[HN Gopher] A day at Hetzner Online in the Falkenstein data center
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A day at Hetzner Online in the Falkenstein data center
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIjdKIMQh4s
Author : speckx
Score : 154 points
Date : 2025-11-18 16:18 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.igorslab.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.igorslab.de)
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Location of Hetzner's Falkenstein data centre, for the curious:
|
| https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/606528332#map=13/50.46220/...
| boldlybold wrote:
| Video didn't display for me even after turning off content
| blockers, here's the url:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIjdKIMQh4s
| tcfhgj wrote:
| works with Firefox + uBlock Origin + canvas blocker
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| Hetzner is awesome.
|
| I wish they would go public.
|
| Would be very interesting to see how their business is doing
| compared to IONOS and OVH.
|
| We need more public cloud companies in Europe.
| progbits wrote:
| Why would you want a company you like to go public? To keep
| chasing profits to the detriment of everything else?
| moooo99 wrote:
| Why in the world would one want a company like this to go
| public? They are a very stable, established and profitable
| private entity. Based on what Hetzner is doing right now, it
| seems like the current way of operating that is intended by the
| leadership is closely aligned with what their customers want.
| This is often the first thing that goes out the window once a
| company becomes public
| Freak_NL wrote:
| > I wish they would go public.
|
| I wish that they'll just keep on running a good profitable
| business without going public, or getting bought by Amazon, or
| otherwise shifting focus to providing shareholder value.
| sdoering wrote:
| This. I am a happy paying customer. Recommend them to my
| clients whenever it makes sense (more often than not). And
| hope they just keep running like they do as profitable
| business, like you said.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| > I wish they would go public.
|
| If they go public they will be bought by foreign private
| equity.
| baxtr wrote:
| Yes I agree, we need more public companies in Europe.
|
| Private companies are inherently less social since they don't
| allow ordinary people to participate in growth.
|
| In this sense, they're selfish.
|
| PS: yes I know that there are also downsides to public
| companies. But looking at the trade-offs I prefer that success
| can be shared as broadly as possible.
| bell-cot wrote:
| At least in America, "a successful private company went
| public" often translates into "ordinary people got a bit of
| gold, selfish vulture capitalists butchered the goose, and
| there was precious little success or growth for anyone after
| that".
|
| (Also - might your "allow ordinary people to participate"
| sympathies extend to people who would like to participate in
| your own financial affairs?)
| baxtr wrote:
| Yes, exactly!
|
| Selfish VC becoming filthy rich through an IPO is exactly
| my point. Up to an IPO a private company will only make
| their owners rich - in your example "selfish vulture
| capitalists".
|
| After an IPO anyone can participate. When Google, Amazon,
| Apple went public, VCs got rich. Everyone after that
| included every day people like you and me.
| bell-cot wrote:
| No - the selfish _vulture_ capitalists are the outsiders
| who purchase a private company which has been successful
| for many years, then butcher it. There is no IPO - it is
| "you own X, and we are offering you $Y million to sell it
| to us".
|
| After that - X's best assets are sold off (the VC's get
| the money), X goes deeply into debt (again, the VC's get
| the money), many of the employees are laid off, and X
| generally goes bankrupt within 7 years - because what is
| left of it can't make the payments on the debt.
| Gooblebrai wrote:
| I don't understand your comment. You are both talking
| about public companies, and suddenly you are now talking
| about private equity?
| bell-cot wrote:
| (You're right - I made a mess of things, and inter-
| mingled the cases where a privately-owned company is sold
| directly to private equity / vulture capitalists, and the
| case where a privately-owned company "goes public" - but
| that still does not lead to a happy ending.)
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >the selfish vulture capitalists are the outsiders who
| purchase a private company which has been successful for
| many years, then butcher it.
|
| Sounds like the selfish vulture capitalists are the
| insiders who sell the company.
|
| >X's best assets are sold off (the VC's get the money), X
| goes deeply into debt (again, the VC's get the money),
| many of the employees are laid off, and X generally goes
| bankrupt within 7 years - because what is left of it
| can't make the payments on the debt.
|
| This doesn't make any sense, because X is the original
| asset. If part of X is sold, then the remaining portion
| of X loses value (assuming the sold part is the good
| part). If X is used as collateral, then it also loses
| value.
| nchmy wrote:
| they offer by far the best value servers in the world. If
| that's selfish, so be it
| jeffbee wrote:
| The comparison with OVH is a good one. For some reason OVH has
| much worse PUE, self-reporting 1.24 vs. Hetzner's 1.11.
| Operating costs are basically just electricity for these
| places, so their margins are that much worse.
|
| For further comparison, Google at a similar latitude in Saint-
| Ghislain, Belgium, claims 1.08.
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| I don't understand anything in your comment, so I'm
| shamelessly posting some info from an LLM:
|
| > PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) measures datacenter
| efficiency - it's total facility power divided by IT
| equipment power. A perfect 1.0 means all power goes to
| servers; higher numbers mean more waste on cooling/overhead.
| OVH's 1.24 vs Hetzner's 1.11 means OVH burns 24% extra power
| on non-IT stuff, hurting margins since electricity is their
| main cost. Google hits 1.08 at similar latitude.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Damn Americans, can't think of anything other than "I wish I
| could make a buck off this, idgaf if it gets destroyed in the
| process".
| Anarch157a wrote:
| The last thing we need is more enshitification on this space.
|
| I just migrated my selfhosted email server to Hetzner and I
| don't want them turning into monstrosity like AWS or Azure,
| with theit miriad of ways to nickel and dime the customers.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Compared to IONOS, it is day and night. IONOS in my experience
| is just worse in every category that matters. IONOS has buggy
| and bad wannabe SPA web frontend, broken OS images, bottlenecks
| in their provisioning API, that they don't care to fix, and 10x
| the costs.
|
| If you are not desperate for one specific offering of IONOS,
| that Hetzner doesn't offer, and you have any other options,
| there is no good and justifiable reason to go for IONOS. IONOS
| is a low effort, low quality, high marketing spend shop.
| Hetzner is almost the opposite. They don't waste money on
| advertising, they cost much less to rent servers from, their OS
| images work, they got good technical support.
| esafak wrote:
| Do tech companies like Hetzner count as _mittelstand_ s?
| IlikeKitties wrote:
| "Mittelstand" in Germany seems to be roughly: below 500
| Employees, below 50 Million EUR turnover. Hetzner makes more
| like 400 Million EUR turnover but with 300 Employees. So it's
| technically above it but they are propably a very tight margin
| buisness. As such i'd say yes.
| elcapitan wrote:
| Mittelstand is singular (like middle class).
|
| I would say decidedly yes for Hetzner. Mittelstand can somewhat
| be characterized by size, but it's mostly that they are more
| like a family, have different values and more long term
| thinking than the larger industry and public companies. It's
| also kind of a brand that many companies would like to
| attribute to themselves, even much larger companies that like
| that seal of quality.
| noir_lord wrote:
| Had a server in that DC for a few years until recently (no knock
| on Hetzner they where excellent, just didn't need it any more).
|
| Robot is a brutally functional tool but it does function (well)
| and had zero issues.
| john01dav wrote:
| Regarding Robot, I think that it's completely fine for what it
| is. I almost never interact with it, and instead just configure
| my server as I see fit over ssh. Hetzner's value proposition is
| extremely cheap no frills servers -- you're paying for the
| server, not the management interface. If you want management
| interfaces that do a lot of useful work, use a cloud.
| noir_lord wrote:
| Yup, which is why I said brutally functional and not broken.
|
| I _like_ brutally functional it just needs to get me to SSH
| and I 'm good.
| jsheard wrote:
| Der8auer did some similar videos a few years ago, but in English:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2P8mjWRqpk
|
| The second is especially interesting as it demonstrates Hetzner's
| unique semi-custom hardware.
| yrro wrote:
| I love Hetzner. That said their IPv6 support is poor. A server
| gets a /64 only, if you want a /56 (allowing 256 container
| networks) then you have to pay EUR15. As for virtual networks:
| they only support IPv4!
|
| At least they're not as bad as Azure... :)
| matt-p wrote:
| Why do you need ipv6 on your internal network? Is 10/8 really
| not enough/overlap? For 99.99% of people it's fine for the
| internal interfaces and if anything actually simplifies
| configuration.
| yrro wrote:
| The purpose of a network is to allow any two consenting
| parties to communicate. IPv4 cannot deliver that if either
| party has an RFC1918 address. NAT is a foul perversion of
| this foundational principle of the Internet Protocol.
| matt-p wrote:
| On your *internal* network e.g the thing between your
| postgres VM and your webserver (or whatever). Not arguing
| against it on the public/wan connection.
| yrro wrote:
| There is no such thing as an 'internal' network.
| fulafel wrote:
| For a lot of use cases a major advantage of IPv6 is to get
| away from ambiguous rfc1918 addressing.
|
| You can then just put an allow rule between arbitrary v6
| addresses anywhere on the internet when you need connectivity
| without any other hacks like proxies, NAT, etc and the
| associated complexity and addressing ambiguity/context
| dependence of rfc1918 addresses.
|
| So fex you can just curl or ssh to your
| mycontainer.mydomain.net or you can put an allow rule from
| mycontainer.mydomain.net to a vm or laptop on your home
| network.
|
| Internetworking, they call it.
| matt-p wrote:
| I'm talking about an _internal_ network, not the public
| connection.
| fulafel wrote:
| The context in the GP comment was generally getting v6
| connectivity for containers.
|
| "Internal" is a context dependent term that you
| introduced. But to give a use case for that, for example
| you might want to have (maybe at a future date) two hosts
| on your networks on AWS and Hetzner talk to each other,
| still without allowing public connectivity.
| mulmen wrote:
| The benefit of IPv6 is that I don't need an "internal"
| network. Everything is on the Internet and the firewall is
| the only thing that gets in the way.
| speedgoose wrote:
| I disable IPv6 and I'm somewhat scared of the concept of having
| containers with public IPs.
| yrro wrote:
| Routable != routed.
|
| If your containers have a Global Unicast Address then it's
| possible to look at connetion logs and figure out which
| container made a particular request, for instance.
| matt-p wrote:
| Yes, not addressable is even safer. Especially so for
| someone not specialized in networking.
| yrro wrote:
| It's not safer: it impedes observability.
| matt-p wrote:
| It doesn't impeed observability for goodness sakes. It
| does however impeed accidentally opening up your internal
| network because you don't really understand your
| firewall/virtual router/whatever.
| yrro wrote:
| Of course it impedes observability. With IPv6, I can see
| the IP addresses of the containers that connect to a
| service. With IPv4, I get (at best) the IP address of the
| container host, thanks to NAT.
|
| Are you also afraid of port forwarding? Have you
| considered that your ISP could choose to send your router
| packets destined for RFC1918 addresses?
| bonyt wrote:
| Does each container network of the 256 really need its own /64?
| Is there some constraint that doesn't let them work on a /72?
| matt-p wrote:
| A container should absolutely not even need a /72. The
| traditional reason for /64 is for slaac but you most
| certainly don't need that for one container (if at all
| honestly).
| yrro wrote:
| Indeed, a host should be able to request a /64 via
| DHCPv6-PD and split that between millions of container
| networks. But you can't do that on Hetzner (or anywhere
| else).
| matt-p wrote:
| Yeah that obviously only works on /56 and above because
| networks should be a minimum of /64. I use k3s and each
| host has a /64; cilium just gives each pod a /80 and the
| host does NDP and stuff. Works fine, no need to require
| dhcp6.
| yrro wrote:
| In practice this can be made to work but a networking expert
| can probably explain better than me why splitting a prefix
| into chunks smaller than a /64, and assigning them to virtual
| networks within a host is a bad idea.
|
| In Hetzner's specific case: they won't give me one or more
| additional /72s: only a /56 if I pay for it. Per server.
| colonCapitalDee wrote:
| I have a tiny Hetzner VPS (2 vCPUs, 2 Gb RAM) in their west us
| datacenter that costs me $5.59 a month. I get 1 TB a month free
| outgoing bandwidth and unlimited incoming bandwidth, plus
| additional outgoing bandwidth at a rate of $1.20 per TB. I host
| my personal project's git LFS server there, a file server, and a
| Caddy instance that proxies over Tailscale to a more powerful box
| in my apartment. It's a great homelab architecture and I couldn't
| be happier with it. Thanks Hetzner!
| kalaksi wrote:
| They still have VPSes with 2G of RAM? I'm checking the cloud
| price page* and you can get CX23 with 2 vCPU, 4G RAM and 20TB
| of traffic (seems to say that it's 1TB for US) for
| 3,49EUR/month (~4 USD).
|
| You can save additional 0,50EUR if you go with only IPv6.
|
| Maybe it's location dependent, I can't get it to show me prices
| for US.
|
| * https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/
| stavros wrote:
| I think they retired a bunch of machines one or two weeks
| ago. I was prompted to upgrade my machine at no extra cost,
| anyway.
| colonCapitalDee wrote:
| Yep, just checked, 2 GB RAM. That CX23 sounds like a great
| deal, 20 TB of free outgoing is ridiculous. But I live in
| west us and I rarely hit my 1 TB free bandwidth cap anyway,
| so the added latency isn't worth it
| tcdent wrote:
| Hetzner certainly has this cult-like following mostly because of
| their low cost.
|
| I assume it is a recent push toward these kind of open frame,
| super minimalist, consumer hardware based systems (I don't speak
| german and didn't translate the video).
|
| It looks like they're using lots of consumer hardware and very
| little redundancy; you'll notice that the power supplies are
| generic ATX units and they're not doubled up. And then they're
| also running the onboard networking with a second connection
| which looks like it's for just a management system. Might not
| even be 10 gigabit networking.
|
| It's interesting that in an era where almost all of the major
| players are moving toward cable-free arrangements i.e. backplanes
| with fully integrated power and networking, etc., they're instead
| opting for the rat's nest of cabling. It must have something to
| do with lower labor costs vs hardware costs. The amount of
| density that they are achieving with those systems is also
| incredibly low relatively speaking.
| radiator wrote:
| 25 Gigabit networking is mentioned in the video. As for the low
| density, it might have something to do with their mentioned
| freecooling concept, which does not use cooling machines, but a
| controlled stream of air coming from outside.
| lifty wrote:
| This summer their Amsterdam DC went down because of the
| record breaking temperature in Amsterdam. Wondering if they
| use the same cooling technique there. They did mention it was
| because of cooling.
| arend321 wrote:
| Hetzner does not have a datacenter in Amsterdam
|
| https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/general/locations/
| lifty wrote:
| Ups, my bad. Confused the incident, it was Scaleway.
| g-mork wrote:
| Same old world thinking.. Google use single PSUs too, real
| redundancy came from having multiple machines, and Hetzner
| certainly makes that cheap enough to accomplish on a budget.
| You can also pay for 10 Gbit as an option with Hetzner, and a
| bunch of other custom upgrades, but the further you move
| outside their sweet spot the more it's going to cost.
| showerst wrote:
| I think a lot of the following comes the old-fashioned nature.
| In an age of hyperscalers that want to sell you a private cloud
| and full stack certification to make it your job to use their
| software and want to charge you $500/mo for a server with 64GB
| of ram and decent bandwidth, Hetzner will just rent you a
| server, relatively cheap.
|
| Amazon has _95 pages_ of EC2 instance types. They have so many
| products that I literally had to google the name to know what
| product type to put into the estimator to get a boring server.
|
| What's all that data center best practice get you[1], the
| customer, if it doesn't provide lower prices and higher
| availability?
|
| [1] -- I'm assuming you are not Netflix. After some scale all
| those crazy AWS services are pretty great to have.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| > I assume it is a recent push toward these kind of open frame,
| super minimalist, consumer hardware based systems
|
| If by recent you mean that was how Hetzner has been since start
| (20+ years ago) then yes
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| They no longer use consumer grade off-the-shelf hardware. They
| use their own mainboards (yes, custom layouts due to their
| unique cooling solution). Checkout the video from Der8auer on
| youtube.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Their technical support is also quite good, at least in my
| experience. Any questions I had they easily answered in a way
| that was easy to understand for me as a technical person. Not
| sure how it is for a non-technical person. But they might not
| rent Hetzner.
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