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I have been with Hetzner since 1999, and I have hosted with AWS for 2 or 3 years, before moving back to Hetzner, and I keep wondering when AWS will have anythin

I have been with Hetzner since 1999, and I have hosted with AWS for 2 or 3 years, before moving back to Hetzner, and I keep wondering when AWS will have anything to match Hetzner's price/performance. Someone from AWS proactively called me up out of the blue the other day to ask for input and to interview me about what I need, and offered to quote. I received a phone call or two and two emails and after mentioning the exact specs and price I get from Hetzner, and being genuinely interested in perhaps getting a competitive quote, I waited and received no reply for some time and then the following: "I'm sorry for my late response. I’ve been pretty busy these days…" "I had a look at what your technical specifications below and I'd like to understand a bit more what type of business you're doing." "One of AWS's main strengths lies in the scalability of our platform." "How much is the % of usage of your dedicated server? What happens if it reaches the maximum usage? At AWS, you can start with smaller instances and use auto-scaling to scale up or down automatically according to your traffic." "Is scalability a challenge for you?" There was no quote attached. :) Hetzner's price/performance is an elephant in the room it seems.

Slartie 11y ago
Hehe, I've been using different European-based dedicated server providers (including Hetzner, but also server4you, OVH, Strato) for 10-15 years as well, with varying numbers of servers. All of this happened during the cloud revolution, and I've always been wondering "why would anybody pay these outrageous AWS prices?" - after all, the much-hyped scalability quickly becomes much less relevant if you can practically get 5x-10x the power and traffic in the form of dedicated servers at the same cost, plus the capability of quickly ordering a few more servers (which are automatically allocated to you from a pool of ready-to-use servers, this has been standard practice at dedicated hosting providers for quite some time now) and have them installed in a matter of minutes (provided you've automated your setup process). Sure, you'll have a harder time to get rid of the additional servers, since rentals are typically on a monthly basis, but - did I mention that you'll start with 5x-10x the power anyway, which greatly reduces the need for quick up/downscaling? Aside from huge customers like Dropbox, which most likely get deep discounts on AWS, I don't see who else could get a better deal out of AWS (or any similar cloud provider) than they would get by directly renting dedicated servers, even considering the much-hyped scalability factor (which most customers probably don't ever end up needing anyway, because...let's face it, there's just so much attention going around on the net, which means there can be just a very limited number of things that "go viral", while there are many, many more services competing for said attention out there). That's at least true for the European market. AFAIK, the US hosting market is a bit different and generally more expensive, so AWS might have a better price point with regard to the competition there.
res0nat0r 11y ago
How do you handle massive traffic spikes? Hetzner seems fine for small project / personal / small company websites with predictable load and people who have no problem spending time setting up all of their services they need themselves, it really just sounds like you just aren't the customer AWS wants to attract.
- jorangreef 11y ago
  "How do you handle massive traffic spikes?" Well, how would you handle massive traffic spikes? Through a combination of vertical and horizontal scaling? Through having excess capacity? Except that I would probably want to start with something fast and inexpensive to begin with. If you wait until the spike hits before you spin up your VM you're still too late. I don't follow your line of reasoning, you seem to suggest that to build a scalable service you yourself would prefer to use servers with necessarily poor price/performance? Or are you saying that it's not possible to use dedicated machines to build a scalable service? Or that one should only use VMs, with their inefficiency and resource contention? How do you reason about disk seek performance? What happens when the spike hits, and another AWS customer on the box starts stealing CPU? Actually, traffic spikes were the reason we moved off AWS. A single dedicated machine at Hetzner gives 10x the headroom at a fraction of the cost. That buys you time and capacity when you need it.
  - LoSboccacc 11y ago
    > If you wait until the spike hits before you spin up your VM you're still too late. precisely. this is the other elephant in the AWS room. the only way to survive a spike without service degradation while vm spin up on that platform is through lambdas/s3 served pages/api gateway - but even lambdas lag behind traffic. but then you need to build your whole architecture for it anyway I'm running on AWS right now, but for other advantages and services, not for its scalability/price performance.
    - ownagefool 11y ago
      Baking your images and set your scaling thresholds lower should be able to largely deal with that. The thing is though, the scaling is nice but most folks just want the auto-recovery. You stick your app over 3 zones, you have autoscaling and you can run with a couple of Ops savy devs and largely forget about it. You no longer need to pay for that dedicated sysadmin who knows how to manage a datacentre when have a small number of technical staff. The extra hosting bills are less than hiring that other person.
btb 11y ago
My main issue with hetzner is the lack of any sort of firewall in front of the servers. Your chosen OS is essentially directly exposed to the internet.
merb 11y ago
how do you interconnect three nodes without a vpn on hetzner without paying twice as much as on aws? like a private network.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

Slartie 11y ago

Hehe, I've been using different European-based dedicated server providers (including Hetzner, but also server4you, OVH, Strato) for 10-15 years as well, with varying numbers of servers. All of this happened during the cloud revolution, and I've always been wondering "why would anybody pay these outrageous AWS prices?" - after all, the much-hyped scalability quickly becomes much less relevant if you can practically get 5x-10x the power and traffic in the form of dedicated servers at the same cost, plus the capability of quickly ordering a few more servers (which are automatically allocated to you from a pool of ready-to-use servers, this has been standard practice at dedicated hosting providers for quite some time now) and have them installed in a matter of minutes (provided you've automated your setup process). Sure, you'll have a harder time to get rid of the additional servers, since rentals are typically on a monthly basis, but - did I mention that you'll start with 5x-10x the power anyway, which greatly reduces the need for quick up/downscaling? Aside from huge customers like Dropbox, which most likely get deep discounts on AWS, I don't see who else could get a better deal out of AWS (or any similar cloud provider) than they would get by directly renting dedicated servers, even considering the much-hyped scalability factor (which most customers probably don't ever end up needing anyway, because...let's face it, there's just so much attention going around on the net, which means there can be just a very limited number of things that "go viral", while there are many, many more services competing for said attention out there). That's at least true for the European market. AFAIK, the US hosting market is a bit different and generally more expensive, so AWS might have a better price point with regard to the competition there.

res0nat0r 11y ago

How do you handle massive traffic spikes? Hetzner seems fine for small project / personal / small company websites with predictable load and people who have no problem spending time setting up all of their services they need themselves, it really just sounds like you just aren't the customer AWS wants to attract.

jorangreef 11y ago
"How do you handle massive traffic spikes?" Well, how would you handle massive traffic spikes? Through a combination of vertical and horizontal scaling? Through having excess capacity? Except that I would probably want to start with something fast and inexpensive to begin with. If you wait until the spike hits before you spin up your VM you're still too late. I don't follow your line of reasoning, you seem to suggest that to build a scalable service you yourself would prefer to use servers with necessarily poor price/performance? Or are you saying that it's not possible to use dedicated machines to build a scalable service? Or that one should only use VMs, with their inefficiency and resource contention? How do you reason about disk seek performance? What happens when the spike hits, and another AWS customer on the box starts stealing CPU? Actually, traffic spikes were the reason we moved off AWS. A single dedicated machine at Hetzner gives 10x the headroom at a fraction of the cost. That buys you time and capacity when you need it.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  > If you wait until the spike hits before you spin up your VM you're still too late. precisely. this is the other elephant in the AWS room. the only way to survive a spike without service degradation while vm spin up on that platform is through lambdas/s3 served pages/api gateway - but even lambdas lag behind traffic. but then you need to build your whole architecture for it anyway I'm running on AWS right now, but for other advantages and services, not for its scalability/price performance.
  - ownagefool 11y ago
    Baking your images and set your scaling thresholds lower should be able to largely deal with that. The thing is though, the scaling is nice but most folks just want the auto-recovery. You stick your app over 3 zones, you have autoscaling and you can run with a couple of Ops savy devs and largely forget about it. You no longer need to pay for that dedicated sysadmin who knows how to manage a datacentre when have a small number of technical staff. The extra hosting bills are less than hiring that other person.

btb 11y ago

My main issue with hetzner is the lack of any sort of firewall in front of the servers. Your chosen OS is essentially directly exposed to the internet.

merb 11y ago

how do you interconnect three nodes without a vpn on hetzner without paying twice as much as on aws? like a private network.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]