31 ms·

Hetzner removes traffic limitation for dedicated servers

236 points by TimWolla 8y ago

asdojasdosadsa 8y ago
Long time customer of Hetzner, and can't more than praise them. Cheap, reliable & super fast support.
- mark_l_watson 8y ago
  I totally agree. I have used them (occasionally) for years whenever I need extra compute for a few months, or for long term development servers. I especially like running large Haskell builds after updating to new versions, overnight machine learning runs, etc. on a rented server rather than my laptop. For me, GCP is a close competitor to Hetzner for a different use case: when I want a lot of compute for a few hours at a time.
nik736 8y ago
They should rather pay for DTAG transit than do such shenanigans.
- tombowditch 8y ago
  They have DTAG I believe, you have to pay extra for it though.
  - nik736 8y ago
    It's through Core Backbone, has nothing to do with this "unlimited traffic" thing and it is NOT possible to add that option for their cloud services.
- stemuk 8y ago
  IIRC they ended the DTAG transit agreement due to DTAG having unreasonable pricing requests for the renewed agreement (i.e. DTAG holding Hetzener hostage, you can read more about it here [1]. If you are interested you can still buy DTAG transit for your Hetzner servers via https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Double_Paid_Traffic/en https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Double_Paid_Traffic/en, do keep in mind however that this is a metered connection, not unlimited like for regular web traffic. [1] https://www.golem.de/news/hetzner-und-netzneutralitaet-extrakosten-fuer-bessere-anbindung-an-telekom-kunden-1511-117711.html https://www.golem.de/news/hetzner-und-netzneutralitaet-extra... (German)
  - nik736 8y ago
    I know perfectly fine about this. It has nothing to do with being held hostage. DTAG simply wants to charge more money, which is just business. You can either pay it or not. Hetzner decided that it's not worth it for them, the victim is the customer, because you probably are only able to download with around 5mbps in the evening from a DTAG connection. The upgrade is not possible with their cloud services, so it's a nightmare if you are a DTAG customer. The same as Level3 charges more than others (even though not as extreme as DTAG) because they think their pipes are premium.
    - yayana 8y ago
      Sounds like a nightmare to be a DTAG customer.. But why would all of us pay to subsidize DTAG when we want servers in Europe peered with our reasonable ISPs and there are plenty of French ones?
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
      Hetzner simply wants to pay less money, which is just business. You can either sell at that price or not. DTAG decided that it's not worth it for them, the customer is the victim, because you probably are only able to download at around 5mbps in the evening from a Hetzner server. The upgrade is not possible with their internet connection, so it's a nightmare if you are a Hetzner customer. I mean, yeah, sure, it sucks for the customer. What I don't understand is your implication that this is Hetzner's fault. Both sides could accept the other side's conditions, neither side did, all of that is "just business". What isn't "just business" is asking much higher prices than the competition for the same kind of service and expecting customers to buy it. And if you find that there are customers who do buy anyway, that's a hint that you are dealing with a monopoly situation, which is appropriately described as "holding people hostage".
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
  1. DTAG transit to where? 2. Assuming you don't really mean paying for transit, but paying DTAG for accepting traffic that DTAG's paying customers have requested to be sent to them from Hetzner: 2.1 Why? 2.2 When you say "they should pay", what you are really saying is "all of Hetzner's customers should pay". Thanks, but I am not interested. I intentionally don't use DTAG as a customer, and I am not interested in subsidizing those who do.
  - nik736 8y ago
    1. While of course the main reason would be to get a "paid peering", the DTAG network is also very good to reach other destinations, so technically it makes it transit. 2.1. DTAG has a market share of around 40% in Germany. Without a direct connection to them you won't reach them properly. The connection trough other Tier 1 providers is is awful congested. 2.2. I don't want to sound offensive, but it doesn't really matter what you are doing. You are the exception, most people and your customers don't care about their business tactics, often times it's their only choice to go with DTAG. Of course the traffic pricing would increase, this is why I called it absurd to wave the traffic pricing, because Hetzner is offering a crippled line to 40% of Germany.
    - mrunkel 8y ago
      Why do you think it's Heztner's responsibility to provide good service to DTAG's customers? If the connection between DTAG's network and Heztner's isn't good, shouldn't both networks work to improve the situation?
    - toast0 8y ago
      Your 1 and 2.1 don't go well together. If DTAG is well connected to other networks, it shouldn't also be congested when reached through other networks.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
      > 1. While of course the main reason would be to get a "paid peering", the DTAG network is also very good to reach other destinations, so technically it makes it transit. Just because DTAG also offers transit, doesn't make a peering connection a transit connection, so, no, it doesn't. That's as absurd as saying that DTAG is also very good at LTE networks, so technically that makes an internet peering connection an LTE connection. All this is about DTAG accepting traffic destined for their customers. Noone cares what DTAG charges for transit, and noone minds if DTAG drops transit traffic at peering points. > 2.1. DTAG has a market share of around 40% in Germany. Without a direct connection to them you won't reach them properly. The connection trough other Tier 1 providers is is awful congested. Which only explains why you would want to have a good connection to DTAG if possible. I asked why you should pay massively above-market rates for that. Also, suppose DTAG asked 1000 EUR per TB of inbound traffic. Would you still use that argument? If not, why not? > 2.2. I don't want to sound offensive, but it doesn't really matter what you are doing. You are the exception, most people and your customers don't care about their business tactics, often times it's their only choice to go with DTAG. It doesn't matter what I am doing when as a matter of fact I am doing what apparently most Hetzner customers are doing (that is: not buy DTAG peering traffic), which presumably is the exact reason why Hetzner still doesn't include DTAG peering traffic in their default package? Or are you saying that you think it shouldn't matter because Hetzner should raise prices for everyone, including me, to pay for DTAG peering traffic that most of us don't care about, because you know better what I should care about? My server has essentially no DTAG traffic, and certainly no bandwidth or latency critical DTAG traffic, so if you think that I should care about DTAG traffic, you are just wrong. Not every server is a public web server. Not every public web server is targeted primarily at a German audience, or even a German audience at all. I know when I need DTAG traffic and when I don't, and I don't care to subsidize DTAG traffic when I don't need it. Also, I don't think there is anywhere in Germany where DTAG IP is your only choice. > Of course the traffic pricing would increase, this is why I called it absurd to wave the traffic pricing, because Hetzner is offering a crippled line to 40% of Germany. That's just bullshit. Hetzner is offering a completely uncrippled connection to all of Germany. It's just that DTAG for some reason inserts a bottleneck into the connection of their customers instead of letting through the packets that Hetzner delivers to them completely free of any congestion. All you are saying is that Hetzner should raise prices so that I have to subsidize a protection racket that you choose to be affected by instead of giving me the product that I actually want. And all that while there are plenty of options on the market for high-priced hosting solutions that do include DTAG peering traffic, so it's not even that you can't buy what you want to buy. Just rent a Strato server, they are a DTAG company, and you will have no problem sending traffic to DTAG customers, instead of demanding that Hetzner offer the same product as Strato instead of what Hetzner's customers want.
- vidarh 8y ago
  Why? What proportion of their customers do you think care? I've used Hetzner for a lot of different things, and for none of them would the download speed for DTAG users be worth paying extra for.
samfriedman 8y ago
I'm always hearing good things about Hetzner and especially the value on their auction servers. Tried buying one on the auction once, went through a whole rigamarole to confirm my identity, send them ID pics, etc. In the end they decided to cancel the order due to "suspicious activity". I was baffled by that as we hadn't had any conversation besides sending them the order info & credentials. I assumed it was a weird false positive... wonder if I should try again sometime.
- vidarh 8y ago
  Basically you only need to go through their ID hassle once when you submit the first order on an account, at least that's been my experience. After that it's generally entirely painless to order further servers.
  - interfixus 8y ago
    Yeah, that's what I thought. Went through the passport routine, got approved, started mucking about. At one point, as part of experimenting, I deleted a VPS which happened to be the last one remaining. And bang! Account closed for lack of active instances. So I went elsewhere, and have been the ever since. Elsewhere highly recommended, by the way: https://lunanode.com/ https://lunanode.com/
    - nielsole 8y ago
      They deactivate accounts after a couple of months without activity but can be easily reactivated (I went through this earlier this year after having been inactive for multiple years)
- m0nty 8y ago
  I don't remember providing them with ID but I've been a customer for a long time, maybe it's a recent requirement. It's worth opening a dialog with them if you're having issues - you'll be conversing with a real person and they can probably be persuaded.
cbg0 8y ago
Link in the title might be slightly confusing as it is showing differences between current and previous versions of the page. Here's the current page: https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Traffic/en https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Traffic/en
humanbeinc 8y ago
Have been a customer for years now... they're one of the really innovative hosters from Germany with dead cheap competitive pricing... Also their new cloud options are top notch.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- hardwaresofton 8y ago
  I absolutely love Hetzner -- they're pricing is near unbeatable. To be a bit more precise, I believe that they offer cut rate pricing (which is not a bad thing if you're the consumer) but not cut-rate service -- there is just enough for a DIYer to be very productive and cost effective. This gets even easier if you use Hetzner Cloud directly, and they've got fantastic prices for beefy machines there too -- while a t2.micro on AWS is ~$10/month on hetzner cloud CX51 with 8 vcores and 32GB of RAM & and 250GB SSD with 20TB of traffic allowed is 29.90 gbp. Discovering the robot marketplace[0] (thanks to HN) was an eye opening experience for me that showed me dedicated servers were viable and could be competitive with the VPSes I'd been purchasing/using for years (I was so excited I wrote blog posts about it). I've recently been thinking about making a subreddit for hetzner (r/hetzner), so fellow users can talk with each other but I am worried it would do more harm than good (increasing the burden on them in terms of having to do PR in yet-another part of the internet that can be pretty toxic in terms of community at times). You can even deploy to them with terraform[1]. -- warning, rant/ramblings below -- I feel like I say the same thing all the time, but I'll repeat it again here -- if devops/infrastructure goes at all correctly in my mind, going to one vendor for both your compute/data and your value-added services (so asking AWS for EC2 machines and to run RDS on top of them for you and offer support) is going to dissipate. Smaller companies can run sufficiently niche (many might disagree but I think running postgres is within this ) with more innovation and decent support for less cost than Amazon can. The vast majority of people who run RDS with something like Postgres as a backend are unlikely to run into crazy issues simply due to how well postgres is built, and how well known it is, outside of gross misconfiguration. Companies are already offering on-your-cloud solutions that use EC2 machines to run their own software and offer support on top -- as container orchestration systems become even more widespread I think people will stop asking AWS or GCP for more than basic compute/data and a few tools they're really good at, and go to more specialized smaller vendors. [0]: https://robot.your-server.de/order/market https://robot.your-server.de/order/market [1]: https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/hcloud/r/server.html https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/hcloud/r/server.html
Keyframe 8y ago
That's what, up to max. ~300TB / month, at 1Gpbs?
- nik736 8y ago
  1 Gbps = 0,125 GB/s 0,125 * 86.400 (1 Day) = ~10,8 TB per day Theoretically you can also use inbound and outbound at the same time.
- Tepix 8y ago
  648TB (assuming 1GBit up and down each), see https://www.heise.de/netze/tools/bandbreitenrechner/ https://www.heise.de/netze/tools/bandbreitenrechner/
  - chrisper 8y ago
    You can't saturate 1 Gbit up and down at the same time. It would be either 1 Gbit up or down, or 500 Mbit both.
    - gnode 8y ago
      Why? 1GBit Ethernet is conventionally full-duplex.
      - chrisper 8y ago
        Looks like you are right. I must have mixed up something I read recently.
  - Keyframe 8y ago
    I've meant uplink only, but yeah. That's a lot of free bandwidth then!
buboard 8y ago
this is gonna be great for my gaming server ... not that i ever reached the quota
gator-io 8y ago
We get a ton of bot traffic from Hetzner servers.
- zaarn 8y ago
  I recommend to nag their abuse mail, they tend to forward abuse information to the server owner first (which is awesome for people running stuff on their service, I got locked out of a previous provider in the US after someone fired a malicious abuse complaint against me)
  - confact 8y ago
    I had Hetzner before and got my server locked out from a malicious abuse complaint and the support ignored my emails, I had to call them, from abroad to get my server's access back just because some thought it was fun to "swatt" my server. I moved pretty quick from there after that.
  - tetha 8y ago
    We had some of our legacy setup on hetzner used in a DDoS reflection attack a year ago. That was handled really professionally by Hetzner imo. They null routed the systems and requested us to get in contact with them within a couple of working days or they'd void the contract. We handed them our office IP to whitelist. Once I could get back onto the systems, I could finally overrule all the stupid legacy hesitation and setup firewalls on the systems. From there, the support confirmed the ports are closed and the servers got freed again. Good experience, in spite of the circumstances. And the remote hands at hetzner are good, especially if you know how to work with DCOPs. You know, have redundant systems, shutdown the broken system so they can just do whatever they have to do once they're around.
- razakel 8y ago
  >We get a ton of bot traffic from Hetzner servers. Because they're a discount provider. OVH has the same problem.
  - gator-io 8y ago
zaarn 8y ago
Recently got a very neat server box from the auctions page, having the traffic limits removed would be amazing indeed. Quite satisfied with support too. (Though I wish I could get a hold of a /48 IPv6 subnet from them, pfSense doesn't like /64 only networks).
- hoffs 8y ago
  Are you running pfsense on remote server??
  - zaarn 8y ago
    Why wouldn't I? It seems to be a pretty solid FOSS Firewall solution from what I've experienced. I never really saw a reason not to do it.
  - Operyl 8y ago
    It works great, have used it in the past. Right now I’m using openwrt/lede in a VM as a NAT for VMs that don’t need a dedicated external IP. It took seconds to set up.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
  > Though I wish I could get a hold of a /48 IPv6 subnet from them, pfSense doesn't like /64 only networks Please pester them about this. (Technically, you can, but they charge extra, which is just braindead.)
  - zaarn 8y ago
    Might try that, thanks!
- lambada 8y ago
  Could you elaborate more about how pfsense doesn't like just /64? As someone who ordered a Hetzner server from them a couple of days ago after a hefty price increase from my current provider this concerns me - getting IPv6 working through pfsense and into machines behind it is the next tech project I have on my list!
perlpimp 8y ago
My personal server is with them, their response has been better then some 'enterprise level' server solutions in my country. while costing hundreds of times less.
aogl 8y ago
Hetzner rocks, have used them for years and they are super reliable and their (more recent) cloud hosting options are dead cheap but also really good! Great to see them features on HN!
- levosmetalo 8y ago
  Honestly, I was a bit worried when switching from Digitalocean, but everything still works perfectly for half the price. The only lacking part is the general Linux documentation and how-tos, but whatever DO writes still applies to all other providers. They are the best kept hosting secret.
  - joering2 8y ago
    +1. Smart move switching away from DigitalOcean. I dont know what the heck is going on with them recently but I started moving away as well. What broke camels back was limit on number of servers you can have which is 12 at the moment i believe. How the heck am i going to grow a startup if thats a ceiling? Google is also full of stories of abruptly interrupted and frozen accounts that you have tiny chance of getting resumed because they don’t tell you what is wring due to “security concerns”.
    - jarland 8y ago
      Hey friend, I'm sorry that you've had a bad experience, but we can help. Our support team will gladly increase that limit for you on request. On the stories that you read, I hear you. It's a tough situation because I don't want to discount anyone's story. What I do want to point out is that there are two sides to every story, and in such a relationship one party has the duty of protecting privacy of the other. Sometimes we make mistakes and we need to correct it. Sometimes what we do upsets people when we work to protect our customers from those who would seek to abuse our platform. Abuse of our platform lowers quality of service for everyone, and that is why it is our duty to manage that. Each story will have it's own variables, and I'm happy to discuss anyone's situation with them personally. If you have any questions or there is anything I can personally help with, please feel free to reach out at jdonnell@digitalocean.com. Jarland
osrec 8y ago
Their virtual servers are really very cheap. How do they compare with AWS/Vultr/Digital Ocean? Do they have an API for automation and is it reliable?
- wut42 8y ago
  Absolutely! It's based on Xeon Gold and NVMe disks. Works pretty well. I'm running there CI and a couple of stuff since cloud was announced -- had a bit on downtime on a single VM, some network issues, otherwise: all good. They have an API.
- manveru 8y ago
  They have a really good and simple API for the Cloud hosting at https://docs.hetzner.cloud/ https://docs.hetzner.cloud/ and there's also https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/hcloud/index.html https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/hcloud/index.html I've been using this to setup some servers with little effort. For dedicated hosting there is https://robot.your-server.de/doc/webservice/en.html https://robot.your-server.de/doc/webservice/en.html I just wish they had NixOS images so I'd save a few minutes of initial deploy time.
- petercooper 8y ago
  I "downgraded" from a physical server to a VPS with them when Cloud launched and have saved a ton of money and the performance isn't miles off. Great success so far. Network is solid within Europe though have noticed the occasional bit of weird routing to the US.
  - osrec 8y ago
    Could you elaborate on the weird routing in the US please? I ask because my app has a bunch of US users.
    - petercooper 8y ago
      I'm not a qualified networking engineer, but we had some US users report outages which we investigated from US-based servers and noticed the normal routing was screwy (in the sense that the normal direct routes weren't being taken so latency was high). These incidents lasted under ten minutes and I wrote them off as being peering related incidents as they had no effect on European traffic. I accept minor things like this as part of the price for hosting in Europe, and have certainly experienced the same issues going the other direction (i.e. me reaching US-based services) more often.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Bayart 8y ago
A mere decade after French hosts.
owlninja 8y ago
How is the connection speed/latency for these for someone in the US? Been shopping for a hobby/personal server
- xeroxmalf 8y ago
  Canada here but I get 40-50mbps single threaded / connection. Anything multithreaded I can max my 200mbps home connection out.
esseti 8y ago
does anyone have a tutorial/guide on how to use hetzner for a k8s deployment, the one of GCP is rather expensive for something of that size..
- talkingquickly 8y ago
  This is a really good starting point; https://github.com/hobby-kube/guide https://github.com/hobby-kube/guide I've used it for several projects and it works a treat.
  - esseti 8y ago
    well, i need a cluster not just for hobby.
- growt 8y ago
  http://stytex.de/blog/2018/01/29/deploy-kubernetes-hetzner-cloud-openebs/ http://stytex.de/blog/2018/01/29/deploy-kubernetes-hetzner-c...
Timucin 8y ago
I was a customer of Hetzner for years but my experience was way worse than others unfortunately. I have lost my data twice on different hardware. The first one was totally Hetzner's fault since they have failed to identify the faulty disks when they check the disks for it. They were like `oops, sorry, it seems second disk was faulty too` AFTER I tried to re-build the RAID array on a recovery attempt. And the second one was being a bit unlucky, the RAID card didn't detect the faulty disk and tried to sync the broken disk with the healthy ones. So I lost data on a RAID-10 array, twice. I asked them to do tests on the faulty hardware to identify the problem, to confirm my suspicion, so I could go back to my clients with a proper explanation and things got interested at this point; While I was talking to the technical people at Hetzner and trying to explain why I think the RAID controller is the problem and how the RAID logs are confirming that, a guy called Arno, Head of Product Advice and Sales took my ticket over. He said; ``` First of all we want to apologize for what happened. Why it happened is hard to say. As you wrote at least one disk was so faulty that your data was corrupt. Those things can happen and from our point of view no one can prevent from happening again. The only things that help are good backups and a good recovery strategy, which I think you have both. Of course extra efford on your end occurs for recovery and since it happend the 2nd time, we want to compensate you for that. What compensation would you expect from us? ``` which was kind of ridiculous because I didn't ask for a compensation, I didn't even imply that I want a compensation for what happened. I was simply requesting a solid explanation and/or confirmation and this guy was saying that I lost my data on a RAID-10 array because 1 (ONE) of the disks were faulty. I asked him to handover the tickets to the technical people since he's from sales and what he says doesn't make sense. Also provided him some numbers about how much money the sites were making on that lost server, just to prove how wrong he is to approach to the matter from that perspective and guess that was the bit what triggered him. He fought so hard to not handover the ticket back to the technical people, explained how much he knows about RAID-10, how loosing the server is our fault while making so much money the sites because the server was cheap (WTF?), they won't do the testing because they host many more servers with the same hardware and they are just working fine etc. After using Hetzner for 7 years, I cancelled the service I take from them, along with other 11 company accounts and tens of dedicated servers and never looked back. Hetzner is a company that ask you to move from their network to some other provider when you ask what happens if you get DDOSed (this happened before they introduced the DDOS protection). So never again...
cbluth 8y ago
I am considering some servers from hetzner. Does anyone know of a decent solution to put a few of these servers on the same "protected lan"?
- vbezhenar 8y ago
  VPN
- TimWolla 8y ago
  Hetzner recently introduced the vSwitch feature. I believe it might be what you are searching for: https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Vswitch/en https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Vswitch/en
  - chaz6 8y ago
    I noted that if you assign public addresses on the vSwitch network, it is limited to 1TB free transfer per month, with each additional TB charged at €1 (plus tax) per TB (for outgoing traffic).
- cuu508 8y ago
  You can get physical private LAN! Usually an overkill, but it's possible. When you order, you can specify extra things you will need. For example, you can ask for a secondary NIC on each server, and to connect up the secondary NICs through a dedicated switch. There are some caveats though: * more expensive. When your servers have non-standard configurations, Hetzner charges a fixed extra per-server, per-month fee ("Flexipack"). The fees add up. * The servers need to be in the same rack. If you order them all at once it's fine. But if you order, say, four servers now, and the fifth server a month later, the fifth one will go on a separate rack and won't get the private access to the four. * Setup takes longer. If you order standard configuration, it will be ready in minutes/hours. When I ordered the extra NICs and switch, it took about a week to complete the order. * A bit more configuration required. Primary NICs work out of the box. For the secondary NICs to work you need to tweak /etc/network/interfaces and the routing table.
  - 8y ago
bpye 8y ago
This is pretty great news. Reducing bandwidth costs is definitely a good thing. I've always wondered how people run their own (personal use or side project) services on bare metal or VPS providers manage them without spending too much time. I've found that trying to run even a few services and have a reasonable solution for backups, software updates, etc to take more time and effort than it seems is worthwhile, it makes Heroku and App Engine particularly appealing as a lot of the issues are kinda solved with managed cloud providers. I would love to hear how people make this work.
- _eht 8y ago
  If you invest some initial time into a few shell scripts your management time is very minimal and your cost savings is monumental. Another investment into a couple python scripts and API access to Linode (vps provider) and you can easily auto scale on demand with the best of them. As a practical example, I run a cluster of auto scaling servers for around $500/month. The same infrastructure and traffic cost me almost $3,500 on AWS.
- Operyl 8y ago
  I have a KVM hypervisor machine with a bunch of python scripts to make cloud-init images for deployment of my VMs. Best 5 hours of time spent, ever.
- h1d 8y ago
  When you realize AWS/GCE/Azure costs you about $0.1/GB for bandwidth, it scares me it can be DDoSed to the point your bill goes out of the normal proportion so easily. Other places have TBs of bandwidth within their < $50 plans.
  - ApolloFortyNine 8y ago
    If you do move to Hetzner, you will quickly realize the value of premium bandwidth. Maxing out your Hetzner pipe is quite difficult in my experience. OVH/AWS (my other two experiences) on the other hand maxes out the pipe without issue.
wink 8y ago
Maybe I'm the odd one out, but apart from the new cloud stuff 've had nothing but bad experiences. Many years ago: HDDs died like I've never seen it before, one every few months with just a couple of servers. ca. late 2013: We had some production systems running on Hetzner hardware, we regularly! called their support to tell them the DC lost connection because our monitoring apparently was better than theirs and they acted surprised for not hearing something yet. Only like 2-3 years ago: Got a new server, had SMART issues and had to have the disk replaced before the first 24h after ordering were up. An ex-coworker of mine joked they must have added the "please change the disk" option in the support form just for him because he was running 20+ servers and actually had to call them every week to replace a dying disk. Yes, this was all years ago - but I'd rather pay servers out of my own pocket than be oncall for production servers there, ever again.
- chappi42 8y ago
  > I'm the odd one out You are (from my 10+ year experience with Hetzner at least).
  - scotu 8y ago
    loving this comment: a: am I the odd one? b: based on my 1 datapoint yes (ok it's 10 years but still one customer?) :)
    - chappi42 8y ago
      Your right of course, but as we don't know the Hetzner statistics it's hard to say something definitive. -- As you (wink/scotu?) provide 1 datapoint I was thinking 1 datapoint from my side should be defensible :-)
      - quickben 8y ago
        So, it seems my chance, if I go with them, is 50-50.
- baybal2 8y ago
muks 8y ago
I've been a Hetzner customer for several years. I'm yet to have a faulty disk experience with them, but that's not what this post is about. This month I "purchased" another EX41 server. Something made me wonder if the hard disks on the machine allocated to me were old ones previously used for some other customer, so the first thing I did after installing Linux was to look at smartctl output. Not only were the disks new (power on hours) but as part of provisioning the machine, they seem to have performed a "long" self-test on the disk (see smartctl -t in its manpage). I was impressed by this, because they seem to have checked that I didn't get bad disks on arrival. This is probably expected of such a service provider.. but I've seen worse.
- zifnab06 8y ago
  They wipe smart before giving you drives. Ovh does the same. Most drives have a serial interface you can connect to with a special cable to do it.
  - _wmd 8y ago
    Any reference for that? Didn't know it was possible. Is it just to minimize customer complaints about otherwise good-enough hardware?
lokl 8y ago
Satisfied customer of their cloud. Was a satisfied customer at Linode for 10+ years but found Hetzner's offer too good to not at least try and I've seen no reason to switch back.
burtonator 8y ago
Hetzner is great. We host about a petabyte of search data on them over at http://www.datastreamer.io/ http://www.datastreamer.io/ (my search company). I'm working on a new startup around a personal web archive and annotation system (https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/) which uses Firebase but I would love to figure out how to use Hetzner as their prices are amazing.
- iagovar 8y ago
  Hi, is datastreamer similar to webhose.io? Can't check now from mobile.
- ar-jan 8y ago
  Polar Bookshelf looks very interesting! Aside: on the frontpage "forum" links to GitHub, and Discord links to Reddit.
- yazr 8y ago
  Is there any reason u r not supporting epub? Is it just prioritizing or are there licensing/copyright complications ?
  - webmaven 8y ago
    Same Q here, burtonator. Please consider supporting EPUB.
haroldp 8y ago
Anyone want to compare experiences between OVH/Soyoustart and Hetzner?
- n3storm 8y ago
  Soyoustart servers are not always (ever?) available and connection is not usually the best and they may cannot solve it because of customer agreement. Also, Support takes much longer, maybe days, to respond. If you see them as learning servers they are ok, plus you learn to negotiate with support ;)
- zaarn 8y ago
  I'm currently moving from SYS to Hetzner, the prices are much better and support has been great. If you want to get something cheaper than SYS Dedicated boxes I definitely recommend looking at the server auction (which is basically SYS but different). I managed to grab a 128GB server for very cheap. If you don't have an account you'll likely need ID verification, it was a while ago but to my recollection they'll simply hold the purchase for you while they verify so you don't loose a good spot. Plus you have to do it only once.
zawerf 8y ago
On AWS or GCP the cost per GB transferred is around $0.10. Even if you put a cheap CDN on top, it costs around $0.01 per GB. How is it possible that Hetzner (and other unmetered hosting) are giving it out for free? If you max out the 1 Gbit for a month that's ~300 TB. GCP and AWS would've charged you $30,000 for that!!! Are the cloud providers just not competing with each other on price? How has the price remained so high for so long?
- brianwawok 8y ago
  Take a latency benchmark for a hetzner server in a crowded DC streaming GBs of data and GCP. I suspect you will see a quality difference over time. That said many apps can deal with more latency. Image sharing sites would care more about cost vs latency compared to a multiplayer game. GCE introduced a tier of lower perf but cheaper network. Hopefully the trend continues.
- lfittl 8y ago
  Quality of the backbone matters - Hetzner is going for the cheapest it can find, and (presumably) peering where it can, with whomever it can find. AWS and GCP both have much more investment into their own backbone, plus higher quality transit providers.
- JoshTriplett 8y ago
  Amortization helps; even if you offer unmetered bandwidth, relatively few people will max it out 24/7. So even if they offer unmetered 100Mbps or unmetered 1Gbps, their net bandwidth won't necessarily be customers * 1Gbps.
- berns 8y ago
  > Are the cloud providers just not competing with each other on price? You mean the big three. Other cloud providers are certainly competing: Digital Ocean is $0.01/GB, Oracle Cloud $0.0085/GB, OVH and Scaleway are unmetered.
- inapis 8y ago
  So bandwidth is actually very cheap. It certainly costs nowhere as much as AWS/GCP charge. Some reports peg their margins on bandwidth at >90%. That said, I've frequently seen parallels between razor + razor blades pricing and how AWS/GCP price compute vs bandwidth. Computing is cheap, by some measures, but almost all customers will egress that data somewhere and once you've done your computation, you'll pony up whatever prices they demand for letting that data "egress"
parliament32 8y ago
Hetzner has been fantastic, been using their dedis for several years now. You can get rock bottom prices on their robot-auction-house thing too.
ohopton 8y ago
Hetzner is great - we run a couple of Ethereum nodes (non-mining) on there and we've had zero issues with it for nearly a year. Great support, had SSDs installed almost immediately, almost no downtime. Cheap!
craftoman 8y ago
Fresh Hetzner customer here. I've been using their services for personal use for about 2 months now without any problems. I'm running speed and benchmark tests regularly and they are actually very positive. I heard their old Cloud panel was crappy but this one seems very promising. It's modern and simple like those in Vultr or Digital Ocean.
ElectronShak 8y ago
Hey guys, so after i saw this on the front page, and visited the site, there rates were surprisingly really low, I actually decided to try out the service. TL:DR Its not as rosy or great as some people here suggested, and their response on contacting them came off as a little harsh to me. Here is what truly happened, I registered, entered my personal details, confirmed my email, entered my card details, they then deducted about USD 0.010 from my card, which is okay, many cloud services do that to test the card validity or something like that. So the next step is you have to submit a copy of your ID or passport, the reasons they give for this made perfect sense, so i sent in a photo of my ID, then in the morning, about 7 hours later, I got an email saying my account was rejected. Easy, so I try to call their support team, to find out what i had submitted incorrectly, or what i had missed. The answer is not what you would expect given the praise their customer reps had on this thread, I was told the rejection is a management decision and i had to reapply with another email. note that even if i had wanted to reapply, now i couldn't because i wanted to know what data i had not included or submitted incorrectly. I call in again and I am told the same thing. So i try to login and my account is deactivated, thats expected. So that's my experience. Sidenote: Do not start with a greeting like "good morning" when you call their support team, both of the people i called did not answer to that and waited for me to speak again, before they said anything, which i felt was quite embarrassing, like as though saying I should know better and go straight to the point when i call in. Maybe someone else who got through has a different narrative, but if you also failed then your story is similar to mine. but If you want to have a great week, don't try them b'se they will steal your happiness for a day. Stay with AWS or GCP or Digital Ocean or whatever
- ElectronShak 8y ago
  I was also asked to signup again with a different email address if i needed help....sad, right?
  - ElectronShak 8y ago
    Sorry guys, i re-applied, and went through successfully, the problem is, I have no zipcode, in my country, so i had initially used 00000 as my zipcode, i changed that and i got verified, thanks Hetzner!

236 points by TimWolla 8y ago

asdojasdosadsa 8y ago

Long time customer of Hetzner, and can't more than praise them. Cheap, reliable & super fast support.

mark_l_watson 8y ago
I totally agree. I have used them (occasionally) for years whenever I need extra compute for a few months, or for long term development servers. I especially like running large Haskell builds after updating to new versions, overnight machine learning runs, etc. on a rented server rather than my laptop. For me, GCP is a close competitor to Hetzner for a different use case: when I want a lot of compute for a few hours at a time.

nik736 8y ago

They should rather pay for DTAG transit than do such shenanigans.

tombowditch 8y ago
They have DTAG I believe, you have to pay extra for it though.
- nik736 8y ago
  It's through Core Backbone, has nothing to do with this "unlimited traffic" thing and it is NOT possible to add that option for their cloud services.
stemuk 8y ago
IIRC they ended the DTAG transit agreement due to DTAG having unreasonable pricing requests for the renewed agreement (i.e. DTAG holding Hetzener hostage, you can read more about it here [1]. If you are interested you can still buy DTAG transit for your Hetzner servers via https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Double_Paid_Traffic/en https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Double_Paid_Traffic/en, do keep in mind however that this is a metered connection, not unlimited like for regular web traffic. [1] https://www.golem.de/news/hetzner-und-netzneutralitaet-extrakosten-fuer-bessere-anbindung-an-telekom-kunden-1511-117711.html https://www.golem.de/news/hetzner-und-netzneutralitaet-extra... (German)
- nik736 8y ago
  I know perfectly fine about this. It has nothing to do with being held hostage. DTAG simply wants to charge more money, which is just business. You can either pay it or not. Hetzner decided that it's not worth it for them, the victim is the customer, because you probably are only able to download with around 5mbps in the evening from a DTAG connection. The upgrade is not possible with their cloud services, so it's a nightmare if you are a DTAG customer. The same as Level3 charges more than others (even though not as extreme as DTAG) because they think their pipes are premium.
  - yayana 8y ago
    Sounds like a nightmare to be a DTAG customer.. But why would all of us pay to subsidize DTAG when we want servers in Europe peered with our reasonable ISPs and there are plenty of French ones?
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
    Hetzner simply wants to pay less money, which is just business. You can either sell at that price or not. DTAG decided that it's not worth it for them, the customer is the victim, because you probably are only able to download at around 5mbps in the evening from a Hetzner server. The upgrade is not possible with their internet connection, so it's a nightmare if you are a Hetzner customer. I mean, yeah, sure, it sucks for the customer. What I don't understand is your implication that this is Hetzner's fault. Both sides could accept the other side's conditions, neither side did, all of that is "just business". What isn't "just business" is asking much higher prices than the competition for the same kind of service and expecting customers to buy it. And if you find that there are customers who do buy anyway, that's a hint that you are dealing with a monopoly situation, which is appropriately described as "holding people hostage".
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
1. DTAG transit to where? 2. Assuming you don't really mean paying for transit, but paying DTAG for accepting traffic that DTAG's paying customers have requested to be sent to them from Hetzner: 2.1 Why? 2.2 When you say "they should pay", what you are really saying is "all of Hetzner's customers should pay". Thanks, but I am not interested. I intentionally don't use DTAG as a customer, and I am not interested in subsidizing those who do.
- nik736 8y ago
  1. While of course the main reason would be to get a "paid peering", the DTAG network is also very good to reach other destinations, so technically it makes it transit. 2.1. DTAG has a market share of around 40% in Germany. Without a direct connection to them you won't reach them properly. The connection trough other Tier 1 providers is is awful congested. 2.2. I don't want to sound offensive, but it doesn't really matter what you are doing. You are the exception, most people and your customers don't care about their business tactics, often times it's their only choice to go with DTAG. Of course the traffic pricing would increase, this is why I called it absurd to wave the traffic pricing, because Hetzner is offering a crippled line to 40% of Germany.
  - mrunkel 8y ago
    Why do you think it's Heztner's responsibility to provide good service to DTAG's customers? If the connection between DTAG's network and Heztner's isn't good, shouldn't both networks work to improve the situation?
  - toast0 8y ago
    Your 1 and 2.1 don't go well together. If DTAG is well connected to other networks, it shouldn't also be congested when reached through other networks.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
    > 1. While of course the main reason would be to get a "paid peering", the DTAG network is also very good to reach other destinations, so technically it makes it transit. Just because DTAG also offers transit, doesn't make a peering connection a transit connection, so, no, it doesn't. That's as absurd as saying that DTAG is also very good at LTE networks, so technically that makes an internet peering connection an LTE connection. All this is about DTAG accepting traffic destined for their customers. Noone cares what DTAG charges for transit, and noone minds if DTAG drops transit traffic at peering points. > 2.1. DTAG has a market share of around 40% in Germany. Without a direct connection to them you won't reach them properly. The connection trough other Tier 1 providers is is awful congested. Which only explains why you would want to have a good connection to DTAG if possible. I asked why you should pay massively above-market rates for that. Also, suppose DTAG asked 1000 EUR per TB of inbound traffic. Would you still use that argument? If not, why not? > 2.2. I don't want to sound offensive, but it doesn't really matter what you are doing. You are the exception, most people and your customers don't care about their business tactics, often times it's their only choice to go with DTAG. It doesn't matter what I am doing when as a matter of fact I am doing what apparently most Hetzner customers are doing (that is: not buy DTAG peering traffic), which presumably is the exact reason why Hetzner still doesn't include DTAG peering traffic in their default package? Or are you saying that you think it shouldn't matter because Hetzner should raise prices for everyone, including me, to pay for DTAG peering traffic that most of us don't care about, because you know better what I should care about? My server has essentially no DTAG traffic, and certainly no bandwidth or latency critical DTAG traffic, so if you think that I should care about DTAG traffic, you are just wrong. Not every server is a public web server. Not every public web server is targeted primarily at a German audience, or even a German audience at all. I know when I need DTAG traffic and when I don't, and I don't care to subsidize DTAG traffic when I don't need it. Also, I don't think there is anywhere in Germany where DTAG IP is your only choice. > Of course the traffic pricing would increase, this is why I called it absurd to wave the traffic pricing, because Hetzner is offering a crippled line to 40% of Germany. That's just bullshit. Hetzner is offering a completely uncrippled connection to all of Germany. It's just that DTAG for some reason inserts a bottleneck into the connection of their customers instead of letting through the packets that Hetzner delivers to them completely free of any congestion. All you are saying is that Hetzner should raise prices so that I have to subsidize a protection racket that you choose to be affected by instead of giving me the product that I actually want. And all that while there are plenty of options on the market for high-priced hosting solutions that do include DTAG peering traffic, so it's not even that you can't buy what you want to buy. Just rent a Strato server, they are a DTAG company, and you will have no problem sending traffic to DTAG customers, instead of demanding that Hetzner offer the same product as Strato instead of what Hetzner's customers want.
vidarh 8y ago
Why? What proportion of their customers do you think care? I've used Hetzner for a lot of different things, and for none of them would the download speed for DTAG users be worth paying extra for.

samfriedman 8y ago

I'm always hearing good things about Hetzner and especially the value on their auction servers. Tried buying one on the auction once, went through a whole rigamarole to confirm my identity, send them ID pics, etc. In the end they decided to cancel the order due to "suspicious activity". I was baffled by that as we hadn't had any conversation besides sending them the order info & credentials. I assumed it was a weird false positive... wonder if I should try again sometime.

vidarh 8y ago
Basically you only need to go through their ID hassle once when you submit the first order on an account, at least that's been my experience. After that it's generally entirely painless to order further servers.
- interfixus 8y ago
  Yeah, that's what I thought. Went through the passport routine, got approved, started mucking about. At one point, as part of experimenting, I deleted a VPS which happened to be the last one remaining. And bang! Account closed for lack of active instances. So I went elsewhere, and have been the ever since. Elsewhere highly recommended, by the way: https://lunanode.com/ https://lunanode.com/
  - nielsole 8y ago
    They deactivate accounts after a couple of months without activity but can be easily reactivated (I went through this earlier this year after having been inactive for multiple years)
m0nty 8y ago
I don't remember providing them with ID but I've been a customer for a long time, maybe it's a recent requirement. It's worth opening a dialog with them if you're having issues - you'll be conversing with a real person and they can probably be persuaded.

cbg0 8y ago

Link in the title might be slightly confusing as it is showing differences between current and previous versions of the page. Here's the current page: https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Traffic/en https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Traffic/en

humanbeinc 8y ago

Have been a customer for years now... they're one of the really innovative hosters from Germany with dead cheap competitive pricing... Also their new cloud options are top notch.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
hardwaresofton 8y ago
I absolutely love Hetzner -- they're pricing is near unbeatable. To be a bit more precise, I believe that they offer cut rate pricing (which is not a bad thing if you're the consumer) but not cut-rate service -- there is just enough for a DIYer to be very productive and cost effective. This gets even easier if you use Hetzner Cloud directly, and they've got fantastic prices for beefy machines there too -- while a t2.micro on AWS is ~$10/month on hetzner cloud CX51 with 8 vcores and 32GB of RAM & and 250GB SSD with 20TB of traffic allowed is 29.90 gbp. Discovering the robot marketplace[0] (thanks to HN) was an eye opening experience for me that showed me dedicated servers were viable and could be competitive with the VPSes I'd been purchasing/using for years (I was so excited I wrote blog posts about it). I've recently been thinking about making a subreddit for hetzner (r/hetzner), so fellow users can talk with each other but I am worried it would do more harm than good (increasing the burden on them in terms of having to do PR in yet-another part of the internet that can be pretty toxic in terms of community at times). You can even deploy to them with terraform[1]. -- warning, rant/ramblings below -- I feel like I say the same thing all the time, but I'll repeat it again here -- if devops/infrastructure goes at all correctly in my mind, going to one vendor for both your compute/data and your value-added services (so asking AWS for EC2 machines and to run RDS on top of them for you and offer support) is going to dissipate. Smaller companies can run sufficiently niche (many might disagree but I think running postgres is within this ) with more innovation and decent support for less cost than Amazon can. The vast majority of people who run RDS with something like Postgres as a backend are unlikely to run into crazy issues simply due to how well postgres is built, and how well known it is, outside of gross misconfiguration. Companies are already offering on-your-cloud solutions that use EC2 machines to run their own software and offer support on top -- as container orchestration systems become even more widespread I think people will stop asking AWS or GCP for more than basic compute/data and a few tools they're really good at, and go to more specialized smaller vendors. [0]: https://robot.your-server.de/order/market https://robot.your-server.de/order/market [1]: https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/hcloud/r/server.html https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/hcloud/r/server.html

Keyframe 8y ago

That's what, up to max. ~300TB / month, at 1Gpbs?

nik736 8y ago
1 Gbps = 0,125 GB/s 0,125 * 86.400 (1 Day) = ~10,8 TB per day Theoretically you can also use inbound and outbound at the same time.
Tepix 8y ago
648TB (assuming 1GBit up and down each), see https://www.heise.de/netze/tools/bandbreitenrechner/ https://www.heise.de/netze/tools/bandbreitenrechner/
- chrisper 8y ago
  You can't saturate 1 Gbit up and down at the same time. It would be either 1 Gbit up or down, or 500 Mbit both.
  - gnode 8y ago
    Why? 1GBit Ethernet is conventionally full-duplex.
    - chrisper 8y ago
      Looks like you are right. I must have mixed up something I read recently.
- Keyframe 8y ago
  I've meant uplink only, but yeah. That's a lot of free bandwidth then!

buboard 8y ago

this is gonna be great for my gaming server ... not that i ever reached the quota

gator-io 8y ago

We get a ton of bot traffic from Hetzner servers.

zaarn 8y ago
I recommend to nag their abuse mail, they tend to forward abuse information to the server owner first (which is awesome for people running stuff on their service, I got locked out of a previous provider in the US after someone fired a malicious abuse complaint against me)
- confact 8y ago
  I had Hetzner before and got my server locked out from a malicious abuse complaint and the support ignored my emails, I had to call them, from abroad to get my server's access back just because some thought it was fun to "swatt" my server. I moved pretty quick from there after that.
- tetha 8y ago
  We had some of our legacy setup on hetzner used in a DDoS reflection attack a year ago. That was handled really professionally by Hetzner imo. They null routed the systems and requested us to get in contact with them within a couple of working days or they'd void the contract. We handed them our office IP to whitelist. Once I could get back onto the systems, I could finally overrule all the stupid legacy hesitation and setup firewalls on the systems. From there, the support confirmed the ports are closed and the servers got freed again. Good experience, in spite of the circumstances. And the remote hands at hetzner are good, especially if you know how to work with DCOPs. You know, have redundant systems, shutdown the broken system so they can just do whatever they have to do once they're around.
razakel 8y ago
>We get a ton of bot traffic from Hetzner servers. Because they're a discount provider. OVH has the same problem.
- gator-io 8y ago

zaarn 8y ago

Recently got a very neat server box from the auctions page, having the traffic limits removed would be amazing indeed. Quite satisfied with support too. (Though I wish I could get a hold of a /48 IPv6 subnet from them, pfSense doesn't like /64 only networks).

hoffs 8y ago
Are you running pfsense on remote server??
- zaarn 8y ago
  Why wouldn't I? It seems to be a pretty solid FOSS Firewall solution from what I've experienced. I never really saw a reason not to do it.
- Operyl 8y ago
  It works great, have used it in the past. Right now I’m using openwrt/lede in a VM as a NAT for VMs that don’t need a dedicated external IP. It took seconds to set up.
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
> Though I wish I could get a hold of a /48 IPv6 subnet from them, pfSense doesn't like /64 only networks Please pester them about this. (Technically, you can, but they charge extra, which is just braindead.)
- zaarn 8y ago
  Might try that, thanks!
lambada 8y ago
Could you elaborate more about how pfsense doesn't like just /64? As someone who ordered a Hetzner server from them a couple of days ago after a hefty price increase from my current provider this concerns me - getting IPv6 working through pfsense and into machines behind it is the next tech project I have on my list!

perlpimp 8y ago

My personal server is with them, their response has been better then some 'enterprise level' server solutions in my country. while costing hundreds of times less.

aogl 8y ago

Hetzner rocks, have used them for years and they are super reliable and their (more recent) cloud hosting options are dead cheap but also really good! Great to see them features on HN!

levosmetalo 8y ago
Honestly, I was a bit worried when switching from Digitalocean, but everything still works perfectly for half the price. The only lacking part is the general Linux documentation and how-tos, but whatever DO writes still applies to all other providers. They are the best kept hosting secret.
- joering2 8y ago
  +1. Smart move switching away from DigitalOcean. I dont know what the heck is going on with them recently but I started moving away as well. What broke camels back was limit on number of servers you can have which is 12 at the moment i believe. How the heck am i going to grow a startup if thats a ceiling? Google is also full of stories of abruptly interrupted and frozen accounts that you have tiny chance of getting resumed because they don’t tell you what is wring due to “security concerns”.
  - jarland 8y ago
    Hey friend, I'm sorry that you've had a bad experience, but we can help. Our support team will gladly increase that limit for you on request. On the stories that you read, I hear you. It's a tough situation because I don't want to discount anyone's story. What I do want to point out is that there are two sides to every story, and in such a relationship one party has the duty of protecting privacy of the other. Sometimes we make mistakes and we need to correct it. Sometimes what we do upsets people when we work to protect our customers from those who would seek to abuse our platform. Abuse of our platform lowers quality of service for everyone, and that is why it is our duty to manage that. Each story will have it's own variables, and I'm happy to discuss anyone's situation with them personally. If you have any questions or there is anything I can personally help with, please feel free to reach out at jdonnell@digitalocean.com. Jarland

osrec 8y ago

Their virtual servers are really very cheap. How do they compare with AWS/Vultr/Digital Ocean? Do they have an API for automation and is it reliable?

wut42 8y ago
Absolutely! It's based on Xeon Gold and NVMe disks. Works pretty well. I'm running there CI and a couple of stuff since cloud was announced -- had a bit on downtime on a single VM, some network issues, otherwise: all good. They have an API.
manveru 8y ago
They have a really good and simple API for the Cloud hosting at https://docs.hetzner.cloud/ https://docs.hetzner.cloud/ and there's also https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/hcloud/index.html https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/hcloud/index.html I've been using this to setup some servers with little effort. For dedicated hosting there is https://robot.your-server.de/doc/webservice/en.html https://robot.your-server.de/doc/webservice/en.html I just wish they had NixOS images so I'd save a few minutes of initial deploy time.
petercooper 8y ago
I "downgraded" from a physical server to a VPS with them when Cloud launched and have saved a ton of money and the performance isn't miles off. Great success so far. Network is solid within Europe though have noticed the occasional bit of weird routing to the US.
- osrec 8y ago
  Could you elaborate on the weird routing in the US please? I ask because my app has a bunch of US users.
  - petercooper 8y ago
    I'm not a qualified networking engineer, but we had some US users report outages which we investigated from US-based servers and noticed the normal routing was screwy (in the sense that the normal direct routes weren't being taken so latency was high). These incidents lasted under ten minutes and I wrote them off as being peering related incidents as they had no effect on European traffic. I accept minor things like this as part of the price for hosting in Europe, and have certainly experienced the same issues going the other direction (i.e. me reaching US-based services) more often.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Bayart 8y ago

A mere decade after French hosts.

owlninja 8y ago

How is the connection speed/latency for these for someone in the US? Been shopping for a hobby/personal server

xeroxmalf 8y ago
Canada here but I get 40-50mbps single threaded / connection. Anything multithreaded I can max my 200mbps home connection out.

esseti 8y ago

does anyone have a tutorial/guide on how to use hetzner for a k8s deployment, the one of GCP is rather expensive for something of that size..

talkingquickly 8y ago
This is a really good starting point; https://github.com/hobby-kube/guide https://github.com/hobby-kube/guide I've used it for several projects and it works a treat.
- esseti 8y ago
  well, i need a cluster not just for hobby.
growt 8y ago
http://stytex.de/blog/2018/01/29/deploy-kubernetes-hetzner-cloud-openebs/ http://stytex.de/blog/2018/01/29/deploy-kubernetes-hetzner-c...

Timucin 8y ago

I was a customer of Hetzner for years but my experience was way worse than others unfortunately. I have lost my data twice on different hardware. The first one was totally Hetzner's fault since they have failed to identify the faulty disks when they check the disks for it. They were like `oops, sorry, it seems second disk was faulty too` AFTER I tried to re-build the RAID array on a recovery attempt. And the second one was being a bit unlucky, the RAID card didn't detect the faulty disk and tried to sync the broken disk with the healthy ones. So I lost data on a RAID-10 array, twice. I asked them to do tests on the faulty hardware to identify the problem, to confirm my suspicion, so I could go back to my clients with a proper explanation and things got interested at this point; While I was talking to the technical people at Hetzner and trying to explain why I think the RAID controller is the problem and how the RAID logs are confirming that, a guy called Arno, Head of Product Advice and Sales took my ticket over. He said; ``` First of all we want to apologize for what happened. Why it happened is hard to say. As you wrote at least one disk was so faulty that your data was corrupt. Those things can happen and from our point of view no one can prevent from happening again. The only things that help are good backups and a good recovery strategy, which I think you have both. Of course extra efford on your end occurs for recovery and since it happend the 2nd time, we want to compensate you for that. What compensation would you expect from us? ``` which was kind of ridiculous because I didn't ask for a compensation, I didn't even imply that I want a compensation for what happened. I was simply requesting a solid explanation and/or confirmation and this guy was saying that I lost my data on a RAID-10 array because 1 (ONE) of the disks were faulty. I asked him to handover the tickets to the technical people since he's from sales and what he says doesn't make sense. Also provided him some numbers about how much money the sites were making on that lost server, just to prove how wrong he is to approach to the matter from that perspective and guess that was the bit what triggered him. He fought so hard to not handover the ticket back to the technical people, explained how much he knows about RAID-10, how loosing the server is our fault while making so much money the sites because the server was cheap (WTF?), they won't do the testing because they host many more servers with the same hardware and they are just working fine etc. After using Hetzner for 7 years, I cancelled the service I take from them, along with other 11 company accounts and tens of dedicated servers and never looked back. Hetzner is a company that ask you to move from their network to some other provider when you ask what happens if you get DDOSed (this happened before they introduced the DDOS protection). So never again...

cbluth 8y ago

I am considering some servers from hetzner. Does anyone know of a decent solution to put a few of these servers on the same "protected lan"?

vbezhenar 8y ago
VPN
TimWolla 8y ago
Hetzner recently introduced the vSwitch feature. I believe it might be what you are searching for: https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Vswitch/en https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Vswitch/en
- chaz6 8y ago
  I noted that if you assign public addresses on the vSwitch network, it is limited to 1TB free transfer per month, with each additional TB charged at €1 (plus tax) per TB (for outgoing traffic).
cuu508 8y ago
You can get physical private LAN! Usually an overkill, but it's possible. When you order, you can specify extra things you will need. For example, you can ask for a secondary NIC on each server, and to connect up the secondary NICs through a dedicated switch. There are some caveats though: * more expensive. When your servers have non-standard configurations, Hetzner charges a fixed extra per-server, per-month fee ("Flexipack"). The fees add up. * The servers need to be in the same rack. If you order them all at once it's fine. But if you order, say, four servers now, and the fifth server a month later, the fifth one will go on a separate rack and won't get the private access to the four. * Setup takes longer. If you order standard configuration, it will be ready in minutes/hours. When I ordered the extra NICs and switch, it took about a week to complete the order. * A bit more configuration required. Primary NICs work out of the box. For the secondary NICs to work you need to tweak /etc/network/interfaces and the routing table.
- 8y ago

bpye 8y ago

This is pretty great news. Reducing bandwidth costs is definitely a good thing. I've always wondered how people run their own (personal use or side project) services on bare metal or VPS providers manage them without spending too much time. I've found that trying to run even a few services and have a reasonable solution for backups, software updates, etc to take more time and effort than it seems is worthwhile, it makes Heroku and App Engine particularly appealing as a lot of the issues are kinda solved with managed cloud providers. I would love to hear how people make this work.

_eht 8y ago
If you invest some initial time into a few shell scripts your management time is very minimal and your cost savings is monumental. Another investment into a couple python scripts and API access to Linode (vps provider) and you can easily auto scale on demand with the best of them. As a practical example, I run a cluster of auto scaling servers for around $500/month. The same infrastructure and traffic cost me almost $3,500 on AWS.
Operyl 8y ago
I have a KVM hypervisor machine with a bunch of python scripts to make cloud-init images for deployment of my VMs. Best 5 hours of time spent, ever.
h1d 8y ago
When you realize AWS/GCE/Azure costs you about $0.1/GB for bandwidth, it scares me it can be DDoSed to the point your bill goes out of the normal proportion so easily. Other places have TBs of bandwidth within their < $50 plans.
- ApolloFortyNine 8y ago
  If you do move to Hetzner, you will quickly realize the value of premium bandwidth. Maxing out your Hetzner pipe is quite difficult in my experience. OVH/AWS (my other two experiences) on the other hand maxes out the pipe without issue.

wink 8y ago

Maybe I'm the odd one out, but apart from the new cloud stuff 've had nothing but bad experiences. Many years ago: HDDs died like I've never seen it before, one every few months with just a couple of servers. ca. late 2013: We had some production systems running on Hetzner hardware, we regularly! called their support to tell them the DC lost connection because our monitoring apparently was better than theirs and they acted surprised for not hearing something yet. Only like 2-3 years ago: Got a new server, had SMART issues and had to have the disk replaced before the first 24h after ordering were up. An ex-coworker of mine joked they must have added the "please change the disk" option in the support form just for him because he was running 20+ servers and actually had to call them every week to replace a dying disk. Yes, this was all years ago - but I'd rather pay servers out of my own pocket than be oncall for production servers there, ever again.

chappi42 8y ago
> I'm the odd one out You are (from my 10+ year experience with Hetzner at least).
- scotu 8y ago
  loving this comment: a: am I the odd one? b: based on my 1 datapoint yes (ok it's 10 years but still one customer?) :)
  - chappi42 8y ago
    Your right of course, but as we don't know the Hetzner statistics it's hard to say something definitive. -- As you (wink/scotu?) provide 1 datapoint I was thinking 1 datapoint from my side should be defensible :-)
    - quickben 8y ago
      So, it seems my chance, if I go with them, is 50-50.
baybal2 8y ago

muks 8y ago

I've been a Hetzner customer for several years. I'm yet to have a faulty disk experience with them, but that's not what this post is about. This month I "purchased" another EX41 server. Something made me wonder if the hard disks on the machine allocated to me were old ones previously used for some other customer, so the first thing I did after installing Linux was to look at smartctl output. Not only were the disks new (power on hours) but as part of provisioning the machine, they seem to have performed a "long" self-test on the disk (see smartctl -t in its manpage). I was impressed by this, because they seem to have checked that I didn't get bad disks on arrival. This is probably expected of such a service provider.. but I've seen worse.

zifnab06 8y ago
They wipe smart before giving you drives. Ovh does the same. Most drives have a serial interface you can connect to with a special cable to do it.
- _wmd 8y ago
  Any reference for that? Didn't know it was possible. Is it just to minimize customer complaints about otherwise good-enough hardware?

lokl 8y ago

Satisfied customer of their cloud. Was a satisfied customer at Linode for 10+ years but found Hetzner's offer too good to not at least try and I've seen no reason to switch back.

burtonator 8y ago

Hetzner is great. We host about a petabyte of search data on them over at http://www.datastreamer.io/ http://www.datastreamer.io/ (my search company). I'm working on a new startup around a personal web archive and annotation system (https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/) which uses Firebase but I would love to figure out how to use Hetzner as their prices are amazing.

iagovar 8y ago
Hi, is datastreamer similar to webhose.io? Can't check now from mobile.
ar-jan 8y ago
Polar Bookshelf looks very interesting! Aside: on the frontpage "forum" links to GitHub, and Discord links to Reddit.
yazr 8y ago
Is there any reason u r not supporting epub? Is it just prioritizing or are there licensing/copyright complications ?
- webmaven 8y ago
  Same Q here, burtonator. Please consider supporting EPUB.

haroldp 8y ago

Anyone want to compare experiences between OVH/Soyoustart and Hetzner?

n3storm 8y ago
Soyoustart servers are not always (ever?) available and connection is not usually the best and they may cannot solve it because of customer agreement. Also, Support takes much longer, maybe days, to respond. If you see them as learning servers they are ok, plus you learn to negotiate with support ;)
zaarn 8y ago
I'm currently moving from SYS to Hetzner, the prices are much better and support has been great. If you want to get something cheaper than SYS Dedicated boxes I definitely recommend looking at the server auction (which is basically SYS but different). I managed to grab a 128GB server for very cheap. If you don't have an account you'll likely need ID verification, it was a while ago but to my recollection they'll simply hold the purchase for you while they verify so you don't loose a good spot. Plus you have to do it only once.

zawerf 8y ago

On AWS or GCP the cost per GB transferred is around $0.10. Even if you put a cheap CDN on top, it costs around $0.01 per GB. How is it possible that Hetzner (and other unmetered hosting) are giving it out for free? If you max out the 1 Gbit for a month that's ~300 TB. GCP and AWS would've charged you $30,000 for that!!! Are the cloud providers just not competing with each other on price? How has the price remained so high for so long?

brianwawok 8y ago
Take a latency benchmark for a hetzner server in a crowded DC streaming GBs of data and GCP. I suspect you will see a quality difference over time. That said many apps can deal with more latency. Image sharing sites would care more about cost vs latency compared to a multiplayer game. GCE introduced a tier of lower perf but cheaper network. Hopefully the trend continues.
lfittl 8y ago
Quality of the backbone matters - Hetzner is going for the cheapest it can find, and (presumably) peering where it can, with whomever it can find. AWS and GCP both have much more investment into their own backbone, plus higher quality transit providers.
JoshTriplett 8y ago
Amortization helps; even if you offer unmetered bandwidth, relatively few people will max it out 24/7. So even if they offer unmetered 100Mbps or unmetered 1Gbps, their net bandwidth won't necessarily be customers * 1Gbps.
berns 8y ago
> Are the cloud providers just not competing with each other on price? You mean the big three. Other cloud providers are certainly competing: Digital Ocean is $0.01/GB, Oracle Cloud $0.0085/GB, OVH and Scaleway are unmetered.
inapis 8y ago
So bandwidth is actually very cheap. It certainly costs nowhere as much as AWS/GCP charge. Some reports peg their margins on bandwidth at >90%. That said, I've frequently seen parallels between razor + razor blades pricing and how AWS/GCP price compute vs bandwidth. Computing is cheap, by some measures, but almost all customers will egress that data somewhere and once you've done your computation, you'll pony up whatever prices they demand for letting that data "egress"

parliament32 8y ago

Hetzner has been fantastic, been using their dedis for several years now. You can get rock bottom prices on their robot-auction-house thing too.

ohopton 8y ago

Hetzner is great - we run a couple of Ethereum nodes (non-mining) on there and we've had zero issues with it for nearly a year. Great support, had SSDs installed almost immediately, almost no downtime. Cheap!

craftoman 8y ago

Fresh Hetzner customer here. I've been using their services for personal use for about 2 months now without any problems. I'm running speed and benchmark tests regularly and they are actually very positive. I heard their old Cloud panel was crappy but this one seems very promising. It's modern and simple like those in Vultr or Digital Ocean.

ElectronShak 8y ago

Hey guys, so after i saw this on the front page, and visited the site, there rates were surprisingly really low, I actually decided to try out the service. TL:DR Its not as rosy or great as some people here suggested, and their response on contacting them came off as a little harsh to me. Here is what truly happened, I registered, entered my personal details, confirmed my email, entered my card details, they then deducted about USD 0.010 from my card, which is okay, many cloud services do that to test the card validity or something like that. So the next step is you have to submit a copy of your ID or passport, the reasons they give for this made perfect sense, so i sent in a photo of my ID, then in the morning, about 7 hours later, I got an email saying my account was rejected. Easy, so I try to call their support team, to find out what i had submitted incorrectly, or what i had missed. The answer is not what you would expect given the praise their customer reps had on this thread, I was told the rejection is a management decision and i had to reapply with another email. note that even if i had wanted to reapply, now i couldn't because i wanted to know what data i had not included or submitted incorrectly. I call in again and I am told the same thing. So i try to login and my account is deactivated, thats expected. So that's my experience. Sidenote: Do not start with a greeting like "good morning" when you call their support team, both of the people i called did not answer to that and waited for me to speak again, before they said anything, which i felt was quite embarrassing, like as though saying I should know better and go straight to the point when i call in. Maybe someone else who got through has a different narrative, but if you also failed then your story is similar to mine. but If you want to have a great week, don't try them b'se they will steal your happiness for a day. Stay with AWS or GCP or Digital Ocean or whatever

ElectronShak 8y ago
I was also asked to signup again with a different email address if i needed help....sad, right?
- ElectronShak 8y ago
  Sorry guys, i re-applied, and went through successfully, the problem is, I have no zipcode, in my country, so i had initially used 00000 as my zipcode, i changed that and i got verified, thanks Hetzner!