[HN Gopher] Hetzner GPU Server
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Hetzner GPU Server
        
       Author : matteocontrini
       Score  : 220 points
       Date   : 2024-02-20 12:39 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (robot.hetzner.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (robot.hetzner.com)
        
       | ecmascript wrote:
       | Not really related to their GPU offering but Hetzner is such a
       | great company. I have a dedicated server I rented where I host
       | all of my side projects. For the same price as one shitty VPS I
       | get 8 cores, 64GB ram and a disk of 240GB or something like that.
       | 
       | Just incredible, response times are incredibly low and there is
       | no cap on data. The few times I have contacted support they've
       | been great. The only times I have experienced downtime is when I
       | have stopped or rebooted the servers.
       | 
       | Can't recommend enough, especially if you are inside the EU and
       | care about data privacy. The fact that they're a european company
       | is of great value to me.
       | 
       | If you are new on server provisioning and want to learn how to
       | setup a new server, I wrote a small guide for how to do it for
       | node-projects (works for pretty much any web app if you replace
       | the node.js stuff): https://deployjs.com/ (hosted on that server)
        
         | gokhan wrote:
         | Had a server with them for more than 10 years. Had they
         | eliminated the setup fee, they would get more of my money for
         | sure for small projects.
        
           | ecmascript wrote:
           | The setup fee is a one-time fee though, so if you have a
           | server for many years that won't hurt so much. I pay around
           | EUR30/month for the server I am renting but I know it will
           | last a long time even if I get spikes on any on my many
           | projects. For a 8 core, 16GB droplet/vps at DigitalOcean it
           | will cost you ~$96/month. The performance is better at
           | Hetzner for about 1/3 the cost.
        
             | gokhan wrote:
             | Yes. I'm talking about occasional needs for a small server
             | for a month or two.
        
               | ecmascript wrote:
               | They have VPS cloud offerings similar to DigitalOcean as
               | well, with no setup fees.
        
               | gowthamgts12 wrote:
               | Why not go with hertzner cloud? No setup fees and you'll
               | be billed by the usage. Still cheaper than other cloud
               | providers.
        
               | throwaway11460 wrote:
               | The VM performance tax is huge. Also, no GPU and
               | limited/paid traffic (large limit though).
        
               | e12e wrote:
               | Use the server auction? No setup fee then.
        
           | sshagent wrote:
           | They often have a couple of servers with no setup.
        
         | Citizen_Lame wrote:
         | Ah yes, they are great if you messing about. Not so great if
         | you have crucial business server with them.
        
           | ecmascript wrote:
           | why not?
        
           | rapsey wrote:
           | We've been running stuff on their platform for years with
           | very little problems. Why not?
        
           | withinboredom wrote:
           | I haven't run into a single issue for years, what do you mean
           | by that?
        
           | elric wrote:
           | Care to elaborate on that?
           | 
           | I've been using their services for some 20 years at various
           | scales, and the only complaints I've had are that their
           | shared mailservers occasionally get blacklisted.
           | 
           | That, and the UI of their KonsoleH could do with a bit of a
           | refresh.
        
         | happylion0801 wrote:
         | Signed up from an Asian country and during signup they asked me
         | to upload a passport copy page.
         | 
         | I thought that was weird (I mean no other cloud provider asked
         | for it but okay). I uploaded anyway because I thought it's in
         | EU so they at least have better privacy laws so they may end up
         | deleting it later from their systems but I immediately got
         | rejected. Not sure why no reason specified. So now they have my
         | passport copy page without me having an account.
         | 
         | Oh well, seems like either they have an overly aggressive spam
         | filter that gets false positives or they don't really like
         | accepting signups from Asia
        
           | lakomen wrote:
           | Hetzner is pretty hostile towards foreigners.
           | 
           | And don't you dare suggest in their forum that foreign tech
           | is better than German, instaban.
           | 
           | Fuck Hetzner
        
             | EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
             | What German tech - AMD, Intel or Nvidia?
        
               | callalex wrote:
               | Please don't feed the trolls.
        
             | lukan wrote:
             | I can see a possible scenario, in where rather your general
             | attitude might have been the problem.
        
             | Shorel wrote:
             | I'm from South America, got a server with them, no issues
             | so far.
        
           | deltaknight wrote:
           | I had a similar experience very recently (albeit within
           | Europe). Did you try their manual verification process? It
           | was available to me after two failed automatic attempts, and
           | it basically had me send an email to Hetzner support asking
           | if they needed any more information. I got approved manually
           | the very next morning.
           | 
           | Maybe not the most customer-friendly experience, but I figure
           | half an hour of signup weirdness is okay for a solid after-
           | signup service in the long term, especially as that half an
           | hour is likely to deter a decent chunk of fraud.
        
           | lofties wrote:
           | Had the same experience. Contacted support for manual
           | verification, was online the next day with Hetzner. Machine
           | has been running without interruption for a year now.
        
           | EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
           | Same story from the US. I think they mostly worry that you
           | are trying to avoid paying VAT.
        
         | pmontra wrote:
         | Which server do you have on Hetzner that I missed? Dedicated
         | servers start at 37.30 Euro per month now there, the AX-41
         | couch is pretty good and has no setup fee. On the other side
         | I'm paying OVH about 12 Euro per month for two small VPSes and
         | they are even too much for me, performance wise.
        
           | e12e wrote:
           | Have a look at the server auction? Tbh, I would limit my
           | dedicated server rentals to server/ddr ram setups (which is a
           | little more expensive).
           | 
           | But if you just need some cpu (to transcode some video, crack
           | some passwords, what-have-you, run a game/videochat server) -
           | consumer cpu models give you unmetered gigabit or 30tb/month
           | 10gbps. So can definitely be worth it vs a VPS.
        
         | thatwasunusual wrote:
         | Ditto.
         | 
         | Been using them since 2012 or something, and have never had a
         | problem (that wasn't my own fault).
        
       | V__ wrote:
       | Note: For now for existing Hetzner customers only.
        
       | greatNespresso wrote:
       | Is Nvidia RTX 4000 solid for training? Alternatively this card
       | seems listed for around $1800 so at $180/month on Hetzner, it may
       | be even cheaper to buy it, depending on the expected usage.
        
         | Ayesh wrote:
         | It's with ample RAM and the latest Intel CPU. Assuming the
         | whole thing draws 100W, that's also including 72kWh of
         | electricity.
        
           | bluedino wrote:
           | I'm not sure what the exact 'rule' is here, but you wouldn't
           | use a contraction in this sentence.
           | 
           | It is, with ample RAM and the latest CPU.
        
             | sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
             | From https://www.yourdictionary.com/articles/contractions-
             | correct... -
             | 
             | Contractions can be used in any position in a sentence;
             | however, homophone contractions such as "it's" and
             | "they're" sound better when followed by another word or
             | phrase. The reason is that the sounds of "its" and "it's"
             | and "they're" and "their" are so similar that they can be
             | confusing unless they are used with the context of an
             | additional word.
        
               | zimpenfish wrote:
               | To be fair, the contracted version doesn't read nearly as
               | nicely.                   Q. Is it good for training?
               | A. It's with ample RAM and the latest Intel CPU.
               | 
               | vs                   Q. Is it good for training?
               | A. It is with ample RAM and the latest Intel CPU.
        
               | bluedino wrote:
               | I think they are agreeing with it not reading as nicely.
               | But you still need the comma. Otherwise it sounds like:
               | 
               | "It is with great pleasure..."
        
               | 0xcde4c3db wrote:
               | I think it's less to do with homophone confusion and more
               | to do with usage patterns relating the contracted part to
               | a phrase rather than a single word [1] [2]. By the logic
               | of the homophone explanation, the following exchange
               | should be much more acceptable than a sentence ending
               | with "it's" or "they're", but to me it seems equally
               | strange:
               | 
               | "Are you waiting for someone?"
               | 
               | "Yes, I'm."
               | 
               | [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkZyZFa5qO0
               | 
               | [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clitic
        
         | Aerroon wrote:
         | Why does this GPU cost so much? It seems to be like an RTX 3060
         | Ti/3070 with more VRAM and less power draw. Does that really
         | justify the price tag?
        
           | kookamamie wrote:
           | Because it's "enterprise".
        
           | HPsquared wrote:
           | Like Apple, they use RAM for market segmentation.
        
           | petercooper wrote:
           | NVIDIA's licensing. Note that the 3060/3070 is a "GeForce"
           | whereas a 4000 is a "Quadro". Then look at the GeForce driver
           | EULA: https://www.nvidia.com/content/DriverDownloads/licence.
           | php?l...
           | 
           | > No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for
           | datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a
           | datacenter is permitted.
           | 
           | I could never figure out why they allowed blockchain
           | processing, given how wasteful much of it was and how it
           | impacted card supply for years, but there you go.
        
             | pmontra wrote:
             | Because they made a lot of money selling to miners at
             | prices that maybe they couldn't ask to gamers?
        
               | 8organicbits wrote:
               | Wouldn't the GeForce license then say "no block chain"
               | and a different NVIDIA brand (BlockForce?) would allow
               | it, letting NVDA charge more for large scale mining?
               | Otherwise it looks like gamers and miners are paying the
               | same prices.
        
               | bbatsell wrote:
               | They do. But since most miners would just ignore the
               | license, they implemented LHR (low hashrate) beginning on
               | GeForce 3000-series that detects the types of ops used
               | for mining and artificially slows the GPU to about 25% of
               | its actual speed.
        
               | pmontra wrote:
               | They did that but with mixed success. One random link
               | from a Google search: https://old.reddit.com/r/EtherMinin
               | g/comments/t4mwxj/workaro...
        
               | latchkey wrote:
               | Their source code got leaked and it was reverse
               | engineered to defeat it. That said, it was all kind of
               | late in the game, GPU mining died not too long
               | afterwards.
        
               | sodality2 wrote:
               | I bet that now the AI demand spike will be the new crypto
               | demand spike that NVDA latches onto.
        
             | Aerroon wrote:
             | This seems insane to me. It makes me even more confused
             | that AMD/Intel aren't trying their hardest to go after AI
             | compute. Nvidia is basically leaving the door open.
             | 
             | But I suppose that the idea could be to protect their
             | gaming market in a way. If datacenters were buying up
             | gaming GPUs then that could cause shortages for regular
             | customers.
        
               | latchkey wrote:
               | AMD is trying their hardest.
        
           | stefan_ wrote:
           | Datacenter customers don't have options, gamers do.
        
         | rmbyrro wrote:
         | You have to discount the price of a similar server without the
         | GPU, tough.
         | 
         | But even so, it's still quite expensive. I have the impression
         | Nvidia charges more from data center customers. So, for cards
         | available to retail consumers, it's not a fair cost comparison.
         | 
         | With only 20GB, RTX 4000 has limited use... I was expecting
         | they'd be offering something with at least 60GB at this point.
        
         | kookamamie wrote:
         | No, not a great GPU for training. Consider something like
         | A5000, A6000 or their Ada variants - if you want to go full
         | "data-center", A40, L40, L40S are solid picks for small-scale
         | training.
        
         | brucethemoose2 wrote:
         | Are you going to be training constantly?
         | 
         | TBH renting a big GPU (A100 or better) and getting the run over
         | with quick is usually best. VRAM is everything.
        
       | christkv wrote:
       | How is the gpu for inference or tuning ?
        
       | SushiHippie wrote:
       | FWIW, on the server auction, you could get GPU servers since a
       | while:
       | 
       | https://www.hetzner.com/sb/#additional=GPU
       | 
       | Looks like currently there are only GTX 1080s on the server
       | auction, I don't know if they normally have other GPUs available
       | as well.
        
         | alberth wrote:
         | Nvidia RTX 4000 SFF Ada
         | 
         | From the OP link, the GPU-Server GEX44 server line includes RTX
         | 4000.
         | 
         | And the server only cost EUR184/month.
        
           | SushiHippie wrote:
           | I meant if they have other GPUs normally available in the
           | server auction. As far as I understand the servers in the
           | server auction are mostly custom built ones for customers and
           | once they stop renting them they land on the server auction
           | for others to rent.
           | 
           | The one with the RTX 4000 seems to be a standardized line of
           | products.
        
             | dizhn wrote:
             | They briefly had GPU servers before. I believe they stopped
             | when crypto messed up the gpu prices and supply. That's why
             | you're seeing them in the auction now. But they usually go
             | quick. This might change now since they have a brand new
             | offering.
             | 
             | The old GPUs would have very litle memory by the way. Not
             | ideal for AI.
        
               | albert180 wrote:
               | They stopped because they had a high percentage of abuse
               | with Morons mining crypto
        
       | aborsy wrote:
       | The price of a brand new Dell precision PC with a core i9 13900
       | CPU (24 cores), 64 GB RAM and 2X2TB NVMe is probably around
       | 2.5k$. It costs tens of Euros per month in electricity to run
       | this PC. The hardware is good to go for some 3 years, before
       | running into various issues (newer CPUs becoming much more power
       | efficient, firmware updates getting less and less frequent etc).
       | Consider also the cost of components failure, time wasted in
       | dealing with hardware, etc.
       | 
       | On hetzner it all costs less than 100$ per month. Doesn't this
       | imply that it's better to rent than to buy?
        
         | throwaway11460 wrote:
         | Yes, the volume discounts and economies of scale they can get
         | (while you can't) are insane.
        
           | singhrac wrote:
           | One of the simplest is that data center energy pricing is
           | just simply different from residential energy, because they
           | often get wholesale (plus small markup) rather than
           | residential rates.
        
             | formerly_proven wrote:
             | The majority of residential rates (about 40 ct/kWh) are
             | taxes and levies, not the actual price of the electricity.
             | That's why industrial rates can be less than half of
             | residential rates.
        
               | throwaway11460 wrote:
               | Can you be more specific? What kind of taxes? VAT is paid
               | by the end consumer so you're not getting out of that
               | one. Are there special consumption taxes on electricity
               | in Germany?
               | 
               | In my experience the largest difference is distribution
               | cost. The mandated distribution monopoly charges a lot
               | (regulated price) to small customers.
        
               | Propelloni wrote:
               | You need to compare prices again. Residential electricity
               | costs are significantly below your quoted rate for quite
               | some time now. I've just checked and the lowest rate I
               | saw was 21 ct/kWh. Most vendors are somewhere in the 25
               | to 30 ct/kWh bracket.
        
               | lelandbatey wrote:
               | Average USA energy prices are (according the Bureau of
               | Labor Statistics) ~$0.18/kWh at the moment, with some
               | folks at $0.40+ (San Francisco, San Diego, Hawaii) while
               | others are as low as $0.13/kWh (Seattle, Saint Lewis)
               | 
               | https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergypri
               | ces...
        
               | formerly_proven wrote:
               | > The average electricity price for households fell by
               | almost 8 percent at the beginning of 2024 compared to the
               | annual average for 2023 and now amounts to an average of
               | 42.22 ct/kWh (2023: 45.73 ct/kWh; base price included pro
               | rata for a consumption of 3,500 kWh/a ).
               | 
               | https://www.bdew.de/service/daten-und-grafiken/bdew-
               | strompre...
        
               | noAnswer wrote:
               | I'm at a small local energy provider. I have their most
               | expensive 100% renewable tariff. Even after the invasion
               | the price only went up to 28,36 EURct/kWh. Yet, my
               | parents pay above 45 to RWE. (That's what cheap nuclear
               | power stations get you I guess.) My father finally
               | changed providers but thanks to the super fair contract
               | has to wait now over a year for it to happen. And thanks
               | to the "Strompreisbremse" I have to subsidise those ass
               | companies.
               | 
               | sorry for being of topic
        
               | callalex wrote:
               | There's no point in having this discussion, it is
               | extremely specific to different locations.
        
               | EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
               | Large part of their operation is in Helsinki, where
               | electricity prices are a fraction of Germany prices.
        
               | singhrac wrote:
               | I think "taxes and levies" is a bit true, but also you
               | pay for distribution. If your power line goes down in
               | your neighborhood, you basically just grumble but it gets
               | fixed. In wholesale connections you pay for the
               | distribution power line (+ maintenance) basically up
               | front, but it doesn't get put in the final wholesale
               | bill.
               | 
               | This isn't to say your local utility isn't wasteful with
               | its ratepayer money; it totally can be. There isn't
               | enough pressure to lower rates. It's just worth saying
               | that these specific "taxes" do have an intended
               | destination, not just general govt.
        
             | xhkkffbf wrote:
             | In the winter time, I get free heat from my server.
             | 
             | In the summer, I have to pay to run an AC to get it out of
             | the envelope.
        
               | teaearlgraycold wrote:
               | Gotta run some ducting for that server!
        
         | schroeding wrote:
         | If you pay European (German) energy prices, this very well may
         | be the case, in my experience.
         | 
         | For some Hetzner servers (especially from their "Server
         | Auctions"), for domestic customers the cost of electricity
         | alone, disregarding the hardware cost, would sometimes be
         | higher than the rent Hetzner wants.
        
         | elric wrote:
         | They build their own servers using some custom components.
         | Economies of scale probably don't really factor into the
         | pricing of their GPU stuff (unless I'm seriously
         | underestimating their GPU customer base), but they do factor
         | into the peripheral stuff like PSUs, fans, hard drives, etc.
        
           | jsheard wrote:
           | There's some videos out there showing off their custom
           | motherboards, it's an odd mixture of standard-ish consumer
           | ATX but stripped down to the absolute bare essentials and
           | with some components rearranged for better airflow in racks
           | chassis they also build themselves:
           | https://youtube.com/watch?v=V2P8mjWRqpk
           | 
           | Another video showing the custom racks and other
           | infrastructure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM
        
         | wongarsu wrote:
         | Hetzner is not only able to get better volume discounts, they
         | also spend a lot of engineering time bringing down costs, and
         | have decades of experience doing so.
         | 
         | They offer some Dell Servers for those that really want them,
         | but most of their servers have a custom mix of consumer
         | hardware, server hardware and in-house hardware (for example
         | they use their own racking system), optimized to minimize
         | lifetime cost in a datacenter. For example most servers use
         | datacenter SSDs, but consumer CPUs.
        
           | dist-epoch wrote:
           | Hetzner is buying ASUS consumer AM5 motherboards, but with
           | the whole CPU + memory block rotated so that the memory
           | sticks are horizontal instead of vertical for better airflow:
           | 
           | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2P8mjWRqpk
        
             | justinclift wrote:
             | They also buy (at least) ASRock Rack motherboards as well.
             | 
             | Saying that from looking at the dmidecode output from some
             | of our dedicated server currently with them:
             | Handle 0x0002, DMI type 2, 15 bytes         Base Board
             | Information             Manufacturer: ASRockRack
             | Product Name: B565D4-V1L
        
           | cobertos wrote:
           | Do you have more details on their own racking system? I
           | couldn't find anything on this.
        
             | wongarsu wrote:
             | The best resource I know is a tour of one of their data
             | centers. Around minute 6 you get some nice views on their
             | current-gen racks, and later in the video you see the back
             | side, followed by the assembly of the servers.
             | 
             | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM
        
         | YetAnotherNick wrote:
         | It's definitely weird that cloud costs which is supposed to be
         | commoditized is differing by 2 orders of magnitude. Hetzner/OVH
         | seemed to have solved the hard part of making the service
         | cheaper but just can't solve the easier task of making the
         | platform usable. Why do I need to upload documents for
         | verification. Why can't I try server for 2 hours right after
         | signing up for the service.
        
           | mike_hearn wrote:
           | Those are part of making it cheaper. ID verification is an
           | anti-fraud measure and ensures that bans stick, which in turn
           | means they don't have to invest so heavily in heuristic anti-
           | fraud and "spam filtering" type work. A delay on provisioning
           | means they are provisioning hardware JIT in some cases,
           | meaning they need less idle float capacity, which in turn
           | drives down costs.
        
           | Scotrix wrote:
           | Have been in deep contact with data centre and rental server
           | offerings in the past, there is a crazy large amount of fraud
           | going on, e.g. 2 hours for free means 2 hours free resource
           | to DDOS.
        
             | YetAnotherNick wrote:
             | I don't want it free. I want to put $2 on the account. Try
             | the server and decide after using the server.
        
               | Scotrix wrote:
               | same problem, credit card fraud/chargebacks happening
               | anyway, that's why you have an intense verification
               | process to reduce the fraud going on.
        
               | albert180 wrote:
               | And they want a customer who will rent the dedicated box
               | for a long time and not wipe it after every 2$/2h
               | Trialcustomer
        
               | throwaway81523 wrote:
               | You can do that with Hetzner virtual (cloud) servers,
               | just not with dedicated servers.
        
           | delfinom wrote:
           | You can thank crypto for ruining the internet for us.
        
           | EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
           | Sure you can. I rented a server and after two weeks decided I
           | don't like it, and got refunded all the money, including the
           | setup fee.
        
         | brudgers wrote:
         | _Doesn't this imply that it's better to rent than to buy?_
         | 
         | TANSTAAFL
         | 
         | 1. Physical hardware is a useful abstraction.
         | 
         | 2. At the end of a three year cycle, you can sell something you
         | own. (This has associated costs of course).
         | 
         | 3. Rents can go up. Terms and Conditions can change. Credit
         | cards can expire or be cancelled. In other words, renting
         | introduces a significant dependency.
         | 
         | 4. You are your own most important customer. Statistically, you
         | are not The Clouds's most important customer. When The Clouds
         | has a fault, it gets resolved based on its business model.
         | 
         | Engineering decisions are specific to a specific problem and
         | all of them come with tradeoffs.
        
           | Dalewyn wrote:
           | >2. At the end of a three year cycle, you can sell something
           | you own. (This has associated costs of course).
           | 
           | This is huge and often overlooked or undervalued. Renting
           | means you have nothing when the contract ends, buying means
           | you have something for your money spent.
        
             | cduzz wrote:
             | A 3 year depreciation cycle may be reasonable for some
             | spaces but not others.
             | 
             | I'm not going to lose sleep over not getting firmware
             | updates; when they've got all the bugs on my stuff ironed
             | out I don't want more firmware updates.
             | 
             | I haven't done the spreadsheet work to identify the cross-
             | over point for where old systems become uneconomical but
             | when I've done it in the past for my heavily clustered
             | workloads it's typically better to buy an off-lease server
             | that's 3 years old and run it for another 8 years, than it
             | is to forklift all my infrastructure every 3 years chasing
             | the newest generation thing.
             | 
             | Certainly the cloud's got some advantages, but running
             | equipment until it's really old is also pretty good too.
             | I'd bet that AWS doesn't throw older systems out _just_
             | because they 're old.
        
               | CapeTheory wrote:
               | Do you happen to have a preferred source for these 3-year
               | old off-lease servers?
        
               | Slartie wrote:
               | > A 3 year depreciation cycle may be reasonable for some
               | spaces but not others.
               | 
               | Exactly.
               | 
               | I am running a server at Hetzner which has a CPU that was
               | discontinued about 7 years ago. I don't know the exact
               | age of the machine because it was already used when I got
               | it 4 years ago, but based on the CPU availability it's at
               | least 7 or 8 years old, potentially even older.
               | 
               | Nothing on that machine has failed in the last 4 years
               | except for HDDs (the spinning platter type), which are
               | immediately swapped when broken, RAID rebuilds,
               | everything's fine.
               | 
               | 3 years is no time for hardware nowadays. It can live
               | much longer, especially if storage is solid-state. And
               | the performance improvements often aren't substantial
               | enough to warrant a swap within anything shorter than 5
               | or 6 years.
        
           | k8sToGo wrote:
           | You forgot that Hetzner also has spare parts.
        
             | brudgers wrote:
             | And Dells have warranties.
             | 
             | And both offer service agreements.
             | 
             | And Hetzner is a straight line expense while a Dell might
             | be a depreciating asset.
             | 
             | And either both or neither may offer discounts off retail.
             | 
             | And so on.
             | 
             | Because that's the nature of actual decisions versus online
             | arguments.
        
           | chrisweekly wrote:
           | > TANSTAAFL
           | 
           | "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch"
           | 
           | (I had to look it up, figure I'll save someone else yhe
           | trouble)
        
             | nortonham wrote:
             | thanks, I had no idea what that meant either
        
             | echelon wrote:
             | It used to be moderately common acronym back in the 90's
             | and 00's. It felt like a blast from the past seeing it crop
             | up again.
        
         | tiffanyh wrote:
         | Yes.
         | 
         | This is what you expect prices to be when a vendor is buying in
         | bulk.
         | 
         | Cloud vendors _should_ be like  "Costco" (buy servers in bulk
         | and can pass along those savings & this is what Hetzner does)
         | 
         | The trick AWS (and other cloud vendors have done), is charge
         | "Uber Eats" pricing for Costco items.
        
           | fragmede wrote:
           | That's a really clever analogy, but is it really a trick?
           | UberEats delivers the food to my door but if I go to Costco I
           | have to make my dinner myself. Sometimes life happens and
           | UberEats isn't just a convenience thing, it's the only way
           | I'll manage to feed me and my crew. I could run a pubsub
           | queuing system and a database myself, but if I don't have to
           | do that, it frees me up to focus on the tasks I'm really
           | trying to accomplish instead.
        
         | whizzter wrote:
         | It seems a bit like car leasing, providers gets a bit of
         | discounts for their volume purchases and customers pays a
         | premium (that is still affordable) compared to just taking the
         | entire deprecation cost themselves. The provider then still has
         | something worth a fair bit of cash that can still generate
         | income (through resale).
         | 
         | So if you look at a 2 year horizon and want to keep cutting
         | edge (or prefer operating expenditures to capital expenditures)
         | then it's cheaper whereas looking at a 5 year horizon the
         | capital expenditure will pay off.
         | 
         | Hetzner is very bare-bones compared to regular clouds (a friend
         | who was after performance but wasn't prepared for this ran into
         | some issues when a disk died), so you need some procedures for
         | backup/replication in place but if your procedures are in place
         | then you can save big compared to the regular clouds.
        
           | chpatrick wrote:
           | There's definitely a tradeoff when it comes to maintenance
           | effort. You need to make sure your RAID and monitoring works
           | and if a disk fails you need to message support to replace
           | it. In general I've had a great experience with them.
        
         | treffer wrote:
         | Last time I checked the GCP prices vs. hetzner servers there
         | was a factor of 10 in monthly cost. So I cant say this is a
         | general rule of thumb. It is true though that hetzner can
         | provide superb performance per $. Potentially below what you
         | can do (unless you buy racks of hardware).
         | 
         | Also keep in mind that hetzner is mostly a beowulf cluster. See
         | e.g. this press picture from their newsroom page:
         | https://cdn.hetzner.com/assets/Uploads/IMG-0546-91.jpg
         | 
         | They do have dell servers, too. But don't expect to run on one
         | of these nodes unless the machine type has Dell / PowerEdge in
         | their name. This means the management capabilities are minimal
         | (but usually enough). A fully licensed management card can do
         | way more.
         | 
         | Their renting pricing is ridiculously cheap though. Hardware
         | failure is more common than on cloud providers (see cluster
         | hardware), support has been helpful in the past. Overall IMHO a
         | good choice if you are price sensitive. But even then consider
         | development vs. deployment vs. running (server) costs. Servers
         | might make up less of the total cost of a service than you
         | expect.
        
           | rthnbgrredf wrote:
           | To be fair, companies that merely launch VMs on GCP
           | constitute a small fraction. GCP truly excels when you
           | leverage its object storage, BigQuery, managed postgres
           | database (which starts at 7$/month), and serverless solutions
           | for cloud-native applications. Our company operates around
           | 500 services, with billing per second, and a significant
           | number of them are scaled down to zero when not in use. If
           | you need a GPU for a batch processing task involving 10,000
           | images, you can simply activate a VM equipped with a high-
           | performance GPU for an hour, pay for that duration, and then
           | shut it down. At Hetzner, you're required to pay for a whole
           | month upfront, regardless of whether you need the GPU for
           | just an hour each day.
           | 
           | Therefore, I'd argue that if you require continuous, raw
           | computing power, Hetzner is indeed cost-effective. However,
           | the cost-effectiveness elsewhere really hinges on your usage
           | patterns.
        
       | petercooper wrote:
       | I've just ordered one to ditz around with. We're early in the
       | process of deploying our own internal server for Mixtral work,
       | but it'll be interesting to see how this performs (in raw terms,
       | almost certainly worse, since we can roll out a 4090 without
       | getting into trouble - but Hetzner has a better connection and
       | handles the maintenance, so..) Order has been accepted but not
       | deployed yet. I'll update when I have some initial inference
       | numbers.
        
         | petercooper wrote:
         | I got it after a few hours. You need to install drivers/CUDA
         | yourself, but all very straightforward. Unfortunately due to
         | having 20GB of VRAM, I'm limited to
         | mixtral:8x7b-instruct-v0.1-q2_K but it runs fine, generating at
         | about 40 tokens/s (65 tok/s for eval). As per official specs,
         | it's running maxed out at 70W (being an SFF card).
         | 
         | (I've now tried running the Q4 mixtral which is 26GB. 18GB is
         | on GPU, 8GB through CPU. Gets about 11 tok/s.)
        
       | gregoriol wrote:
       | It's a good price at ~0.30$/hour comparing to Paperspace's RTX
       | 4000 with 30GB RAM at ~0.56$/hour.
       | 
       | Are there many other providers for such environments?
        
         | pacohernandezg wrote:
         | vast.ai, runpod.io, tensordock.com, ... I have just ordered a
         | GEX44 from Hetzner. :-)
        
       | binarymax wrote:
       | The GPU product page: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/design-
       | visualization/rtx-4000-s...
       | 
       | 20GB RAM, can fit 13B param models, and maybe some quantized
       | larger models.
        
       | ramesh31 wrote:
       | Does every European tech company have some kind of committe that
       | ensures their customer facing website looks like a decrepit ASP
       | page from 2004?
       | 
       | I mean what explains this? It's a billion dollar corporation and
       | I am having serious reservations about whether I would even enter
       | my credit card info on this site.
        
         | lakomen wrote:
         | It's true. And it breaks on mobile when you use the menu.
        
         | delfinom wrote:
         | Hetzner's site looks fine to me. Highly readable and to the
         | point unlike modern web shit where you have to scroll through 5
         | miles of marketing animatinos.
        
         | rsynnott wrote:
         | I mean, see also AWS; for a very long time their console looked
         | like something from the dark ages. I think they have largely
         | spruced it up now, though I'm not sure it helped _usability_
         | too much, and may have actually made it worse.
        
         | system2 wrote:
         | I see the same thing on HN posts. 1999 vibes everywhere.
        
       | hipadev23 wrote:
       | Just make sure any workloads you place on Hetzner are treated as
       | spot instances and outputs are immediately sent off network. The
       | reliability of their systems and customer support is very low.
       | Hetzner is a 5-star or 1-star company. Are you willing to risk
       | your business on the flip of a coin? My own experience [2] was
       | definitely a 1-star.
       | 
       | [1] https://www.trustpilot.com/review/hetzner.com
       | 
       | [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39075608
        
         | tomschwiha wrote:
         | I've been with Hetzner for around 10 years and didn't had a
         | single larger incident so far. Support also answered promptly -
         | didn't had the need to request a lot support so far. Running
         | 2-3 servers and a few cloud instances.
        
         | gizmo wrote:
         | Reliability and customer support are unbelievably good. 99.995%
         | uptime for the past 10 years. Hetzner will happily customize
         | your servers however you like, and at their low prices you can
         | have hot standbys for everything and still save money.
        
           | whizzter wrote:
           | My friend went onto Hetzner for the performance/price,
           | unfortunately the machines drive died within 2 months iirc.
           | Seems like if you're buying on auction you'll get a wiped
           | drive and if you're unlucky it's been written to a lot
           | already, don't remember the specifics but he really wasn't a
           | happy customer afterwards.
           | 
           | I think the last sentence you have there is pertient though,
           | maybe don't go for Hetzner unless you can also afford to have
           | a hot-spare (but for the performance/price you probably can
           | compared to any public cloud). In my friends case he was
           | boot-strapping but needed the CPU so he was really penny
           | pinching.
        
         | dr_faustus wrote:
         | Trustpilot is a scam which encourages bad reviews to force
         | companies to buy their paid plan to "manage" those bad reviews
         | and to feed it good reviews.
        
           | hipadev23 wrote:
           | Hetzner is also a fraudulent operation with zero support in
           | my personal experience. But as you can see in this thread
           | alone, any negative feedback is magically silenced. It sucks.
           | Maybe we go back to webhostingtalk?
        
       | dmaa wrote:
       | It looks like a good value for money, but immediately after
       | registering, I get this reply
       | 
       | "After reviewing your updated customer information, we have
       | decided to deactivate your account because of some concerns we
       | have regarding this information. Therefore, we have cancelled all
       | your existing products and orders with us."
       | 
       | Someone has a similar experience? I've tried it twice, filled
       | everything truthfuly, valid credit cards etc. and no still the
       | same.
        
         | stanislavb wrote:
         | I haven't faced this issue myself, however, lots of people from
         | India and some other countries have this experience.
         | 
         | I'd assume it's something to do with collecting recurring CC
         | payments from Indian cards. That's inherently difficult.
        
           | dmaa wrote:
           | That would also be my guess, but I live in western Europe.
        
         | breakingcups wrote:
         | There's a manual verification process if you contact support.
         | Obnoxious that it's needed, but works for many people.
        
         | belk wrote:
         | I got this when I first registered, contacted support and it
         | was lifted in a day or two.
        
       | nubinetwork wrote:
       | After the exchange rate, that's $270 CAD a month... after a few
       | months, you might as well just buy a raptorlake and run it
       | locally.
        
         | zymhan wrote:
         | Welcome to Cloud Computing.
        
         | throwaway81523 wrote:
         | It's a GPU system, not just raptor lake.
        
       | pinetroey wrote:
       | A few months ago I tried to register an account, but I was
       | denied.
       | 
       | I don't know why, never got a response...
       | 
       | I went with ovh.
        
       | ThinkBeat wrote:
       | I need some help:
       | 
       | I have no idea where the NVIDIA RTX 4000 SFF belongs in the
       | hierarchy of speed and suitability for "AI" computing.
       | 
       | How does this compare to a NVIDIA A800 40G? (if that is still
       | considered good, I can't keep up)
       | 
       | To me the RTX part of the name sounds more on the consumer side
       | but I am probably wrong about that as well.
        
       | renewiltord wrote:
       | They had a strange setup process. I had to scan my passport and
       | stuff. However, I did have a VPS with them that had uptime
       | greater than a decade and that I killed only because the
       | underlying hardware was going away. That was some 7 years ago or
       | so.
        
       | kristianp wrote:
       | It's running an RTX 4000 SFF Ada, 20GB GDDR6. Interesting that
       | they've gone with a single-slot, low power card. Doesn't pull
       | enough power to mess with their cooling/power design, I guess.
       | Not a lot of graphics RAM to do much with LLMs.
       | 
       | That card is about $1500: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C2KMXQYG
        
       | yread wrote:
       | It's a pity you can't commit to 3 year rental for a discount
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2024-02-20 23:01 UTC)