesn't care about managed features, it's
| really hard not to consider using Hetzner for that.
| Hetzner_OL wrote:
| @nickjj -- That might be a difference in which VAT applies to
| your location. If you saw an advertisement in German, or
| perhaps an English ad in the UK or somewhere else in Europe,
| you might see a price difference similar to this if your
| actual region is one where we are not required to charge VAT.
| We also have a list of what VAT rates apply to specific
| locations: https://docs.hetzner.com/accounts-
| panel/accounts/payment-faq... --Katie
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| And the difference is even bigger if you get a bare metal
| instance. Performance is insane if you compare it to dedicated
| VMs or worse cloud VMs.
|
| In one of my Java toy projects I got http responses to sub
| 10ms, that's includes, querying a small amount of data from
| postgres and responding as JSON. The tls handshakes might have
| been reused through, now that I think about it. The number was
| taken from the network tab while switching around routes in the
| pwa
|
| The bare metal instances generally have nvme storage, so you
| get incredible IO
|
| As a reference from a recent test: I went with the smallest OVH
| bare metal server that was discounted to 30EUR/month the other
| day (normal price 60EUR) and got about 2k with hdparm. Running
| the same test on my 45EUR hetzner instance got me over 3.1k.
| And the hetzner instance also got twice the memory (64gb),
| though that didn't impact this particular metric.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Hetzner only offers cloud servers in North America; bare
| metal is only available in Europe.
| jhoelzel wrote:
| Go get them tiger.
|
| I want multi node, multi AZ hetzner k8s clusters ;)
| tobias_irmer wrote:
| Take a look at kubeone. We are fairly happy running production
| loads on K8s distributed across Hetzner DCs...
| jhoelzel wrote:
| thank you! i do the same with ansible and or init scripts.
| but its not the same as a solution that is integrated with
| the hosting provider.
| Hetzner_OL wrote:
| Have you already checked out what is posted here? Maybe there
| is something there to whet your appetite.
| https://github.com/hetznercloud/awesome-hcloud --Katie
| jhoelzel wrote:
| Yes of course and am a big fan! thank you though ;)
|
| I already run cluster in GER and US and what has happened in
| the last years has been amazing, but its not all the way
| there just yet!
| rumblefrog wrote:
| Awesome, been a customer of Hetzner for numerous years. Looking
| forward to dedicated servers offering in the US too :)
| jiripospisil wrote:
| For those curious about what it actually looks like in a Hetzner
| datacenter, der8auer made a video about their Falkenstein,
| Germany location: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM
| a_square_peg wrote:
| Also another very, very happy Hetzner user - we've migrated all
| of our servers to Hetzner over the last year and couldn't be
| happier with the service. Along with Wasabi cloud for object
| storage, the set up has allowed me to run a very large
| infrastructure at a fraction of the cost it would have been
| elsewhere.
|
| If taking requests... showing memory charts along with the usual
| CPU, network bandwidth plots woudl be very helpful. :)
| Hetzner_OL wrote:
| That's not a request I think I have seen before. I will make
| sure to pass that on. I believe some of the dev team members
| will be checking out this thread throughout the day to catch up
| on y'alls suggestions. --Katie
| christophilus wrote:
| I second the request. It's a really helpful metric.
| a_square_peg wrote:
| Fantastic - thanks!
| Aeolun wrote:
| I feel like this is something someone will read, think 'wait,
| we don't?' and then implement in an hour.
| mightypirate wrote:
| holoduke wrote:
| I am running a cluster of machines at Hetzner for years.
| Generally i am satisfied, but i like to share some bad
| experiences which took a month to fix. At some point some of my
| servers were facing random cpu stalls mostly at occuring
| midnight. I spend hours and nights to find out the cause. But i
| wasnt able to find it. Tracing the issue resulting in different
| causes everytime. After I contacted the Hetzner support team they
| moved some of the servers to a different host system. Apparently
| there was a resource issue in their virtualization layer. It
| fixed all the issues for a week, but then it started again. I
| contacted support again and received an arrogant email that the
| issue is related to my software and that they couldnt help me
| further. I was perplexed. I solved the issue by creating servers
| in a different zone. Exact copies of the so called faulty ones.
| The whole stack is now running without issues for about 2 months.
| But still i am a bit worried.
| leoff wrote:
| Something similar happened to me. A server I have was very
| frequently randomly restarting, and I tried everything to solve
| it, i.e factory reset, reinstalling my services. I contacted
| customer support and they offered me to take it offline and
| perform some tests on it that could take more than 10 hours.
| After I insisted a lot, they offered me a one time server
| replacement, which magically fixed the restarting issue.
| Hetzner_OL wrote:
| Thanks for writing about how our team helped you resolve the
| issue. Have you been happy with the rest of your experiences
| using the cloud products? --Katie
| darkstar_16 wrote:
| That's not what we wrote. The support team replaced the
| server after a lot of cajoling. That experience needs to be
| fixed.
| [deleted]
| leoff wrote:
| You thinking this was a positive experience only makes me
| more concerned about your customer support.
|
| Let's hope I don't need another "one-time" server
| replacement because of your faulty servers, because I
| already used mine. 10 hours of downtime with angry
| customers on my tail sounds fun.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| I had a weird performance issues on Hetzner virtual machines
| where network bandwidth would drop to 50mbit/s like it was
| being throttled. My application had a tendency to use very
| little bandwidth most of the time but when updates were
| available we needed 10-40GB in a day or so and I always
| suspected we were getting throttled but support never admitted
| it. On average we were below their resource limits but clearly
| at times we were above the average. Support was pretty
| dismissive and arrogant and I don't regret moving off to netcup
| who in comparison the experience has been flawless.
| Kiro wrote:
| And why are you so sure it's not on your end?
| sph wrote:
| > I solved the issue by creating servers in a different zone.
| Exact copies of the so called faulty ones.
| Kiro wrote:
| Considering the issue didn't start happening immediately
| the previous times I don't see why we can presume it won't
| start happening again this time.
| nextstepguy wrote:
| hardware2win wrote:
| What even is this approach?
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| > I contacted support again and received an arrogant email that
| the issue is related to my software and that they couldnt help
| me further.
|
| Doesn't surprise me, German companies always _know better_ and
| will try to prove you wrong, whether you 're their customer or
| supplier. Such is the business culture, I think.
| niemandhier wrote:
| I think its an issue of inter cultural communication.
|
| My impression is that in Germany you bear the burden of proof
| that you actually have a problem, that its not your own
| fault, and that you did your part trying to fix it.
|
| You usually can get good support in Germany ( even at
| government offices ) , IF you show up with your Leitordner (
| legendary German ring binders) with all the receipts, all the
| possibly relevant account numbers, transaction ids and a
| detailed analysis of your own problem.
|
| There is nothing that signals to German support staff that
| you have to be taken seriously like a ring binder, preferably
| with color coded markers at the margins and lots of punch
| pockets.
|
| If you think this is satire, try it the next time you have an
| in person appointment...
| kuschku wrote:
| Btw, the company making the ring binders is called "Leitz".
|
| The rest is entirely correct, though.
| icelancer wrote:
| This works really well in the United States, I've found.
| Showing up with an arsenal of documentation (virtual or
| otherwise) sets the tone.
| Hetzner_OL wrote:
| As someone who has customer service experience in both the
| USA and Germany, I can tell you that there are, indeed,
| cultural differences. There are certain situations in the USA
| where Germans and other Europeans don't always have the best
| experience because of a cultural misunderstanding. I am also
| the in-house English teacher here at Hetzner. (Most companies
| have no in-house teacher.) Something that I personally work
| on with my students in my conversations class and customer
| service class is intonation, which can cause spoken language
| to come off as sounding "arrogant" by accident. In addition,
| written responses may accidentally come of as sounding too
| direct or "arrogant" for the same reason. We work on these
| situations in my classes. So if you ever have a ticket that
| you think might make for good learning material for one of my
| classes, or that you would like to see escalated because of a
| serious language/cultural misunderstanding, please write to
| marketing@hetzner.com and mention my name (and include the
| relevant ticket number). --Katie
| unity1001 wrote:
| > Doesn't surprise me, German companies always know better
| and will try to prove you wrong
|
| Yep. Its a plight that afflicts almost all engineers around
| the world, and German companies are even more afflicted by it
| due to the German engineering culture...
| bluedino wrote:
| Better than support tickets to a country that will ignore you
| or deny anything is wrong.
| unity1001 wrote:
| > I contacted support again and received an arrogant email
|
| Yep. The attitude of the engineering support is something that
| Hetzner needs to improve a LOT on. They tend to treat customers
| as if they are treating members of their own open source or
| engineering community - scolding the customers when they think
| the customer (community member) is being unreasonable etc.
|
| Its a great thing that eng. support is just a ticket and 20-45
| minutes away at Hetzner. But the attitude needs a lot of
| improvement. Imagine that you are a startup facing some quirky
| issue that affects your business in the middle of the night and
| having to deal with attitude and scolds from datacenter
| engineers...
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Are you using their "standard" cloud or dedicated vcpu product?
| tinco wrote:
| We had a similar problem at Hetzner, we were using their
| consumer grade systems and this was over 6 years ago. To
| Hetzner's credit though, after we decided it had to be a
| hardware problem (dmesg would log something about cpu states
| before every crash) we sent in a ticket and within a reasonable
| timeframe (I think within a day or a couple, it was long ago so
| don't know for sure) a Hetzner sysadmin went into the BIOS and
| changed some feature (I suppose he disabled some sleep mode)
| and the systems ran perfect after that.
|
| I chalked it up to our decision to run our databases on
| consumer grade hardware and didn't give it a second thought.
| Hetzner_OL wrote:
| Perhaps you could give me a ticket number (or the latest ticket
| number) about this issue, and I can ask a team member to review
| it for you. Or, you can send the ticket number directly to
| marketing@hetzner.com with a link to this page, and I can do
| the same thing. --Katie
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| High visibility customer support via hacker news is not a
| feature, it's a failure.
|
| And those failed communications between provider and customer
| are why everyone is frustrated with the big corpos (google,
| cloudflare, stripe, etc.) which Hetzner is apparently bound
| to become.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| At least you have someone speaking for Hetzner officially
| here. Contrast that with Google, where Matt Cutts was kind
| of used as unofficial backchannel for customer complaints,
| up until he left Google, and now all we have are prayers
| that some unknown reader will be moved by our plights.
|
| This is not to excuse bad support experiences. I just think
| we should appreciate it when there is still a channel to a
| real human being willing to be helpful and engage
| constructively, because it's getting increasingly rare
| these days.
| jmartrican wrote:
| I think it's pretty cool of this person to come and try to
| help.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| Support is a very hard issue to solve when you have volume.
| It doesn't help that 99.9% companies regard support as a
| cost center so salaries are low and there's a lot of churn
| and disregard for supportpeople tools.
| rocqua wrote:
| Isn't it great that they recognize this failure and are
| attempting to fix it?
| aflukasz wrote:
| It's not the first time I read a feedback about
| unprofessional customer support from Hetzner. Here or on
| Reddit. I admit that nearly every time someone from
| Hetzner shows up, says it might me a language/cultural
| issue or something of this kind and offer direct help to
| look into it.
|
| Hetzner is on my radar for a long time as an alternative
| to simpler deployments on AWS. It's great they are
| monitoring internet forums and try to be helpful, but
| also very frustrating to read such problems apparently
| still occur.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Being the lucky winner of ones complaint being found by
| personal, C-suite, marketing (Hetzner) or top-engineer
| (Stripe) accounts on online forums and getting one time
| only high priority support is not a fix for the systemic
| failures that led to the complaint.
|
| We recently had a mission- and time-critical issue with
| play store and our first reaction was to contact our gcp
| account manager and old google friends because we knew
| play store communication sucks. It should not be this
| way.
| xuki wrote:
| Cloud is nice but dedicated servers would be better :).
| bicijay wrote:
| Lovely, but as a customer from Brazil i they never accepted me on
| their verification step. I even sent a picture from my passport,
| did the whole face scan verification but nothing. Gave some
| pretty sensitive information, got a rejection in return lol.
| cryptolake wrote:
| same for tunisia
| Hetzner_OL wrote:
| Again, I am sorry that we could not accept your accounts.
| Every day, we also reject a large number of accounts from
| German and European users if there are red flags. (And
| unfortunately, there are some real situations that are
| logical that can lead still to false red flags.) For example,
| I have an unusual last name, especially for here in Germany,
| and when I have done personal shopping, I have had a number
| of online e-shops reject my new accounts because that looked
| suspicious or because they didn't think an address I wanted
| to send something to was real. So I understand that your
| frustration is real, and I am sorry for it. --Katie
| philip1209 wrote:
| I thought that the point of GDPR was to prevent American spy
| agencies from having access to European customer data. Hetzner
| has gained customers because it was a non-US data hosting
| provider. But, if Hetzner now has a nexus in the USA - does that
| dilute their ability to fulfill on the spirit of GDPR? Even if
| the US data center doesn't have access or control of the European
| data centers, these US data centers could be used as leverage by
| American spy agencies against European customer data.
| andix wrote:
| I love Hetzner Cloud, it's similar to Digital Ocean, but the
| performance is much better. Funnily it's cheaper too.
|
| There are just two things I'm missing:
|
| - snapshots for volumes!!!
|
| - restricting the dns api token (I don't want to give one acme
| solver full access to 20+ domains)
| wartijn_ wrote:
| The way they communicate is better too. Both companies
| increased their prices in the past year. DigitalOcean
| announced[0] theirs in an article that mainly focused on a new
| cheaper droplet supplemented by lots of useless text about how
| they " adapt our offerings to meet the needs of our customers
| and their desire to create software that changes the world."
|
| The link to the page with the new prices didn't have some
| overview of the changes, and figuring out how much more I was
| going to pay was frustratingly hard.
|
| Hetzner's article[1] just clearly explained why they increased
| their prices and had a table with the new prices.
|
| I really appreciate that no-bs way of communicating.
|
| [0] https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/new-4-dollar-droplet-
| updat...
|
| [1] https://docs.hetzner.com/general/others/price-adjustment/
| andix wrote:
| I completely moved away from DO, because most IPs I got were
| in some blacklists. And some smaller providers completely
| blocked the IPs of those networks.
|
| So I had customers who weren't able to visit my website
| hosted on DO. Their provider refused to unblock the IP range,
| because there were a lot of attacks coming from there. DO
| doesn't seem to care a lot about reputation.
| exhilaration wrote:
| Not a customer of either but it's very interesting what
| you're saying in the context of all comments here
| complaining about not being allowed to open accounts on
| Hetzner. Maybe their extreme vetting requirements are
| actually paying off.
| andix wrote:
| I guess so. They must get thousands of fake sign ups
| every day. A cheap Server with 1-5 gbps uplink is
| basically a digital weapon.
|
| I signed up as a European company, it was quite easy for
| Hetzner to check that I'm a legit customer.
|
| And that's probably their target group. Companies in
| Europe and the US. Hobbyists who just run one cheap
| server for fun are not a huge profit, but high risk to be
| fraudulent.
| ehou wrote:
| +1 for more restrictions on DNS API tokens. Ways to mitigate
| the riscs: - Separate account per domain ..
| which is a lot of work, see acceptation process in other
| comments - Use a NS record for _acme-
| challenge.domain.tld when having the DNS hosted elsewhere and
| point this to the Hetzner DNS servers
| j3th9n wrote:
| How much does HN get paid for this ad?
| lakomen wrote:
| I don't like that they're milking old SB servers. I have a 12
| year old server there ddr3 RAM, xeon e3 v2, 4x2tb hdd with raid
| controller. I paid 51EUR for this for years, then like a year ago
| asked if I could get a price reduction. They agreed, down to
| 35EUR but ni backup. Then, 3 months later, they increased prices
| because "electric cost" and now they'll increase them again
| because "inflation". So that I'll pay freaking 45EUR for soon 13
| year old hardware that can break any moment. It doesn't cost them
| even half of it. The server barely has any load, rarely reboots
| and they still increase prices. And I can't even run a discord
| bot because their network is banned. And they keep sending me
| false email spam positives, from freaking sign up confirmation
| mails. When you criticize them on their forum you get banned. I
| had the computer since 2014. It was already paid when I rented
| it. It had now been paid 4 times over. And they still increase
| prices.
|
| If there was a similarly priced alternative I'd be gone in a
| second.
|
| Their idk.. the guy who makes the systems and orders hardware is
| stuck in the past. Arno or what his name is. I'd rather have
| 4x2TB than 2x10TB HDDs. I'd rather have low powered cores but
| more cores than those beast machines. Anything below highest tier
| is a consumer computer. And that highest tier is expensive, more
| expensive than comparable alternatives from Leaseweb or similar
| providers. Connectivity is only good for the country it's in and
| the immediate neighbors. That's for Germany. The Helsinki DC has
| an unreliable connection to Europe mainland. 20ms-60ms-80ms
| latency is not what I'd consider stable.
|
| They _are_ greedy.
| coolgoose wrote:
| Why don't you just move to a new server ? And electricity did
| go sky high in Europe at least, that's a moot point.
|
| "If there was a similarly priced alternative I'd be gone in a
| second." Cool, so they're cheap, decently-ish on support and
| there are no alternatives, yet you complain they are making
| some money from people that don't upgrade their old hardware.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Get a new server? It's not as if they make it hard. I replaced
| my two EUR20 instances with one new EUR40 instance when they
| got price increases to EUR33/server or so.
|
| Of course now that'll also increase to EUR50, but yeah, war.
| rwaksmunski wrote:
| Since we have Hetzner employees reading this, please bring back
| FreeBSD image support. Operating system diversity is good for
| Internet's resilience.
| ac29 wrote:
| This might interest you: https://github.com/paulc/hcloud-
| freebsd
| openplatypus wrote:
| OVH Public Cloud allows your images. It even supports private
| registry.
|
| You do you.
| rwaksmunski wrote:
| Already OVH customer, I just need a less flammable failover.
| Hetzner_OL wrote:
| @ducktective -- You asked about being able to charge your account
| EUR20 or soomething similar. Yes, this is possible with bank
| transfer. You can find our bank details at the bottom of every
| invoice. Please enter your invoice or client number as a
| reference to your bank transfer. You can add more than EUR20 if
| you would prefer. And then later, if you decide to close your
| account, we will transfer the money back to you within 14
| business days. You can find the answer this this question and
| others here: https://docs.hetzner.com/accounts-
| panel/accounts/payment-faq... --Katie
| tzartz wrote:
| Ah Hetzner. Good prices, screwy business practices. Got a quote
| from them for one rate, setup a demo and got shut us down saying
| that our application was against their TOS. Funny considering our
| app was at that point nothing but a near blank static website- we
| hadn't even fully deployed it. Talked to the sales guys who
| assured us it would 'be fixed'- but after 3 weeks of zero feed
| back we bolted. FWIW, the app we were going to deploy there was a
| simple website that provided contact info and PDFs of product
| manuals for their German clients.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I don't follow, why would you get a quote? All their prices are
| listed on the website. Especially if it's a simple contact
| list, why would you need to interact with sales at all?
| tzartz wrote:
| Formal quotes were required for the company I was working for
| at the time, company policy.
| jlokier wrote:
| I've been using Hetzner for 10 years for a wide variety of
| bespoke networking services, in-store VPNs for commercial
| clients, video content distribution, and standard services like
| websites, mail servers, compute resources, and development
| servers. All sorts of things. They are one of my largest IT
| expenses, and I'm happy with their service in many respects.
|
| They're easily my favourite hosting provider!
|
| But their recent reputation around "crypto" [except we make up
| what that means on the fly] mega-bans is toxic to any business
| that wants to use Hetzner for reliable hosting of anything
| mission critical.
|
| Here's how I understand their reputation at the moment.
| (Clarification from Hetzner would be very welcome!):
|
| A combination of not clearly saying what they will ban, giving
| zero notice, banning all of a customer's servers at once,
| blocking access to backup data as well, and providing no recourse
| to recover (e.g. by stopping running something). So at best they
| should be used as a cheap backup or compute resource, but it's an
| uncomfortable risk to use them for something mission critical - a
| mail server or customer data processing server for example - as
| long as they keep to this "intentionally vague surprise mega-ban"
| policy.
|
| They don't seem to ban a lot of customers, but the recent
| uncertainty affects more. It's not good that a number of
| customers, including me, _simply can 't tell_ if they are at risk
| of a ban, especially when running novel complex services. Even if
| they just banned one server and let you carry on operations with
| the others, that would be a big improvement. Or if they told you
| what to stop doing. Or if they provided time to get your data off
| or to correct an issue to their satisfaction.
|
| It's one thing to have a policy preferring nobody runs a
| blockchain node, or a news or software distribution website which
| is blockchain-adjacent. Similar perhaps to those places that have
| a policy against IRC or gaming nodes. It's another thing to _not
| say what the real policy is_ anywhere and associate it with
| abrupt mega-bans. The ToS only says mining.
|
| Advice I've seen to someone banned that "you should have taken
| backups, tough" is mocking: After a ban you can't access your
| backups which they encourage to keep on their backup service, of
| course. It also makes sense technically to backup onto another
| Hetzner server, maybe at a different datacenter. Unfortunately
| the only safe thing to do is backup outside Hetzner entirely but
| they won't recommend that until it's too late.
|
| As far as I can tell, there is no place at Hetzner which says
| what their mega-ban policy really is, and it looks capricious and
| unpredictable in practice. Different Hetzner staff say different
| things. The few public responses on this show that they appear to
| not care to understand the question, which adds to that sense
| that you don't know what activities are a risk and what aren't.
| Part of the problem is that peer-to-peer distributed systems in
| general are being ever more relevant, and look like "crypto" from
| the outside (and crypto-related techniques underly some technical
| methods of stabilising p2p networks).
|
| Someone who only runs a website they think is safe will get
| banned one day under that policy, because it has some crypto news
| or something on it, or because some Wordpress module uses a p2p
| client to fetch some files, and they will be completely
| surprised.
|
| It reminds me of Google and Stripe, where we hear a trickle of
| randomly banned customers whose lives or businesses are ruined
| through no fault of their own, with no recourse.
|
| Except as far as I can tell, unlike with Google and Stripe,
| complaining about a Hetzner ban on Hacker News seems unlikely to
| have an effect. There is no Edwin for Hetzner. Or is there? Maybe
| that will change now they have a USA presence :-)
| szarnyasg wrote:
| Does anyone have some experience regarding the bandwidth between
| Hetzner's old US location, Virginia, and the big cloud providers
| (AWS/GCP/Azure)? My use case requires lots of ingress into these
| clouds. I am currently using Cloudflare's R2 object storage but
| I'm not satisfied with the bandwidth as it fluctuates between 40
| MB/s and 200 MB/s when loading to AWS.
| jakub_jo wrote:
| Couldn't you just try out?
|
| Last time I checked through Vultr[0] from South America,
| Ashburn was significantly faster than Digital Ocean in SFO.
| Though, not sure if this helps you.
|
| [0]: https://sao-br-ping.vultr.com
| jszymborski wrote:
| I've always been eager to try out Hetzner as they always come up
| as a very affordable provider of VPS' and small dedis.
|
| However, whenever I price compare, I always find OVH and Kimsufi
| far under-price them on small servers.
|
| Am I missing out on a Hetzner product line or are they offering
| features I'm not getting on OVH?
| unity1001 wrote:
| Good luck getting any customer support at OVH. Something
| happens with your dedicated, it may be a week until they reply
| to your ticket. They say its better with French-language
| support. But for English, their support sucked a few years ago
| when I tried them.
| tunnuz wrote:
| After AWS and DigitalOcean, I'm using Hetzner for my personal
| needs. I have been satisfied so far with the network performance.
| I haven't dealt with support yet.
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