4 ms·

We used to run some basic infrastructure on Hetzner. The support was appalling – any requests for help were swiftly met with short answers such as "Unfortunatel

We used to run some basic infrastructure on Hetzner. The support was appalling – any requests for help were swiftly met with short answers such as "Unfortunately we can not help you here". That makes me question how responsive and understanding Hetzner's staff will be in case of an on-going DDoS that their automated systems are unable to detect and take care of. What sort of scenario would benefit from the announced DDoS protection? People are surely not running websites on commodity hardware.

dx034 10y ago
Any server would profit from it, you don't need to have a public website to be DDoSd
latch 10y ago
What type of support issues? I had servers with hetzner for years and I never had any problems, which also means I never contacted support, so I can't say. I'm trying to figure out if you were expecting support for things that most dedicated, colo and cloud providers wouldn't support (OS updates, install nginx, ....) or if these were clearly provider issues (hardware and network). > People are surely not running websites on commodity hardware. Huh? That's been the growing trend for...decades? It feels like the two places where pure server-grade equipment is used, high end dedicated hosting and collocation, are losing market. I'd go as far as to say high-end dedicated hosting is flat out dying (yay!).
- StanAngeloff 10y ago
  It didn't come across in my comment – my amazement was regarding WordPress, etc. websites being run on commodity hardware without proper backups. E.g., get that ludicrous 128GB machine and run Apache on it with a single website for years. What could possibly go wrong? The most recent issue we had with Hetzner was when we requested a LARA remote console to connect to a failing machine. The standard keyboard on the remote is German and much of the non-Latin keys are remapped. It was impossible to log in to a shell. All we got from support was "This is a standard Generic 104 key layout". That was it. Before that Hetzner rebooted a whole raft of machines and on one of them this corrupted ext2. We asked what prompted the reboot (not bothered by the dead server) and we got (as above) "Unfortunately we can not help you here". There were many more incidents before that and at the end it was just too much to swallow so we moved away. Just out of interest, what's your use case for Hetzner?
  - latch 10y ago
    Read-heavy APIs, which I like to setup as: A central location to take writes. Writes to this location go into a database and a durable, at-least-once, queue (writing to the queue is as important as writing to the database). Then you put your API servers in different geographies (and preferably different hosting vendors). They listen to the queue and update their own storage (which could itself be a full relational database). Edges aren't caching layer, since all the data is expected to be there (so, no miss). But certainly some of the data could be loaded in this way. The edges can also take some writes and send it back to "central", but you have to not care too much about the consistency (and maybe even accuracy) of that specific data. Throw a latency-aware DNS on top of it (anycast, geo) with a short TTL and good health checks and you don't care too too much about uptime, allowing you to focus on raw price and performance. Ironically, the only time I remember a serious outage (at a single location) was during a DDoS against a specific location at a much more expensive provider (not-rackspace-but-the-other-one-you're-thinking-about) which, of course, null routed us.
    - StanAngeloff 10y ago
      Sounds like a well thought out CQRS system. Thank you for taking the time to reply.
kuschku 10y ago
> People are surely not running websites on commodity hardware. That actually is such a growing trend that one of the more popular NoSQL databases is called... Cluster Of Unrealiable Commodity Hardware Database, aka CouchDB.

dx034 10y ago

Any server would profit from it, you don't need to have a public website to be DDoSd

latch 10y ago

What type of support issues? I had servers with hetzner for years and I never had any problems, which also means I never contacted support, so I can't say. I'm trying to figure out if you were expecting support for things that most dedicated, colo and cloud providers wouldn't support (OS updates, install nginx, ....) or if these were clearly provider issues (hardware and network). > People are surely not running websites on commodity hardware. Huh? That's been the growing trend for...decades? It feels like the two places where pure server-grade equipment is used, high end dedicated hosting and collocation, are losing market. I'd go as far as to say high-end dedicated hosting is flat out dying (yay!).

StanAngeloff 10y ago
It didn't come across in my comment – my amazement was regarding WordPress, etc. websites being run on commodity hardware without proper backups. E.g., get that ludicrous 128GB machine and run Apache on it with a single website for years. What could possibly go wrong? The most recent issue we had with Hetzner was when we requested a LARA remote console to connect to a failing machine. The standard keyboard on the remote is German and much of the non-Latin keys are remapped. It was impossible to log in to a shell. All we got from support was "This is a standard Generic 104 key layout". That was it. Before that Hetzner rebooted a whole raft of machines and on one of them this corrupted ext2. We asked what prompted the reboot (not bothered by the dead server) and we got (as above) "Unfortunately we can not help you here". There were many more incidents before that and at the end it was just too much to swallow so we moved away. Just out of interest, what's your use case for Hetzner?
- latch 10y ago
  Read-heavy APIs, which I like to setup as: A central location to take writes. Writes to this location go into a database and a durable, at-least-once, queue (writing to the queue is as important as writing to the database). Then you put your API servers in different geographies (and preferably different hosting vendors). They listen to the queue and update their own storage (which could itself be a full relational database). Edges aren't caching layer, since all the data is expected to be there (so, no miss). But certainly some of the data could be loaded in this way. The edges can also take some writes and send it back to "central", but you have to not care too much about the consistency (and maybe even accuracy) of that specific data. Throw a latency-aware DNS on top of it (anycast, geo) with a short TTL and good health checks and you don't care too too much about uptime, allowing you to focus on raw price and performance. Ironically, the only time I remember a serious outage (at a single location) was during a DDoS against a specific location at a much more expensive provider (not-rackspace-but-the-other-one-you're-thinking-about) which, of course, null routed us.
  - StanAngeloff 10y ago
    Sounds like a well thought out CQRS system. Thank you for taking the time to reply.

kuschku 10y ago

> People are surely not running websites on commodity hardware. That actually is such a growing trend that one of the more popular NoSQL databases is called... Cluster Of Unrealiable Commodity Hardware Database, aka CouchDB.