[HN Gopher] Hetzner Introduces ARM64 Cloud Servers
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Hetzner Introduces ARM64 Cloud Servers
        
       Author : j4nek
       Score  : 457 points
       Date   : 2023-04-12 14:17 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.hetzner.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.hetzner.com)
        
       | ericls wrote:
       | Hope they'll roll out the dedicated-cores plans for these.
        
       | syntaxing wrote:
       | Wow those are some tempting specs. 4 Euros for 2 core CPU, 4GB of
       | RAM, 40Gb storage, and 20TB of traffic. I always had issues with
       | those $5 droplets with the RAM being abysmally low. Closest
       | comparable equivalent is $18-$24 on DO.
        
       | vrglvrglvrgl wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | betimsl wrote:
       | Why? What is the advantage of running arm over x86 on servers?
        
       | drcongo wrote:
       | Amazing news. Your move Digital Ocean.
        
       | g42gregory wrote:
       | With the energy prices in Europe being what they are (and
       | systemically higher than in North America and especially in
       | Asia), will Hetzner be able to provide low prices that they
       | currently have?
        
         | werid wrote:
         | they increased prices a bit some months ago.
        
       | Havoc wrote:
       | More benchmarking. Some of the speedtests coming back >10gigs is
       | a bit of a surprise given price point
       | 
       | https://hastebin.com/share/biyejiriyi.bash
       | 
       | https://hastebin.com/share/unocorikef.bash
       | 
       | https://hastebin.com/share/ujixoxazit.bash
       | 
       | https://hastebin.com/share/ofezuyodob.bash
        
         | r1ch wrote:
         | This probably won't last, the servers aren't fully loaded with
         | VMs yet.
        
           | Kaibu wrote:
           | I regularly get 3-5gbit on their regular cloud servers to
           | consumer ISPs. They definitly don't overbook their vms
           | regarding bandwith.
        
         | Jamie9912 wrote:
         | For comparison, here's an AWS a1.large instance (2cpus, 4GB
         | ram) YABS benchmark I just ran
         | 
         | https://gist.githubusercontent.com/12932/8ba27254846072a43b0...
        
           | Havoc wrote:
           | Jikes. Why is the hdd read so bad? 6 MB/s. Six?
        
             | BackBlast wrote:
             | 4k block size, it's IOPS limited. No surprise there.
        
             | banana_giraffe wrote:
             | It's gated by the default IOPS limits, you'll note the
             | larger block sizes have a considerably better throughput.
             | 
             | You can increase the IOPS, and thus the throughput for 4k
             | operations, but at a cost, of course:
             | 
             | https://gist.githubusercontent.com/Q726kbXuN/7f03a9c11cab51
             | 4...
        
         | johndough wrote:
         | Huh, odd. I opened the URLs twice and got temporarily banned by
         | hastebin. Thank you for the benchmark though. Very nice
         | numbers.
        
       | eis wrote:
       | Great news. I'd like to see how a vCPU compares between arm64 and
       | amd64 but not sure how to best go about it. I've created VMs for
       | both with 4 vCPU and will run the phoronix benchmark suite. After
       | that I'll probably try 16 arm vs 8 amd vCPU because that's a
       | closer match in terms of price. Any suggestions welcome but I
       | also don't want to spend too many hours on it. Will post results.
       | 
       | Ran the kernel build benchmark (result is seconds, lower is
       | better):                  AMD64:             272.916
       | 273.128             270.477        ARM64:             1011.799
       | 1004.713             1015.261
       | 
       | So the ARM CAX21 instance for 6.49 EUR/month took roughly 3.7x as
       | long as the AMD CPX31 instance which costs 13.60 EUR/month. A
       | roughly 2.1x price difference. Here the ARM instance did not
       | shine in a kernel-compile-per-eur metric.
       | 
       | Also ran sysbench cpu --time=60 --threads=4 run
       | AMD64: events per second: 14681.70        ARM64: events per
       | second: 13455.11
       | 
       | In this test the both are very close.
        
         | eis wrote:
         | Additional benchmarks:
         | 
         | sysbench memory --time=60 --threads=4 run
         | AMD64: 5859951.00 per second        ARM64: 6052749.14 per
         | second
         | 
         | Here ARM had a lead.
         | 
         | Next up I timed compiling nodejs. time make -j4. I ran the test
         | two times and took the faster result for each.
         | AMD64:            real    28m46.385s           user
         | 107m48.971s           sys     5m12.994s        ARM64:
         | real    39m18.443s           user    146m25.801s           sys
         | 7m53.271s
         | 
         | Here ARM seems to be roughly 36% slower. This is actually
         | pretty good considering the price difference.
         | 
         | Rescaled the ARM VM to 8 vCPUs:                     real
         | 22m20.624s           user    162m30.176s           sys
         | 8m50.104s
         | 
         | So now the ARM offering is noticably faster than the AMD
         | instance but still cheaper. 12.49 Eur vs 13.60 Eur.
         | 
         | What I learn from these benchmarks is that you might get some
         | really good value out of these ARM instances if your usecase is
         | not impacted all too much in terms of performance.
        
         | bombcar wrote:
         | The main problem I'd think is that by being "virtual" you never
         | really quite _know_ if you 're seeing how it would run in "real
         | life".
         | 
         | Personally, if I were to do it, _and_ I had some sort of load-
         | balanced application that uses multiple backends
         | /frontends/whatever, is balance across the two and compare over
         | time.
         | 
         | And to be 'fair' you'd want to compare similar pricing.
         | 
         | Or if you had a consistent group maybe try a Minecraft server
         | and move it between the two every week and see what people
         | "feel"?
        
         | DeathArrow wrote:
         | >I'd like to see how a vCPU compares between arm64 and amd64
         | 
         | That depends on how many vCPUs are they running on each
         | physical core for both x86 and ARM.
        
           | eis wrote:
           | Yes and we might never know or maybe it's not even static.
           | 
           | This will never be 100% scientific or correct since there are
           | many factors that come into play, stuff like noisy neighbour
           | for example.
           | 
           | What I'm trying to get is a ballpark idea of how their arm
           | vCPU compares to the amd equivalent.
        
       | solalf wrote:
       | Could somebody walk me through why ARM based servers are so
       | inexpensive compared to their x86 counterparts? Is performance
       | much lower? 16 cores & 32gb of RAM for less than 25 euros seems
       | like a bargain.
        
         | Symmetry wrote:
         | ARM's N-series cores are targeted at a somewhat lower
         | performance point than top line x86 cores. That saves a bunch
         | of transistors since there's a lot of diminishing returns.
         | There's also design compromises not being made in order to hit
         | clock speeds that server parts never try to hit anyways. Not
         | having to decode complicated x86 instructions but simple RISC
         | ones is also a small advantage, somewhere on the order of 5%
         | power savings.
         | 
         | Also, x86 backwards compatibility and SMT don't cost much in
         | terms of power or transistors but both have large costs in of
         | verification work.
        
         | mnau wrote:
         | Maybe competition? x86 has only 2 competitors left. ARM has
         | more diverse ecosystem of competitors and the environments ha
         | been different.
         | 
         | ARM design had to be adjusted/developed for a cell phones often
         | cost 10% of a normal computers (main use of x86). I can buy a
         | cell phone a display, battery, memory and ARM cpu for $100
         | total (no idea how much ARM chip alone cost). The phone will
         | have a semi-acceptable performance.
         | 
         | Even cheapest x86 CPU with emi acceptable performance probably
         | cost more than $100 and cheapest x86 cpu more than $50.
        
           | solarkraft wrote:
           | But the makers of the CPUs are still server focused. Then
           | again it's a lot easier to become one with ARM.
        
           | stonemetal12 wrote:
           | Ampere is the only game in town for buying a server ARM chip.
           | It isn't like anyone is rack mounting Samsung Galaxies, so
           | the variety of manufactures working in other spaces doesn't
           | really matter.
           | 
           | Nvidia claims to be working on getting in the server game
           | later this year so maybe ARM will get to x86 levels of
           | competition.
        
         | re-thc wrote:
         | Demand and supply. Even if they did offer equal performance
         | most of your docker images and other binaries may need to be
         | rebuilt. The inertia is hard to beat.
         | 
         | AWS has been trying really hard with Graviton 3.
        
           | xenic wrote:
           | Base docker images, such as Ubuntu have support for multiple
           | architectures.
           | 
           | Building your own based on them isn't really difficult at
           | all; docker buildx works remarkably well and build tools such
           | as maven, sbt, etc. seem to have rather decent support for
           | building multiarch images.
           | 
           | Even better if you have decent build automation, implement
           | cross building for amd64 and arm64 once and just make sure
           | your FROM images support those.
        
             | section_me wrote:
             | Possibly off topic,
             | 
             | I actually registered the org oci-base
             | (https://github.com/oci-base), when Docker Inc. announced
             | the registry fees.
             | 
             | In part as I've been annoyed with multiarch and
             | docker/registry in the past.
             | 
             | Then to top it off the official registry has/is taking ages
             | to support signing/attestation.
             | 
             | Plan is for it to be contributor driven, and RFC style
             | requirements following best practices.
             | 
             | Not had much time to work on it lately, kids, Easter, etc.
        
             | re-thc wrote:
             | A lot of things are usually not difficult in the absolute
             | sense.
             | 
             | It's not just the building of it but the
             | testing/verification of what's built.
             | 
             | 1 major problem with a lot of use cases is there isn't
             | enough test coverage and hence confidence in the change.
             | Some people / companies find it easier to just pay the
             | difference.
        
           | RockyMcNuts wrote:
           | in other words less competition, more market power tax
        
         | sltkr wrote:
         | I would guess simpler CPU core architecture means more cores
         | per die. Presumably it also means lower performance, but
         | perhaps not by as much as you think, since typically the most
         | performant CPUs aren't the most cost-effective.
         | 
         | Quick Googling shows:                 - Intel W9-3495X has 56
         | cores for $5889       - AMD EPYC 64 has 64 cores for $4299
         | - Ampera Altra M128-30 has 128 cores for $5800
         | 
         | The Altra uses about the same power as AMD, and much less than
         | Intel, despite offering twice as many cores. So it stands to
         | reason that you just get twice as many cores for the same
         | money, even if you factor in power, cooling and maintenance
         | costs.
         | 
         | Hetzer offers a 16 core AMD (v)CPU machine at 225% of the
         | price, so that roughly works out.
        
         | nidnogg wrote:
         | Here's hoping it's not just an early adopter promo
        
           | re-thc wrote:
           | Hetzner has always had low prices. Should be good.
        
           | jeffbee wrote:
           | That's exactly what it is.
        
         | elorant wrote:
         | Low demand
        
         | sleepychu wrote:
         | Perhaps operating costs? --
         | https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/linux/ARM-vs-x86#arm-vs-x86...
        
         | ojosilva wrote:
         | Firstly ARM processors are simpler to produce, with simpler
         | circuitry (RISC!), although the number of transistors tend to
         | be similar between the two platforms.
         | 
         | Research costs are also very expensive for x86, with 2 vendors
         | (Intel and AMD) competing savagely in many different markets
         | such as high-end gaming, servers, ultrabooks and low cost PCs.
         | However, ARM (the company) focuses on licensing the designs and
         | instruction sets. So their research costs are split among many
         | licensees while ARM focused on what it does best: designing
         | chips.
         | 
         | That in turn translates into many vendors who can focus on
         | improving manufacturing efficiency, procurement, logistics and
         | sales. x86 vendors have a wild range of manufacturing lines to
         | keep up.
         | 
         | Finally, the laws of supply and demand play a huge part. The
         | ARM market is _2 orders of magnitude_ (!!) greater than x86 as
         | far as raw number of processors shipped, ~370M vs ~32B chips in
         | 2022.
        
           | cellularmitosis wrote:
           | > simpler circuitry
           | 
           | > the number of transistors tend to be similar between the
           | two platforms
           | 
           | sorry, come again?
        
             | ojosilva wrote:
             | x86 has more pathways (interconnects), x86 implements a
             | "mesh" design, which is a low-latency, high-power
             | configuration of pathways. ARM uses a neat hierarchical
             | design that favors low-power consumption.
             | 
             | So, given a x86 and an ARM chip with the same number of
             | transistors, the ARM one will still be a simpler, low-power
             | chip with probably a higher number of cores.
        
               | cellularmitosis wrote:
               | ah thanks! I hadn't considered the core count difference.
        
         | DeathArrow wrote:
         | >16 cores & 32gb of RAM for less than 25 euros seems like a
         | bargain.
         | 
         | 16 cores doesn't say much. It depends how many DMIPS those
         | cores will yield.
        
         | zamalek wrote:
         | Power delivery and cooling are not cheap at datacenter levels.
        
           | nr2x wrote:
           | With the added environment benefits!
        
           | andix wrote:
           | Power is especially expensive in Europe right now. The war in
           | Ukraine caused price increases between 300% and 1000%
        
             | qwytw wrote:
             | Is that still the case? The prices seem to have peaked
             | around August and are now back to their pre war levels.
             | Before that prices have already been steadily rising since
             | September, 2021 though.
             | 
             | e.g. average price in August was over 400% higher than this
             | March
             | 
             | https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/Market-
             | data1/Dayahead/Area-...
        
               | andix wrote:
               | I think wholesale prices for electricity in Germany are
               | still around 3x compared to before the pandemic, and
               | around 4-5x compared to 2020.
               | 
               | The big peak (up to 10x) is over, but the energy prices
               | already increased a lot in autumn of 2021, when Russia
               | first reduced the gas deliveries.
        
       | aendruk wrote:
       | I've never paid much attention to Hetzner but this interested me.
       | Upon clicking the call to action in the announcement they blocked
       | me with "Request on Hold - Suspicous Activity Detected".
       | 
       | I have no interest in subjecting myself to this treatment.
        
         | fckgw wrote:
         | Do you get this indigent over every error message you see?
        
           | MuffinFlavored wrote:
           | it's almost like VPS hosting services have to be careful due
           | to rampant fraud or something
        
             | grrdotcloud wrote:
             | There's a level of friction that is too much for some.
             | 
             | I'm attempting to soften that friction when I launch my
             | PaaS
             | 
             | My concern over bots and misuse is a concern. I'm thinking
             | of crippling the free service to allow full functionality
             | but limiting it's use to really tiny files.
        
             | linsomniac wrote:
             | And it's ALWAYS been that way. A very long time ago I
             | implemented a VPS hosting. How long ago? It was implemented
             | using User Mode Linux. I want to say it was 2003. We had
             | most of our success in a specific geographic region, and
             | also within the Python community. We originally had
             | automated sign-up, but found that if we got a signup from
             | someone who's name we didn't recognize, it was basically
             | guaranteed to be fraud.
             | 
             | In the early days it was slightly amusing to get calls from
             | older folks trying to understand what a virtual server was.
        
         | sgtfrankieboy wrote:
         | It's literally just an alternative to Cloudflares attack
         | protection.
        
           | aendruk wrote:
           | Okay, and responding to their ad is an "attack"?
        
             | sgtfrankieboy wrote:
             | It might be, it's to filter out would be attackers. Normal
             | users are just hit as well.
        
         | sunshadow wrote:
         | [dead]
        
       | jacob019 wrote:
       | I hope Hetzner starts offering GPU instances like Vultr.
        
         | eis wrote:
         | Hetzner at some point used to offer dedicated servers with GPUs
         | like a nVidia 1080 but stopped offering these because there was
         | a lot of fraud and abuse involving crypto miners.
         | 
         | With all the AI hype I'd assume they'll try to offer GPU
         | instances again with precautions put in place.
        
           | jacooper wrote:
           | They are still available in the server auction section
        
             | eis wrote:
             | Yes but what a reader unfamiliar with the server auction at
             | Hetzner should know is that there is very limited supply
             | (and sometimes none) plus it's outdated hardware. At this
             | very moment I see 9 servers with 1080 priced between 105
             | and 118 euro per month available.
        
         | lordnacho wrote:
         | One of the chat support people told me that they were going to
         | do that pretty soon. Haven't seen anything though.
        
           | subsequentmask wrote:
           | When was this? This one really interests me.
        
             | lordnacho wrote:
             | A couple of months ago. They seemed to suggest a launch was
             | imminent, as in "wait around a couple of weeks, rent GPUs
             | just like everything else". But I haven't seen it since, so
             | kinda odd.
        
       | pachico wrote:
       | We are decommissioning all our dedicated servers at Hetzner. This
       | is not because we didn't like that service but because we are
       | concentrating our efforts in AWS.
       | 
       | It's been a wonderful ride. It's cheap and reliable.
       | 
       | I wish our team was big enough to afford having to deal with
       | dedicated hardware.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | andix wrote:
         | Hetzner also has cloud servers and an API to provision them.
         | There is even a terraform module for hetzner cloud. It works
         | very well. But they don't provide any managed services, like
         | databases or blob storage.
        
           | pachico wrote:
           | Yup, reason why we stay in AWS
        
             | gnyman wrote:
             | Scaleway and OVH are two other European companies who
             | provide things like managed databases and blob storage, in
             | addition to very competitively priced dedicated hardware
             | and services.
             | 
             | One thing I personally like with OVH is that they have
             | fixed prices for things like bandwidth, not pay-per-GB like
             | most others.
        
             | derfabianpeter wrote:
             | If that's the only reason, we offer managed databases of
             | many flavors on hetzner. https://www.ayedo.de
        
       | jayonsoftware wrote:
       | Do they have servers in US ? Who would be the Hertzner equvelent
       | in US when it comes to low cost dedicated hosting
        
         | barryp wrote:
         | Yes, the have datacenters in Virginia and Oregon - seems to
         | just be AMD servers though (no Intel or ARM).
         | 
         | Been using a couple VPSes in Oregon, pretty happy with them.
        
         | oriettaxx wrote:
         | yes, they do have now two Data Centers in the US
         | https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/rechenzentrum/
         | 
         | * Oregon
         | 
         | * Virginia
        
       | lopkeny12ko wrote:
       | I don't understand the hype around ARM64 in the server space. Is
       | this just due to all the marketing from Apple around their
       | proprietary M processors leaking into the enterprise market?
       | 
       | The latest Xeon and EPYC offerings are very performance
       | competitive, I doubt we need to overhaul and entire processor ISA
       | paradigm for continued improvements.
        
         | nr2x wrote:
         | For me at least, if I knew I was getting same performance for
         | less energy I'd actually be willing to pay a bit more. Data
         | centers are big polluters still. I think we likely can get to
         | nearly 100% renewables in the non-distant future, and lower
         | energy per compute unit is part of that.
        
           | lelanthran wrote:
           | > For me at least, if I knew I was getting same performance
           | for less energy I'd actually be willing to pay a bit more.
           | 
           | Well if they're spending less to power my ARM machine, then
           | they should damn well be charging me less to host it.
           | 
           | That's the best, and only, long term path towards more
           | efficient compute.
        
             | nr2x wrote:
             | Interesting parallel is I have an electric car, which I pay
             | more for and has limitations. But for me I think the
             | societal benefit is great enough I'll eat the cost. So if
             | it gets data centers to invest in energy savings because
             | they pocket the difference I'm ok with it.
        
         | ericpauley wrote:
         | It's probably pretty rare (though maybe increasing) to have a
         | workload that is ARM-only, so it really comes down to price
         | performance. Amazon claims 40% better price/performance on
         | Gravition2 vs. comparable x86. While it varies by workload, for
         | scenarios where this plays out and the architecture isn't
         | important (languages increasingly make multi-arch deployment
         | easy) this (and S3 intelligent tiering) are the closest thing
         | to free money I can think of.
        
         | cbdumas wrote:
         | > Is this just due to all the marketing from Apple around their
         | proprietary M processors leaking into the enterprise market?
         | 
         | That doesn't seem likely, as the release of AWS Graviton based
         | instances predates the Apple M1 release by about two years
        
         | daneel_w wrote:
         | With Arm Graviton on AWS, for our specific environments and
         | workloads, we get better performance for less money. Same goes
         | for the hosts, who pay a smaller upfront investment per core
         | and less in electricity per core. Bigger bang for the buck when
         | the glove fits.
        
           | watermelon0 wrote:
           | Same here, generally 10-40% better performance, depending on
           | workload, at 15%+ lower costs, on AWS.
           | 
           | We have seen performance improvements in PHP, Java, and
           | various CPU-bound tasks such as video transcoding.
           | 
           | This goes for either EC2 m7g vs m6i and also for Fargate x64
           | (from my experience, perfomance seems comparable to m5
           | instances) vs ARM (Graviton2).
        
         | stu2b50 wrote:
         | The hype is because Intel and AMD have an enforced duopoly of
         | x86, because only they own the licenses to x86-64 and you'll
         | take it from their cold dead hands.
         | 
         | So, if you want to compete, you'll have to go ARM. Amazon
         | graviton and Apples M series have only made it more appealing.
         | 
         | The main reason to switch is cost.
        
           | Dylan16807 wrote:
           | They own the licenses to SSE3/SSE4/AVX. For now.
           | 
           | Currently anyone can make an x86-64 processor.
        
           | usr1106 wrote:
           | The ARM server hype was 10 years ago. Every Linux distro
           | wanted to be first, but then they all waited for the year of
           | the ARM server.
           | 
           | Nice to see that things seem to start moving a bit now.
           | Energy consumption and cooling are major concerns for data
           | centers. ARM is just so much better when it comes to energy
           | consumption. So the potential should be there.
        
         | pornel wrote:
         | I use an M1 Mac, and I'd prefer to develop and deploy on the
         | same CPU architecture. For M1 users the x86 is an alien cross-
         | compilation target.
        
         | junon wrote:
         | It's really just a matter of time at this point. X86 is a
         | bloated nightmare that is a pain to deal with and has a rich
         | history of vulnerabilities where the patches typically affect
         | performance.
        
       | EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
       | They also quietly removed their Apple M1 server option - anyone
       | knows why? not reliable enough?
        
       | cbg0 wrote:
       | Did a quick comparison between intel 2 vCPU and Arm 2 vCPU, these
       | are shared CPUs though so YMMV:
       | 
       | sysbench cpu --threads=2 run
       | 
       | Intel events per second: 1864.20
       | 
       | Arm events per second: 6687.05
       | 
       | Coremark
       | 
       | Intel iterations/sec: 20077.633516
       | 
       | Arm iterations/sec: 23625.767837
        
         | jeffbee wrote:
         | If you have access to them a much more informative datapoint
         | would be `openssl speed rsa` or `lzbench`. Sysbench is just a
         | stunt it doesn't indicate much at all.
        
           | cbg0 wrote:
           | Here's a lzbench
           | 
           | dd if=/dev/urandom of=1GB.bin bs=64M count=16 iflag=fullblock
           | 
           | Intel:
           | 
           | Compressor Compress. Decompress. Compr. size Ratio Filename
           | 
           | memcpy 5062 MB/s 5013 MB/s 1073741824 100.00 1GB.bin
           | 
           | zstd 1.5.2 -2 2083 MB/s 4743 MB/s 1073766410 100.00 1GB.bin
           | 
           | zstd 1.5.2 -5 210 MB/s 4775 MB/s 1073766410 100.00 1GB.bin
           | 
           | zstd 1.5.2 -9 85.5 MB/s 4774 MB/s 1073766410 100.00 1GB.bin
           | 
           | Arm:
           | 
           | Compressor Compress. Decompress. Compr. size Ratio Filename
           | 
           | memcpy 10876 MB/s 10950 MB/s 1073741824 100.00 1GB.bin
           | 
           | zstd 1.5.2 -2 3175 MB/s 11168 MB/s 1073766410 100.00 1GB.bin
           | 
           | zstd 1.5.2 -5 192 MB/s 10967 MB/s 1073766410 100.00 1GB.bin
           | 
           | zstd 1.5.2 -9 146 MB/s 10909 MB/s 1073766410 100.00 1GB.bin
        
             | jeffbee wrote:
             | Nice. Showing off Neoverse's superior single-core
             | load/store abilities.
        
             | mkl wrote:
             | Looks like the ARM one has twice the memory bandwidth,
             | which would help with a lot of workloads.
        
               | jeffbee wrote:
               | It's more along the lines of having roughly the same
               | total bandwidth but being able to exploit all of it from
               | a single core, whereas on Intel you need to exercise all
               | or at least several cores to drive the memory to the
               | limits.
        
           | karakanb wrote:
           | it would be very helpful to have this benchmark for the same
           | price-point instances as well. e.g. it seems like the 2vCPU +
           | 4GB ARM instance is 4.52eur while the 1CPU + 2GB x86 instance
           | is 4.51eur, therefore it would make sense to do a comparison
           | on this level as well.
        
           | hugoromano wrote:
           | New Hetzner ARM: sign verify sign/s verify/s
           | 
           | rsa 512 bits 0.000070s 0.000006s 14268.2 159885.6
           | 
           | rsa 1024 bits 0.000405s 0.000021s 2468.4 47757.7
           | 
           | rsa 2048 bits 0.002847s 0.000078s 351.3 12830.1
           | 
           | Hetzner x86: sign verify sign/s verify/s
           | 
           | rsa 512 bits 0.000067s 0.000004s 14893.9 240902.8
           | 
           | rsa 1024 bits 0.000127s 0.000009s 7845.9 114300.9
           | 
           | rsa 2048 bits 0.000874s 0.000027s 1144.6 36800.6
        
             | daneel_w wrote:
             | If it's of any value to anyone, perhaps as an indication of
             | hardware/environment implementation, I get identical
             | numbers (<1% difference) on Oracle's Ampere Altra servers
             | with OpenSSL 1.1.1n on Debian 11.
        
               | my123 wrote:
               | Due to a peculiar design issue, Neoverse N1 underperforms
               | when using RSA. It doesn't affect other use cases and is
               | fixed on newer Arm cores.
        
           | daneel_w wrote:
           | Sysbench is a better synthetic test in my opinion because it
           | does a lot of varied grinding instead of trying to evaluate
           | the entire CPU using just one very narrow and specific task.
           | Even on the same Linux distribution there can be a lot of
           | differences between x86 and Arm builds because OpenSSL cannot
           | be entirely orthogonal in its use of assembly optimizations
           | and CPU crypto acceleration, even for the RSA benchmark.
           | 
           | To offer a somewhat more varied example I've tested the POV-
           | Ray benchmarker on Debian 11 on Oracle's Ampere Altra servers
           | ("A1.Flex") versus an identical setup/build running on a 2
           | GHz EPYC 7281-based x86-64 VPS, and on that single-threaded
           | test the Arm VPS handily outpaced the EPYC with almost 2x the
           | performance.
        
             | jeffbee wrote:
             | `sysbench cpu` basically measures whether a single
             | primitive inside sysbench is correctly optimized for your
             | platform which is almost meaningless. Its run-to-run
             | variation is enormous because there is a lot riding on
             | whether particular data structure is optimally placed and
             | aligned, which sysbench makes no effort to control. On a
             | typical hyperthreaded x86 machine you will get 100%
             | variance or worse depending on whether sysbench's 2 threads
             | are placed on the same core or on different cores, so you
             | must control that with `taskset` if you want the result to
             | mean anything.
             | 
             | On my local machine with 4 threads I get ~10k events per
             | second on cores 0+2+4+6, but on cores 8-11 I get ~13k. Does
             | this mean that Gracemont Atom is 30% faster than Golden
             | Cove Core? No, it is only measuring the fact that the
             | efficiency cores happen to share an L2 cache.
        
           | 8organicbits wrote:
           | Isn't that just measuring hardware support for RSA? Are many
           | systems bottlenecked on RSA perf?
        
       | candiddevmike wrote:
       | Eagerly awaiting these in Ashburn! Almost double the CPU/RAM in
       | most cases for the same price.
        
       | trollied wrote:
       | 2*vCPU, 4GB RAM, 40GB disk and 20TB traffic for EUR4.52/month is
       | a steal. EUR3.92/month if you go ipv6 only.
        
       | brucethemoose2 wrote:
       | Theres a perception that the ARM Altra per-thread performance is
       | really bad.
       | 
       | But according to my Minecraft benchmarks in Oracle's instances,
       | its better than old Skylake cloud instances... by how much is
       | hard to say since other tenants generate so much variation, but
       | there are proper reviews of the whole SoC floating around out
       | there.
        
         | i386 wrote:
         | Minecraft is inherently single threaded. the success of running
         | big servers is to run it on the fastest single core processor
         | money can buy.
        
           | brucethemoose2 wrote:
           | This wisdom is a bit outdated, especially on heavily modded
           | servers.
           | 
           | Minecraft is _limited_ by a single thread, but some stuff
           | does run on other threads. In addition the JDK will do
           | compilation and GC on other threads now, which is especially
           | apparent if you run GraalVM like you should.
           | 
           | Minecraft wont scale to 16 cores. But if you buy a 2C/4T
           | instance, you are going to get less performance than you
           | would get on a wider one.
        
             | i386 wrote:
             | > Minecraft is limited by a single thread, but some stuff
             | does run on other threads
             | 
             | Hmm, not so outdated. if you're talking about JVM gc then
             | sure but pretty much everything is built around a single
             | thread ticking the mod. I know some mods can do chunk
             | pregen on another thread but those are rarely used.
        
         | re-thc wrote:
         | Old Skylake cloud instances is "really bad" in the current day
         | compared to Rome/Milan/Genoa, Sapphire Rapids and Graviton 3
         | for example.
         | 
         | We've moved on from lakes!
        
           | loeg wrote:
           | Cooper Lake (2020) is still a Skylake. They aren't that old!
        
             | re-thc wrote:
             | The 1 that was mostly canned?
             | 
             | See: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15631/intels-cooper-
             | lake-plan...
             | 
             | It's limited everywhere.
        
               | loeg wrote:
               | > The company is set to only make the hardware available
               | for priority scale-out customers who have already
               | designed quad-socket and eight-socket platforms around
               | the hardware.
               | 
               | I work at one of those customers; we use loads of them.
               | 
               | Nevermind Ice Lake / Alder Lake (2021) / Raptor Lake
               | (2022) -- Intel hasn't abandoned the "Lake" naming scheme
               | yet.
        
               | mardifoufs wrote:
               | Facebook?
        
           | brucethemoose2 wrote:
           | To be fair Ampere Altra is old now too. Kinda a contemporary
           | with Ice Lake and the tail end of Skylake.
           | 
           | Hetzner offering them _right now_ is curious. Maybe its a
           | pipecleaner for the next Ampere gen?
        
             | wmf wrote:
             | The new Altra developer kit is also very cheap. I wonder if
             | Ampere is dumping overstocked inventory. Given their track
             | record I don't expect the One to be available any time
             | soon.
        
             | re-thc wrote:
             | Does Ampere have a newer offering yet? Probably not? So
             | Hetzner are offering the "current gen".
             | 
             | Meanwhile AMD and Intel both do have a later offering so
             | they are "old".
        
           | brucethemoose2 wrote:
           | Also, by "Skylake" I mean whatever the last popular server
           | CPU with the Skylake derived core was... IIRC Cooper Lake was
           | Facebook only, Cascade Lake was HPC, and I cant even remember
           | beyond that, but they've had the same 28C server die forever
           | that hosts everywhere use.
        
         | DefineOutside wrote:
         | I've done a bit of minecraft benchmarking on my Oracle
         | instance. It generates the same number of chunks per second as
         | my 3600x CPU - although minecraft is always a weird benchmark
         | in that benefits from low memory latency and large caches as it
         | is ineffective at using caches well but is memory bound.
        
           | brucethemoose2 wrote:
           | Its even more lopsided when modded to the teeth.
        
         | BackBlast wrote:
         | I've benchmarked ARM systems vs other processors.
         | 
         | On my workload, using Intel as a baseline. AMD under performs
         | relative to standard benchmarks. ARM over performs relative to
         | standard benchmarks. I have seen good performance from Ampere,
         | particularly for the price.
         | 
         | However, ARM architecture complicates my workflow
         | significantly. I've found that they are not worth using it
         | right now due to compatibility issues, easier to just stick
         | with x86 for most things. Dealing with required missing
         | packages just kills the value.
         | 
         | My system isn't generally compute limited anyway. IOPS and
         | egress dominate rather than MIPS.
        
           | kytazo wrote:
           | Try alpinelinux, you'll be able to find almost everything,
           | coupled with nix for just in case. I've yet to find any
           | package missing.
        
             | NegativeLatency wrote:
             | alpine brings it's own issues with the different libc
             | 
             | maybe things have been fixed now, but about a year ago I
             | was having issues with ruby bugs that were due to
             | differences between muslc and gnulibc
        
             | BackBlast wrote:
             | Introducing new distros to solve the problem is moving in
             | the wrong direction. It's so much easier to deal with one
             | distro in the cloud. Just more reasons not to go multi
             | uArch.
        
               | brucethemoose2 wrote:
               | ARM cloud hosts typically run distros with good ARM
               | support. Oracle Linux is actually quite good, kinda like
               | a pre optimized RHEL.
               | 
               | Which begs the question: what is Hetzner pushing on
               | these? SUSE maybe?
        
               | asmor wrote:
               | By default: Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, CentOS, Rocky and
               | Alma.
               | 
               | You can mount your own ISOs though.
        
               | BackBlast wrote:
               | To the downvoter...
               | 
               | I strive for simple infrastructure.
               | 
               | ARM doesn't support the x86 docker eco system. That's a
               | significant strike but not totally unworkable for me.
               | 
               | My primary database isn't prepackaged with the ARM
               | packages nor does the originating org build one. I could
               | build it myself, which I have done plenty over the years.
               | I did try it, but the dependencies aren't up to date on
               | ARM. So now I'm building dependencies and the software
               | package. Building software from scratch can be a rabbit
               | hole that eats untold amount of time. After a one-day
               | effort I gave up and abandoned it. I'll revisit again if
               | Hetzner brings Ampere to the US and I can verify the
               | instances have much higher IOPS ceilings.
               | 
               | Enter another distro and I have to rebuild all of my
               | provisioning and management scripts for all my services
               | with all the testing entailed in the new dependency
               | chains. I'd rather try to build my db from source again,
               | frankly.
        
           | piperswe wrote:
           | I'm curious what distro you're using where there are missing
           | packages. I've never run across missing distro packages on
           | arm64 Debian (which I regularly use at work).
        
             | nine_k wrote:
             | Have you faced issues with packages being too old on Debian
             | Stable though?
             | 
             | "Missing packages" may be packages missing important
             | features or bugfixes.
        
               | brucethemoose2 wrote:
               | I certainly have...
               | 
               | Arch and SUSE are ARM friendly though.
        
               | nine_k wrote:
               | Isn't running Arch in prod considered brave still? Or has
               | it become stable and predictable in the last few years I
               | did not watch it?
        
         | thejosh wrote:
         | We're getting pretty good performance on AWS Graviton3 for our
         | data processing, their m7g is pretty good. Looks like they're
         | banking on ARM taking off, with lots of new options in 2023.
        
       | okasaki wrote:
       | Those aren't the prices I'm seeing when I try to create a new
       | server. I'm getting:                   CAX11 - 3.95eur/m
       | CAX21 - 7.19/m         CAX31 - 14.39/m         CAX41 - 28.79/m
       | 
       | 1 ipv6 costs me 0.6/m
        
         | subsequentmask wrote:
         | These are the prices w/o IPv4 added aren't they.
        
         | miyuru wrote:
         | I think you meant to say IPv4. IPv6 is free.
        
         | detaro wrote:
         | presumably that's prices with the appropriate-to-your-location
         | VAT applied?
        
       | Galaco wrote:
       | Never figured out how to use Hertzner. Wanted to try since they
       | get such a good reputation on here, but they banned my account
       | when their system presented no way for me to verify my identity.
       | 
       | The required either PayPal or passport. I have no PayPal account,
       | and their 3rd party verification system only allows passport from
       | your country of residence (signup requires providing a contact
       | address and they pre fill using this address; you can't change
       | the passport country). I am a British citizen living in Japan,
       | and therefore hold a British passport; there was no way for me to
       | provide a Japanese passport. I asked what I should do to comply,
       | and they banned my account 6 hours later.
       | 
       | I can't be the only one to experience this, can I?
        
         | thatwasunusual wrote:
         | > Never figured out how to use Hertzner. Wanted to try since
         | they get such a good reputation on here, but they banned my
         | account when their system presented no way for me to verify my
         | identity.
         | 
         | Is this something new? I (Norwegian) have been using Hetzner
         | for 10+ years, and never had a problem, and never had to attest
         | my identity. CurrentlyI have a four servers running there. The
         | last one was set up approx. a year ago, IIRC.
        
           | Havoc wrote:
           | >I (Norwegian)
           | 
           | That may be the difference. Some nationalities get KYC'd
           | easier than others and they seem to take it very seriously
        
             | kldx wrote:
             | +1 anecdatum
        
             | rejectfinite wrote:
             | There is a reason :)
        
           | vidarh wrote:
           | Norwegian living in the UK, and have used Hetzner for years,
           | both via a personal account and more recently via a corporate
           | account (UK company, Norwegian citizen), and it's not been an
           | issue. For one of the other corporate accounts I used it for
           | the managing director at the time (UK company, UK citizen)
           | did have to provide ID, though. Not clear exactly which
           | criteria has been in place when and for whom.
        
           | jsnell wrote:
           | It's definitely not new, they required an id 20 years ago.
           | (From EU citizens, so it's not about the country either).
        
             | dividedbyzero wrote:
             | For what it's worth, I have a VM on their cloud offering
             | and I've never had to provide them with an ID.
        
             | thatwasunusual wrote:
             | So how do you explain that I never have had to show an ID?
        
               | detaro wrote:
               | Just because Hetzner has had processes that can involve
               | ID checks if deemed necessary for a long time doesn't
               | mean that they check ID for everyone.
        
               | thatwasunusual wrote:
               | I understand that. I'm trying to figure out why I'm - and
               | several others - are "special."
        
               | nine_k wrote:
               | A large statistical model, likely run by some third-party
               | attestation service, said so. It's mostly used to refuse
               | service where governments require that (say, no service
               | for North Korea), or to people known to repeatedly do
               | fraud, etc. But false positives occur; sometimes an
               | inspection by a human helps (send an ID).
        
           | e12e wrote:
           | I'm Norwegian and have used hetzner for years - i had to send
           | a copy of my passport to get started.
        
         | nixass wrote:
         | > The required either PayPal or passport
         | 
         | I had similar struggles with some non-IT service providers in
         | Germany. They couldn't fathom why I have non-German
         | nationality, German address and driving license from third
         | country. Passport, German address and driving license all have
         | different address on them (all three being EU addresses). It is
         | apparently huge red flag in EU in 21st century. Incredible
        
           | 2000UltraDeluxe wrote:
           | You have an address on your passport? I can see how that
           | could cause issues if the address isn't valid. If I'd have to
           | determine if your order was fraudulent or not, I'd err on the
           | side of caution rather than risk having you abuse my server
           | infrastructure (in the case of Hetzner).
        
             | FinnKuhn wrote:
             | German Passports have the City/Region you life in on them.
             | The ID cards have your full address. So if the address of
             | your ID card doesn't match your passport something is
             | definitely fishy as you would have to get them updated when
             | you move.
        
               | ChuffedToBits wrote:
               | German (and most other?) passports feature the name of
               | the issuing authority and place of birth, no other
               | location, and remain valid irregardless of your current
               | registered address.
               | 
               | Side note: It seems like many African ID cards list the
               | profession and I've had to explain to several suspicious
               | border guards why my passport doesn't.
               | 
               | EDIT: I've always wondered about this and apparently the
               | body that sets passport specifications is ICAO, the
               | International Civil Aviation Organization, as mandated by
               | the UN. Specifically through ICAO document 9303.[1]
               | 
               | [1]https://www.icao.int/publications/documents/9303_p4_co
               | ns_en....
        
             | datenwolf wrote:
             | A lot of people confuse the passport (Pass) with the
             | national identity card (Personalausweis). There's no place
             | of residence stated on the German passport, but it is part
             | of the Personalausweis. Since German citizens by law are
             | required to own a Personalausweis (there's no mandate to
             | carry it around, just having it somewhere in a drawer
             | suffices), practically all businesses in Germany do rely on
             | the Personalausweis to validate identities. And of course
             | if the place of residence stated on the Personalausweis
             | doesn't match the actual place of residence this is going
             | to trigger some red flags.
        
               | onefkgff wrote:
               | There is a common misconception about the law. Germans
               | are only required to have either a passport or a NIC.
        
               | andix wrote:
               | This is a very German thing. I've never seen ID cards
               | from other countries that include an address of
               | residence. Also the obligation to own an ID card is a
               | very foreign concept in most other countries.
               | 
               | I had that issue with German companies before, especially
               | those who rarely deal with international customers. For
               | example in Austria only a few people own an ID card (most
               | people have a passport, but not everyone). So the german
               | companies were very surprised when I gave them a copy of
               | the Austrian ID card, that also doesn't have an address
               | on it.
        
               | rascul wrote:
               | > I've never seen ID cards from other countries that
               | include an address of residence.
               | 
               | In the USA the driver's licenses are ID cards and have
               | addresses. Or if you don't have a license you can get a
               | regular ID card, which has an address. The laws vary from
               | state to state about how long you can go after you move
               | before it gets updated. I'm not aware of a legal
               | requirement to have one though, unless you're driving.
        
               | andix wrote:
               | I thought the only way in the US to prove your address of
               | residence is collecting your last few phone bills and
               | bank statements. It was a huge LOL moment, when I first
               | heard about that.
        
               | blackshaw wrote:
               | This is true in the UK - driving licenses have your
               | address on them, but for some reason they're not usually
               | accepted as proof of address. I assume this is because
               | you only need to renew the license (i.e. get a new copy
               | of the physical piece of plastic with an updated photo
               | and expiry date) every ten years, so in theory your
               | driving license could be evidence that you lived
               | somewhere nine years ago but not evidence that you still
               | live there today.
               | 
               | Providing a recent utility bill or bank statement is a
               | much more common ask.
        
               | singlow wrote:
               | Its definitely not the only way but it is an option for
               | some people who don't have other types of id.
        
               | thewebcount wrote:
               | Yeah, it's really odd and circular. You can often present
               | a lease agreement if you're renting an apartment or
               | house. If you own, you can usually present a mortgage
               | statement. If you own and don't have a mortgage (because
               | you purchased with cash), you can use bank statement
               | and/or phone statement. But what's funny is, how do you
               | get the bank statement and/or phone statement? You
               | usually have to show a lease agreement, mortgage
               | statement, or some other proof you own the place you
               | live. It's fairly difficult for someone coming from
               | another country to get those things when they first
               | arrive because all the documents they have are from
               | another country and the entry-level employees that have
               | to take them would have no idea what to do with them. My
               | foreign friends and neighbors have stories about having
               | to use a secured credit card (basically a debit card but
               | the machines think it's a credit card) for 6-12 months
               | before they could get a regular credit card. It's very
               | confusing (and arbitrary and broken) if you're not on the
               | easy path.
        
               | pastage wrote:
               | Similar problems in many countries, there is usually no
               | problems for the majority who lives there so the pressure
               | to fix it is low.
        
               | sine_break wrote:
               | US does not have such cards, that is why they have issues
               | with voter verification. Most countries have free IDs for
               | citizens.
        
               | vineyardmike wrote:
               | Yes we do have government provided ID cards. Your
               | driver's license (or if you don't drive there's a non-
               | driver version that's just a card). There is no _mandate_
               | to get one or carry it (except for driving).
               | 
               | We have issues with voter registration because it's been
               | politicized. Poor people are disproportionately less
               | likely to have ID cards (because it costs money, takes
               | time, and most people get it to drive which is
               | expensive), less likely to have it up to date. It's
               | disenfranchising to mandate IDs. Whether or not it's a
               | problem falls down party lines and your favorite
               | statistician's analysis. But that's why it's "an issue".
        
               | bee_rider wrote:
               | We have government issues ID cards, but we don't have
               | free government issued ID cards as far as I know, which
               | is one of the problem with these voter ID laws.
        
               | HideousKojima wrote:
               | It ranges from $10 to $90 depending on the state (average
               | is ~$30) and most states also have a discounted rate for
               | people under the poverty line.
        
               | bee_rider wrote:
               | It is unacceptable to charge people any amount of money
               | for a voting requirement.
        
               | biomcgary wrote:
               | Is the ID requirement a leftover from the Nazi era? I
               | don't suppose Germany ever issued a blanket repeal of all
               | the laws passed during that error.
        
               | usr1106 wrote:
               | The law has been changed numerous times since then.
               | However, the requirement to possess an ID was introduced
               | with the start of WW II. So it's not completely wrong to
               | call it a Nazi invention.
        
               | jordij1 wrote:
               | Spain also has the address in the DNI (national document
               | of identity), and as the Germans Spain's citizens are
               | also required to have such a document. Many public and
               | private services will ask for your DNI if they need to
               | validate your identity.
        
               | manuelmoreale wrote:
               | We have address printed on ID cards here in Italy, just
               | as an extra data point in addition to the other people
               | who have replied already.
        
               | Faaak wrote:
               | Spain does that
        
               | blackshaw wrote:
               | > the obligation to own an ID card is a very foreign
               | concept in most other countries.
               | 
               | Is it? From a quick search it looks like a very large
               | number of countries have compulsory ID cards:
               | 
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_identity_c
               | ard...
        
               | krab wrote:
               | Strange for me - the CZ ID cards work the same way as
               | described.
        
               | andix wrote:
               | True. I just checked the ID cards for a few EU countries,
               | and most of them don't seem to include an address of
               | residence (I checked Poland, Netherlands, Belgium,
               | Finland and Switzerland). France includes an address too.
               | 
               | https://www.consilium.europa.eu/prado/en/search-by-
               | document-...
        
               | red_trumpet wrote:
               | To add to this, it is actually forbidden to have a
               | different main residency than the one on your
               | Personalausweis if you live in Germany. If you move, you
               | have to change it within a few weeks.
        
               | nixass wrote:
               | This is dumb. Should I go to my home country and update
               | my personal ID/passport every time I change apartment in
               | Germany?
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | detaro wrote:
               | If you have residency permit, that gets updated. If you
               | don't have (EU citizen) then having done the registration
               | is enough. (I think GPs wording isn't particularly
               | precise: what matters is the registration - and if you
               | have a German ID document, then that gets updated at that
               | point)
        
               | fs111 wrote:
               | > Since German citizens by law are required to own a
               | Personalausweis
               | 
               | This is not true. You must have an Identitatsnachweis,
               | but if you have a valid passport you do not need a
               | Personalausweis.
        
               | mjochim wrote:
               | German law requires you to own a Personalausweis or
               | Reisepass (passport). If you have a passport, you are not
               | required to also have an ID card/Personalausweis.
        
         | jacooper wrote:
         | Just send them a photo of your British passport
        
         | andix wrote:
         | They probably suffer from a lot of sign ups with fake IDs and
         | with criminal intent. So I get that they are rather strict.
         | 
         | Another thing to consider: cloud providers are not very
         | interested in individuals as customers. They usually want
         | companies as customers, that also buy more than a 3$ vserver. A
         | solution for this problem could be a sign-up fee (50 or 100$),
         | to pay for an extended manual vetting of customers, that is
         | then added to the account balance.
        
           | pid-1 wrote:
           | > Another thing to consider: cloud providers are not very
           | interested in individuals as customers
           | 
           | A key theme in the "cloud vs data center" story is that most
           | public cloud providers (AWS, etc...) were really easy to sign
           | up, requiring a CC and nothing else.
           | 
           | Meanwhile, hardware vendors wouldn't even talk to you as an
           | individual / small business.
        
             | HansHamster wrote:
             | Tried to sign up for gcloud a couple of months ago using my
             | >12 year old google account. Long story short, while I
             | technically managed to sign up, I never managed to get my
             | GPU quotas increased to anything above 0, support is non-
             | existent and contacting sales (which seems to be the
             | 'official' way, but is only really intended for business
             | customers?) never got a response...
             | 
             | Meanwhile, my small server (not Hetzner) has been running
             | for many years without any issues, never had to send them
             | anything after I signed up...
        
         | bravetraveler wrote:
         | Sadly not, and I'm one of the happy Hetzner customers
         | 
         | They are remarkably well known for having draconian anti-fraud
        
         | jonatron wrote:
         | This has come up a few times on HN, if you search comments for
         | "Hetzner fraud". The solution is to use a different provider if
         | you can't use Hetzner.
        
           | derefr wrote:
           | I've seen the other side of this. Our SaaS (a data API) has a
           | number of "customers" who attempt to use us (or our
           | competitors; we're not special here) to power some data
           | displays on their phishing-scam websites, to make them seem
           | more legitimate.
           | 
           | We ban these people -- they're violating our ToU by engaging
           | in illegal activities. But they come back. With different
           | names, different IPs, different browsers, different credit
           | cards. They have complete identities to burn. (We spot the
           | correlations anyway, along other dimensions I won't disclose
           | here, and so can keep them out pretty effectively.)
           | 
           | And guess what? Very often, their requests are coming from
           | Hetzner IP blocks.
           | 
           | I don't think the scammers have a direct business
           | relationship with Hetzner, mind you. I think Hetzner tries
           | just as hard as we do to stop these people from making use of
           | their services. But I believe that these Hetzner boxes are
           | either set up as exit nodes of one or more common VPN
           | providers; or they're being registered for other purposes by
           | other parties, and then _resold_ on the secondary market on
           | dark-web forums.
           | 
           | If I were a VPS provider, and I didn't want to support
           | illegal activity, I'd probably just give up on providing
           | service to individuals altogether, only taking corporate
           | customers; and even then, requiring a DUNS number or
           | something as an additional proof-of-work for that
           | corporation, so that people can't just keep spinning up
           | corporations in places where that's essentially free.
           | 
           | Hetzner hasn't gone that far; but it makes sense to me that
           | if a user account is flagged as needing extended
           | verification, and the ops person responsible for verifying
           | the account takes a look at the user-lifecycle activity logs
           | for the user, and sees that this user has: their IP coming
           | from multiple places during registration vs login, their
           | browser locale and timezone bouncing around between requests
           | and set for settings uncommon to the country their IP is
           | originating from, etc. -- that the answer would be "ban"
           | rather than "ask the user why the heck that's happening."
           | 
           | One time out of ten, the user is a real person doing
           | something weird. The other nine times out of ten, the user is
           | a scammer and is going to _make up some story_ about being a
           | real person doing something weird. Every scammer has their
           | very own pool of man-hours, and if you 're in the critical
           | path for their scam, they can burn a number of those man-
           | hours being _really insistent_ that they 're authentic. Until
           | you let them in, and see that they immediately start up the
           | same dumb phishing-scam bot script that all the other
           | scammers purchased.
        
             | withinboredom wrote:
             | It's likely they're just using hacked sites. I've seen a
             | WordPress site used as a Viagra botnet. The owner of the
             | business thought it was good for them because they would
             | get more traffic so they had given the other party root
             | access. :sigh: the shit you see as a contractor...
             | 
             | But I'd be willing to bet you're seeing hacked servers, not
             | necessarily Hetzner's fault. Hell, they didn't even have
             | ipv6 firewalls until recently (like the last six months).
        
               | derefr wrote:
               | I have pretty good reason to believe that scammers are
               | using purchased Hetzner credentials -- which is that some
               | scammers are just right out there in the open, talking
               | about how they do what they do:
               | https://teletype.in/@slivmens/LjPaei8pMTT
               | 
               | Translated quote:
               | 
               | > To do this, we go here: [link to carding forum] and
               | create a topic in the section "verified Hetzner
               | accounts."
               | 
               | > Offer price -- no more than 400 rubles is needed. The
               | priority is people from Ukraine, as they have benefits.
               | GEO of the person who verifies the account - any,
               | excluding Russia due to sanctions.
               | 
               | > Another important detail: the seller must register a
               | fresh GMail account, use that account to create an
               | account on Hetzner, and verify it themselves.
               | 
               | > After verification, we wait 3 days before the creation
               | of the new server -- otherwise the likelihood of the
               | account being blocked for abuse increases.
               | 
               | > After purchasing the account credentials, we change the
               | password, both on the Gmail account, and on the Hetzner
               | account.
        
             | counttheforks wrote:
             | Are you implying that someone (possibly temporarily) living
             | in another country than where they're from means the
             | sensible course of action is to instantly ban them?
        
             | bootsmann wrote:
             | We crawl through data like this professionally and from
             | what we see, Hetzner isn't actually that bad at combating
             | fraud. They are not GCP or AWS but there are other hosters
             | of similar scale that have _significantly_ worse response
             | times and leave up clearly compromised machines for a lot
             | longer.
        
               | mardifoufs wrote:
               | I'm very curious to know who are the worst offenders! (If
               | you can/want to share the details, obviously :) )
        
               | bootsmann wrote:
               | I cannot really comment on this because its A) a multi-
               | dimensional problem (Hosters like Oracle have slightly
               | longer mean removal time than Hetzner but less of their
               | IPs end up in our aggregated blocklist, so does that make
               | them worse or better idk) and B) we're trying to coax at
               | least some of these hosters into using our service to
               | support their fraud team so its probably best not to call
               | out potential customers ;)
        
         | lmarcos wrote:
         | That's why I don't use Hetzner. I don't really want to handover
         | my passport to any company. How come digital ocean doesn't
         | require that?
        
         | kyriakos wrote:
         | I use credit card and was never asked for a passport. That's
         | odd. Been using them for more than 5 years.
        
         | JacobiX wrote:
         | Their compliance process is quite abysmal.
         | 
         | This is actually exactly what happened with us. After creating
         | a new account with the intention of exploring the ARM64
         | services, our account was unexpectedly suspended. I contacted
         | them to have information on the specific concerns regarding my
         | customer information and the reason for deactivating my
         | account. Unfortunately, we did not receive any response to our
         | inquiries.
        
         | delusional wrote:
         | I sent them a photo of my passport encrypted with their pgp
         | key. This was a long time ago, so the process might have
         | changed, but it seemed entirely manual.
        
         | qwertox wrote:
         | > I have no PayPal account, and their 3rd party verification
         | system only allows passport from your country of residence
         | (signup requires providing a contact address and they pre fill
         | using this address; you can't change the passport country)
         | 
         | Sounds like a good thing to do?
         | 
         | My current hoster in Germany made a surprise call and asked me
         | what the name of the hotel near the address I provided was.
         | This after I submitted the order and before they accepted.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | sunshadow wrote:
         | [dead]
        
         | aent wrote:
         | I provided them with my passport and all the other documents
         | they requested and they still banned me with no recourse, so
         | yeah, their signup process is the worst I have ever
         | experienced.
        
         | nr2x wrote:
         | I'm currently setting up infrastructure for a startup and it's
         | been very interesting how the threat model of data loss and
         | disaster recovery is no longer hardware failure: it's account
         | lock out.
         | 
         | I've got streaming replication of my core data going from one
         | cloud company to other company as that way if one has some
         | antifraud system go rogue on me I still have access.
         | 
         | As somebody who used to spend a lot of time thinking about
         | drives breaking it's an interesting shift.
        
           | Aldipower wrote:
           | Exactly. My main infrastructure is on Hetzner, but I have a
           | live replication via Wireguard at another hoster in Austria.
           | With less resources there, but for accessibility "in the case
           | of".
        
             | nr2x wrote:
             | I'm also thinking about buying a second hand server and
             | racking it in a colocation joint just so I can physically
             | get the disk. The client data I have is super important,
             | and there is some level of comfort you only get from bare
             | metal.
        
               | miohtama wrote:
               | I would go further and have a small server/NAS running
               | locally in an office. The best backup is one you sit on
               | the top off.
        
               | nr2x wrote:
               | I literally have a Linux machine that I'm ready to rig up
               | were it not for Comcast being my internet provider.
               | Maddening to live in "Silicon Valley" and be dealing with
               | dog shit data caps and speeds.
        
               | Aldipower wrote:
               | This does not pay out in Germany due to the high energy
               | costs in private house holds or office spaces.
        
               | meltedcapacitor wrote:
               | For a "small server/NAS"?
        
               | Eduard wrote:
               | With 0.40 EUR/kWh, running a beefy 100 Watt NAS setup
               | will cost 0.96 EUR per day.
        
               | [deleted]
        
           | rnk wrote:
           | That's a very perceptive comment. It happens again and again
           | and it's much harder to control for that, as compared to say
           | making sure you are running in different amazon availability
           | zones or something. If you wanted to destroy someone's
           | service, probably getting them banned like you describe could
           | even be easier than a DOS now. I worry about the day that
           | google kills my gmail account for some random and never to be
           | explained reason.
        
             | nr2x wrote:
             | Well, this site is a big reason I got the insight to focus
             | on account redundancy over disk redundancy. Lots of posts
             | over the years of people locked out from all the big clouds
             | in a panic trying to see if an employee will see their cry
             | for help on HN.
             | 
             | I do NOT want to be making that post!
        
         | miduil wrote:
         | > Never figured out how to use Hertzner. Wanted to try since
         | they get such a good reputation on here, but they banned my
         | account when their system presented no way for me to verify my
         | identity.
         | 
         | I ran into the same thing as well, maybe my real name sounds a
         | bit funny to their system? It was very discouraging to move
         | forward after being instantly banned. I reached out to them how
         | I could verify and the only way was sending them an unencrypted
         | mail with my Passport copy. Upon request they suggested I could
         | simply send them a fax.
         | 
         | Note, this has been some years ago and I've never gave Hetzner
         | a new try. As long as I can see from professional experience,
         | you will have a lot of back and forth with Hetzner support,
         | which becomes quite bad the moment your team is international
         | because they'll always manage to sneak in some sort of German
         | text. It really feels antiquated having to go through support
         | for basic server hardware debugging. Eventually they'll often
         | resort to replacing your instance.
        
         | unixhero wrote:
         | Use a VPN connection to the UK when you verify... BOOM solved
        
           | 2000UltraDeluxe wrote:
           | Using a VPN is one of the easiest way to get rejected. Most
           | automated systems flag stuff coming from them as highly
           | suspicious due to the sheer amount of crap coming through
           | them.
        
             | unixhero wrote:
             | You can run your own from a vps and an ssh socks proxy.
        
         | MrMan wrote:
         | [dead]
        
         | lordnacho wrote:
         | They seem pretty good at writing back to people. Have you
         | contacted them? It's normal for new accounts to get suspended
         | pending KYC checks. But they also do the checks pretty fast.
        
           | danesparza wrote:
           | The OP indicated this in their original comment: "I asked
           | what I should do to comply, and they banned my account 6
           | hours later."
        
             | withinboredom wrote:
             | That's pretty suss. Just send your passport and if they
             | have any issues with it, they'll ask. If they ask you for
             | your passport and you ask "how do I comply" I'd probably
             | suspend the account to since you seem unable or unwilling
             | to comply.
        
               | jackothy wrote:
               | They asked him for a _Japanese_ passport and he does not
               | have one. Hence the  "how do I comply".
        
               | withinboredom wrote:
               | Just send the one you have? I don't see the problem.
        
               | jackothy wrote:
               | And I also don't see the problem with asking a clarifying
               | question when he does not have what they asked for.
        
               | withinboredom wrote:
               | It's obviously a typo or something similar. The customer
               | support person likely has no idea what you're talking
               | about, they want a passport with your name on it, they
               | don't care where it is from.
        
         | EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
         | I think they really care about two things: VAT and
         | cryptocurrency. Passports are required to prove you should or
         | should not pay the 19% VAT, and crypto (namely, SIA) destroy
         | their servers.
        
           | yrro wrote:
           | Whoa whoa whoa I can opt out of paying VAT? How do I do this!
        
             | EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
             | That's exactly why they have draconian KYC measures in
             | place)
        
             | marcosdumay wrote:
             | You prove you don't reside on the EU, and they don't bill
             | you the VAT.
             | 
             | (But I believe the KYC rules aren't only because of this.)
        
               | yrro wrote:
               | You got my hopes up but it seems I'm stuck paying UK VAT
               | even though I don't think it's necessary any more.
               | 
               | I've run into this with a few different German
               | businesses, I don't know if I'm right or they are, but it
               | seems like they don't _have_ to charge me VAT. Which is
               | underlined by the huge "import VAT" bill I'm dumped with
               | when I have physical goods delivered to me in the UK.
        
               | robjan wrote:
               | They do have to charge you VAT unless you are a VAT
               | registered limited company
        
               | fdr wrote:
               | Are you using the computer for business? If so, you
               | should be claiming VAT credits that neutralize VAT (since
               | it's intended as a consumption tax). If they don't charge
               | you VAT on behalf of the UK, the UK should be charging
               | you the equivalent consumption tax by some other means to
               | keep the consumption tax base neutral.
        
             | mjochim wrote:
             | Have a company whose business purpose justifies spending
             | company money on servers. Make a profit so you have company
             | money to spend. Spend it on servers. There you go.
        
         | kornhole wrote:
         | You get a good range of options at a low cost with Hetzner but
         | need to identify yourself. Many hosting companies have
         | different levels and types of verification these days. If you
         | want to avoid any KYC, checkout https://kycnot.me/services#VPS.
        
       | thejosh wrote:
       | Perfect build servers for native AARCH64 compiling (though you
       | can use distcc), really wish AWS had spot pricing for ARM..
        
         | re-thc wrote:
         | They do? Unless you are referring to Fargate. EC2 Graviton does
         | have spot pricing?
        
       | e40 wrote:
       | Appears to be ARM v8.2, which is important to some.
        
       | kseistrup wrote:
       | Does anyone know if there is ssh/root access and what OS the
       | servers are running?
        
         | subsequentmask wrote:
         | These are VPSs. You can SSH, use the root user, and when
         | setting up you can choose what OS to use, they give a list or
         | iirc they let you upload your own ISO.
        
           | cstuder wrote:
           | Any recommendations for an uncomplicated server OS which will
           | just run Docker, SSH and not much more?
           | 
           | I'm currently running Ubuntu but am open to alternatives. My
           | local Raspberry Pi uses a fun, but little maintained OS
           | called Hypriot which is just this: Start Docker and not much
           | more.
        
             | NortySpock wrote:
             | Dietpi is what I switched to.
             | 
             | Maintained, light on logging unless you ask for it (saves
             | your SD card from wear and tear), and focused on low host-
             | os resource usage while still being Debian-based.
        
             | yrro wrote:
             | RHEL, Debian.
             | 
             | If you're serious about running _everything_ in containers,
             | then maybe RHEL Edge? RHEL + microshift? Fedora Silverblue?
             | openSUSE MicroOS?
        
               | e12e wrote:
               | You probably want podman, not Docker, on RedHat (and
               | SuSe).
        
             | chpatrick wrote:
             | Ubuntu is fine for that use case.
        
             | regularfry wrote:
             | Just stick Debian on it. It'll be familiar enough from your
             | Ubuntu experience, and if all you're going to do is slap
             | Docker on it and run everything in containers you can just
             | use Debian Stable, not care that things in the repo might
             | not be bang up to date, stick unattended-upgrades on it,
             | and never really worry about it until dist-upgrade time.
        
               | layer8 wrote:
               | Seconding this.
        
             | subsequentmask wrote:
             | I'm quite a large fan of Debian, it's my go to choice for
             | anything server personally. It's pretty good for what you
             | want here IMHO, it's stable so you won't really have to
             | worry about packages screwing you over and like another
             | comment said you can stick unattended-upgrades on it :)
        
           | kseistrup wrote:
           | Thanks.
        
       | zackmorris wrote:
       | I implemented a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) on AWS with Elastic
       | Container Service (ECS) using Terraform so that I could run
       | Docker, and it ended up being about 2 orders of magnitude more
       | expensive than Hetzner after all of the services were configured.
       | For example, something as simple as AWS NAT Gateway costs $30 per
       | month, and it can be challenging to get everything right if you
       | don't use one. I haven't tried Heroku, but expect similar prices
       | and nearly as high of a configuration burden.
       | 
       | So what's the point of all that? Seriously, one server with 16
       | cores and the memory bandwidth and storage speed of SSD drives
       | should be able to serve many thousands of simultaneous requests
       | and millions of users per month. I can't help but feel that the
       | cloud infrastructure and microservice movement of the 2010s was..
       | a scam.
       | 
       | I just need a place to run Docker, similar to what we had with
       | Linode for running a shell 20 years ago. And don't tell me how to
       | set it all up. Just give me a turnkey Terraform (or Ansible-
       | inspired declarative configuration management tool) setup that
       | has stuff like load balancing and some degree of more advanced
       | features like denial of service protection out of the box. What
       | we used to think of as managed hosting, but open source, and with
       | sane defaults for running standard suites like Laravel, Rails,
       | etc.
       | 
       | I have to assume that I'm just terribly out of it and something
       | like this already exists. Otherwise I can't understand why
       | someone doesn't just offer this and provide a way for us to pay
       | them the millions of dollars we lose to spinning our wheels on
       | cloud infrastructure with 1% utilization.
        
         | nine_k wrote:
         | Cloud is about elasticity. At ${work} we spin up a ton of EC2
         | instances in anticipation of huge traffic spikes that happen
         | predictably several times a day, in different regions, and spin
         | them down afterwards.
         | 
         | It's also about simplicity. Many services come pre-configured
         | on.AWS, with clustering, failover, backups, etc already
         | present.
         | 
         | When you are small, you can sysadmin your server fine, and you
         | don't yet need the cloud.
         | 
         | When you are colossal, you want everything custom, and the
         | cloud would cost you a huge amount, so you go for your own
         | servers (and possibly datacenters).
         | 
         | But for the midrange, the expense of hiring several more SREs
         | to handle dedicated servers is usually higher than the entire
         | AWS bill, and the cloud looks very reasonable.
        
           | chpatrick wrote:
           | How much would it cost to handle your peak load with
           | dedicated servers and no scaling?
        
             | maccard wrote:
             | Last time I ran the math, it made sense for us to provision
             | bare metal for 70% of our baseload, but our regions skew
             | EU/US
        
             | nine_k wrote:
             | With the peak load being about 10x the still load, the
             | dedicated servers should cost 10% of the cloud version.
             | 
             | We'd likely have to have some reserve just in case our
             | marketing and product do so well that the next peak of the
             | load rises higher in absolute terms.
        
               | 5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV wrote:
               | Hybrid approaches are also really good, but I'm gonna be
               | honest: If capital is not an issue and the growth is to
               | be expected, I wouldn't steer into dedicated server
               | region. It's just such an headache if it's not the core
               | business
        
           | justsomehnguy wrote:
           | Counterpoint: for some years we had clients who happily lived
           | on cheap as fuck plans but requested _more_ at the
           | anticipated calendar events (NY and the like).
           | 
           | Most of the time we just removed GHz limits, sometimes adding
           | vCPUs in advance, they fared well.
           | 
           | NB: IaaS provider with a guarenteered resources
        
             | nine_k wrote:
             | Yes, if your elasticity requirements are not within hours
             | but within weeks or months, adding and removing capacity
             | can be done by traditional means, even by renting physical
             | servers and putting them into your on-premises racks.
        
               | justsomehnguy wrote:
               | You missed the point - for some the 'elasticity' is just
               | being able to consume 12-20GHz instead of ~1-2GHz 350
               | days of the year. Sure, you can deploy some advanced
               | hyper-scaling arch to do so... or just move to a fatter
               | instance.
        
           | sshine wrote:
           | I can't help but think that a 10x user spike causing a 10x
           | CPU spike is mostly caused by poorly performing web apps
           | written in dynamic scripting languages and the ethos "Just
           | add more servers, servers are cheaper than developers."
           | 
           | Turns out, developers are cheaper than DevOps engineers and
           | AWS budgets. So if a linear spike in servers necessitates a
           | superlinear cost in operational complexity, maybe working
           | highly performant web app backends is actually cheaper?
        
         | 015a wrote:
         | > I can't help but feel that the cloud infrastructure and
         | microservice movement of the 2010s was.. a scam.
         | 
         | I think the general consensus is that the most-root cause for
         | why cloud infrastructure and microservice architectures matter
         | is more People, less Technology. Its hard to hire highly
         | experienced people, especially at the hundreds-to-thousands of
         | engineers scale that many companies operate at.
         | 
         | That, in isolation, is reasonable. The actually uncomfortable
         | question that no one wants to address is: was _that_ a scam.
         | Put another way, how much of that was a zero-interest rate
         | phenomena, and how much  "state of art best way to engineer"
         | things was influenced from that, and has root causes in US
         | monetary policy.
         | 
         | Between AI and high interest rates: if you're not ready to
         | spend the 2020s questioning every single thing you think you
         | know about software engineering; you won't be long for the
         | industry.
        
           | mmmm2 wrote:
           | My thought on this is we've all been trained to follow the
           | Google approach: thousands of machines, horizontally
           | scalable, to handle any load. But this model was developed in
           | 2004 when they wanted to hold the entire web in memory and
           | could afford the enormous hardware outlay.
           | 
           | Computers are so powerful now this may be the wrong instinct.
           | You can mind boggling amounts of processing for say...
           | $30,000 in hardware, and even with redundancy it would be
           | much simpler to manage.
        
           | simplotek wrote:
           | > I think the general consensus is that the most-root cause
           | for why cloud infrastructure and microservice architectures
           | matter is more People, less Technology.
           | 
           | Indeed the main selling point of microservices is People,
           | more specifically how to set hard boundaries on
           | responsibilities and accountability while ensuring
           | independent decision-making.
           | 
           | Another important selling point of microservices is
           | flexibility. It's trivial to put together an entirely new
           | service from scratch, written in whatever technology crosses
           | your mind. With microservices you don't even need access to a
           | repo.
        
         | lmarcos wrote:
         | I think one disadvantage of putting everything (nginx, web
         | server, database, monitoring tools, etc.) in one machine is
         | that suddenly your machine is exposing a myriad of ports to the
         | internet and one mistake on your side (e.g., misconfigured auth
         | module) is all what's needed to compromise your entire service.
         | 
         | Having some sort of vpc where you can safely put your db server
         | that only listens to requests from servers within the same vpc
         | (e.g., web server) sounds like good practice to me.
        
           | gizzlon wrote:
           | Hm, why? You can run services without exposing their ports to
           | the whole world. Or use unix sockets..
        
           | Eduard wrote:
           | > I think one disadvantage of putting everything (nginx, web
           | server, database, monitoring tools, etc.) in one machine is
           | that suddenly your machine is exposing a myriad of ports to
           | the internet and one mistake on your side (e.g.,
           | misconfigured auth module) is all what's needed to compromise
           | your entire service.
           | 
           | All the Linux distributions I got to know use sensible
           | defaults so that critical services don't bind to a public-
           | facing interface / bind only to localhost, e.g. mariadb and
           | mysql on Debian.
           | 
           | Besides that, Hetzner's "Robot" interface allows to configure
           | which ports/IP addresses you allow access to your Hetzner
           | server.
        
         | nightpool wrote:
         | "I haven't tried Heroku, but expect similar prices and nearly
         | as high of a configuration burden."
         | 
         | Are you kidding me? Prices, sure, but comparing the
         | configuration burden using AWS or GCP alphabet soup to a dead-
         | simple Heroku setup is ridiculous. You set up something like
         | hirefire.io for autoscaling, you connect your Github repo and
         | that's it. You're done. Compared to weeks worth of headaches
         | setting up Terraform Cloud and CI actions and massaging your
         | state file and spending days tearing your headout over insane
         | obtuse NAT configuration parameters? It's literally night and
         | day.
        
         | j45 wrote:
         | I don't know that this is terribly off base.
         | 
         | The cloud almost always ends up costing a lot more at scale and
         | increasingly at the beginning.
         | 
         | In some part this is because the cloud is someone else's
         | computers that you have to help pay for.
         | 
         | The current incarnation of cloud was designed in part to work
         | around scaling issues with Linux networking, which have long
         | since been solved. What a $5 Linode/VPS can do today vs 10
         | years ago is much different from a linux standpoint alone
         | before additional horsepower.
         | 
         | At the same time tooling to host (docker, ansible, terraform)
         | is making traditional devops heavier at times.
        
         | Deloritoono wrote:
         | Hetzner is great but it's not a good choice for companies which
         | really care.
         | 
         | Your data is not encrypted in rest.
         | 
         | Their security is not bad but someone can easily plugin
         | whatever they like.
         | 
         | Try this at Google. Google not just has much stricter physical
         | access control but also FULL control over the hardware. They
         | know the firmware of the Mainboard. The server don't even
         | unencrypt and start if you move them out of their Datacenter.
         | 
         | Google doesn't just has ingress egress they have undersea
         | cable.
         | 
         | There is so much difference between hetzner and google it's not
         | the same thing.
        
           | Eduard wrote:
           | > Hetzner is great but it's not a good choice for companies
           | which really care. Your data is not encrypted in rest.
           | 
           | It's up to you to set up "encryption in rest": E.g setup LUKS
           | on a Hetzner machine.
           | 
           | > Their security is not bad but someone can easily plugin
           | whatever they like.
           | 
           | That's not how it is. Check e.g. this six-year old security
           | video from Hetzner: Hetzner is great but it's not a good
           | choice for companies which really care. Your data is not
           | encrypted in rest.
           | 
           | Their security is not bad but someone can easily plugin
           | whatever they like.
        
             | Deloritoono wrote:
             | I know the video quite well and I also have stuff on
             | hetzner.
             | 
             | But it's just levels different to Google.
             | 
             | I have a small startup at hetzner.
             | 
             | But my main job has everything at the big cloud providers
             | because of audit logs, high slash, global network etc. And
             | no the hetzner video shows already that hetzner can't
             | fullfil all required security certifications.
             | 
             | They have rows and rows of desktop PCs there.
             | 
             | With 'really' care I mean if you process millions or
             | billions you just don't go to hetzner.
             | 
             | And doing encryption on rest with what decryption method?
             | Manual unlock through a remote console?
             | 
             | At Google you literally have encryption on rest by default
             | with key rotation build in and you can use your own keys.
             | 
             | Dimensions of difference
        
           | DarkPhily wrote:
           | You are really comparing Google, which sells Cloud products,
           | against a company which have a variety of products?
           | 
           | If you only compare the cloud products. How do you know that
           | they aren't encrypting their drives?
           | 
           | And BTW, they own undersea cables as well ;)
           | https://www.hetzner.com/presse-berichte/2016/01/156818
           | 
           | Please educate yourself before you make such wild claims.
        
             | Deloritoono wrote:
             | They don't own undersea cables.
             | 
             | They invested in one and it's not stated how much.
             | 
             | And yes I'm comparing google with hetzner as answer to the
             | op to tell him that cloud is more than just cheap compute.
             | 
             | I'm trying to explain why people pay a premium for cloud
             | services and what the difference is.
             | 
             | And I use and like hetzner a lot. I'm happy to use hetzner
             | for plenty of things just not for everything.
        
         | simplotek wrote:
         | > So what's the point of all that? Seriously, one server with
         | 16 cores and the memory bandwidth and storage speed of SSD
         | drives should be able to serve many thousands of simultaneous
         | requests and millions of users per month. I can't help but feel
         | that the cloud infrastructure and microservice movement of the
         | 2010s was.. a scam.
         | 
         | You're just missing the whole point of why you need n>1
         | instances. You're focusing on what might be the least
         | compelling reason for the majority of applications, which is
         | scalability.
         | 
         | Reliability and fault tolerance is a major selling point, and
         | you can't simply expect to have adequate performance in more
         | than one region if you're providing your services out of a
         | single box in a single data center. The laws of physics ensure
         | your quality of service will suck.
         | 
         | Operations also compell you to have multiple instances, ranging
         | from blue/green deployments to one-box deployment strategies.
         | And are you going to allow your business to be down for
         | significant amounts of time whenever you need to update your
         | OS? How would you explain all that downtime to your
         | boss/shareholders? Are the tens of dollars you save on
         | infrastructure a good tradeoff?
         | 
         | Also, security is also a concern. You're better off isolating
         | your backend from frontend services, and software-defined
         | networks aren't a silver bullet.
         | 
         | And in the end, are the tradeoffs of not designing your web
         | services the right way really worth it?
        
           | patrickthebold wrote:
           | My pet theory is that VCs also hold a lot of Amazon stock or
           | perhaps more reasonably: are friendly with people who own a
           | lot of Amazon stock.
        
           | glutamate wrote:
           | A simple single node is often more reliable than a complex
           | fault-tolerant setup. Fewer moving parts mean fewer broken
           | pieces.
           | 
           | Similar with security. A simple monolith is more secure than
           | isolated front- and backend.
        
             | martinald wrote:
             | Agreed entirely for most. I have seen so many insanely
             | complicated and eye wateringly expensive architectures for
             | what are simple web apps on the big clouds. Often the team
             | don't really understand the intricacies of all these
             | services and how they interrelate which causes often cause
             | a lot of stability problems.
             | 
             | Even if they don't, there is usually a huge tax on
             | developer productivity with these architectures, which
             | often outweighs any improved stability over the long term.
             | 
             | Let's keep in mind that modern hardware and software is
             | very stable, generally.
        
               | jamesfinlayson wrote:
               | Agreed - I worked for a company with 30 people dedicated
               | entirely to managing the mess they'd created in AWS - and
               | their AWS account manager somehow managed to keep
               | convincing them to use more and newer AWS services to dig
               | them in even further.
        
         | mike_hock wrote:
         | > cloud infrastructure and microservice movement of the 2010s
         | was.. a scam.
         | 
         | Unfathomably based.
        
         | MagicMoonlight wrote:
         | Isn't this entire site run off a laptop in someone's shed?
         | 
         | And yet it's got basically perfect uptime. Whereas the
         | impenetrable cloud goes down every week and costs billions a
         | year.
        
           | simplotek wrote:
           | > And yet it's got basically perfect uptime.
           | 
           | Some monitors indicate that hackernews has a 99.84% uptime in
           | the past 30 days. Hardly "perfect".
           | 
           | https://hacker-news.statuspal.io/
        
             | viraptor wrote:
             | And that still doesn't include the very short term soft-
             | failures where HN tells you "something happened, try again"
             | - those happen every week or so.
        
         | jnwatson wrote:
         | The price disparity is getting worse. Cloud price reductions
         | haven't kept pace with the amazing pace of hardware performance
         | improvements, especially in I/O and RAM quantity.
         | 
         | For $400 you can buy an SSD with 1.5 million sustained IoPS.
         | 
         | It is no big deal to build a 1TiB RAM box these days.
        
         | andix wrote:
         | If there were no microservices, a lot of companies would run
         | their monoliths on a few VMs, with a small fraction of the cost
         | ;)
        
           | RowanH wrote:
           | If it wasn't for a good portion of tech leads FAANG
           | aspirational goals I bet a lot more companies would be on
           | monoliths. It's simply staggering the productivity and cost
           | differences (up to of course a certain point) being on
           | monoliths vs microservices. The discussions on authorisation
           | alone.....
        
             | simplotek wrote:
             | > If it wasn't for a good portion of tech leads FAANG
             | aspirational goals I bet a lot more companies would be on
             | monoliths.
             | 
             | I think you inadvertently pointed out one of the advantages
             | of microservices: the ability to bootstrap ideas without
             | having to be hindered by artificial barriers to entry. If
             | you have an idea and want to show it off, you just
             | implement it and make it available to the public. Call it
             | "aspirational goals", but I don't see any advantage in
             | barring people from providing value without having to
             | wrangle bureaucracies, red tape, and office politics.
        
       | INeedMoreRam wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | jacooper wrote:
       | Finally! That's where ARM Alta CPUs shine Try your luck to get
       | them for free in oracle free tier, just make sure to have
       | backups!
        
         | solarkraft wrote:
         | Oracle's free tier is cool. I've let my free instance expire
         | and so far haven't noticed them doing anything weird with my
         | credit card info.
         | 
         | Also haven't been sued yet. But let's see.
        
           | usr1106 wrote:
           | Oracle did not accept my credit card. The same one AWS has
           | been charging successfully for years.
           | 
           | But I don't really want to do business with Oracle anyway,
           | maybe it's better so.
        
             | jacooper wrote:
             | Can confirm, they are very picky about the credit cards
             | they accept.
        
           | daneel_w wrote:
           | If your tenancy is unpaid your "always free"-classed
           | instances can be terminated without notice in order to
           | provide capacity for a paid tenancy when necessary. You can
           | upgrade to paid tenancy and simply keep using "always free"
           | resources for a $0.00 monthly bill.
        
             | IceWreck wrote:
             | I'm still on unpaid tenancy and oracle docs say that
             | reclaim servers which are under or overutilized.
             | 
             | I use my oracle free servers (and one paid vps on hetzner)
             | as automatic cloud fallbacks if my homelab is inaccessible
             | over the internet for some reason. Which means I fall in
             | the underutilized category as most of the time workload is
             | under 2%. So I "fake" work to prevent reclaimation by
             | oracle and its worked well so far.
             | 
             | ``` # Oracle Cloud reclaims idle resources #
             | https://docs.oracle.com/en-
             | us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...
             | 
             | - name: Create cronjob for minimum CPU utilization
             | ansible.builtin.cron:              name: fake work to
             | prevent re-claimation              special_time: hourly
             | job: timeout 30s sha1sum /dev/zero
             | 
             | ```
        
       | trvz wrote:
       | Geekbench 5 results for rough comparison, best of 3+ runs:
       | 
       | ---
       | 
       | Intel 1-core VPS single: 719
       | 
       | (2 GB RAM)
       | 
       | ---
       | 
       | Intel 2-core VPS single: 729
       | 
       | Intel 2-core VPS multi: 1402
       | 
       | (4 GB RAM)
       | 
       | ---
       | 
       | AMD 2-core VPS single: 1141
       | 
       | AMD 2-core VPS multi: 2214
       | 
       | (2 GB RAM)
       | 
       | ---
       | 
       | Ampere 2-core VPS single: 872
       | 
       | Ampere 2-core VPS multi: 1716
       | 
       | (4 GB RAM)
       | 
       | ---
       | 
       | Ampere 16-core VPS single: 880
       | 
       | Ampere 16-core VPS multi: 12143
       | 
       | (32 GB RAM)
       | 
       | ---
       | 
       | And for some fun, my iPad Pro from 2018, single: 1135
       | 
       | If Android CPUs are 4 years behind Apple, then Arm on servers is
       | maybe 8 years.
        
         | smoldesu wrote:
         | At least till the big boys arrive: https://www.nvidia.com/en-
         | us/data-center/grace-cpu/
        
       | e63f67dd-065b wrote:
       | > The new server plans start at the unbeatable prices of just EUR
       | 3.79 a month, which includes an IPv4 address, and there is no
       | setup fee or minimum contract period. If users' servers only
       | exist for part of the month, they will only pay for the hours
       | when the servers existed. This hourly billing option gives
       | customers even more flexibility and will help keep costs low
       | 
       | Unless I'm blind, the price clearly says 4.52 EUR/mo with IPv4 at
       | https://www.hetzner.com/cloud for a CAX11 instance, the smallest
       | listed there.
       | 
       | Edit: nevermind, I didn't deselect Germany's 19% VAT. It is
       | indeed 3.79 euros before sales tax.
        
         | martin_a wrote:
         | 4.52 is the price with German VAT included, without it, it's
         | 3.79.
        
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