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Just a friendly reminder that AWS pricing is still insanely high compared to dedicated bare metal servers. On AWS you'd pay around $1500/mo for 24 cores ("m5a.1

• eropple 8y ago
  Non-snarky question: can I get a Hetzner server provisioned via API? (I've never tried.)
  • lukeqsee 8y ago
    Yes. They even support terraform, last I checked!
  • dylz 8y ago
    Yes. https://robot.your-server.de/doc/webservice/en.html#get-order-server-product https://robot.your-server.de/doc/webservice/en.html#get-orde...
  • thekonqueror 8y ago
    Terraform has support for hetzner cloud[1], not sure if that's the same as bare metal. [1] https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/hcloud/index.html https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/hcloud/index.html
    • krn 8y ago
      > not sure if that's the same as bare metal Hetzner Cloud is more like AWS EC2, if you choose dedicated vCPU, and more like VPS, if you don't.
• hinkley 8y ago
  If it were a 3:1 ratio or even a bit higher there are situations where that would still be the right choice. But I’m having trouble justifying 8:1.
  • toast0 8y ago
    I think it could make sense if your traffic has a large difference between peak and trough, and you can reliably and automatically scale your system up and down throughout the day; and even more if you can make use of spot pricing. Bare metal makes a lot of sense when you're using the capabilities of a full machine (or several), but provisioning isn't usually fast enough to deal with short term load management.
    • ju-st 8y ago
      Is this a real thing or a urban legend? Does anyone have real examples?
      • TheDong 8y ago
        Autoscaling groups on AWS are very real, very old, and very widely used. The Amazon Retail site scales its machines up and down. Netflix built a tool called "scryer" to guess when to spin up and down instances more accurately [0]. Jenkins has a series of plugins for provisioning workers on-demand, and multiple companies I've worked at have used that plugin (or a variant of it) to spin up CI workers when needed (during the work day usually) and shut them down when not needed. Clearly this is something that real companies do. If you wish to spend some time googling on how people use Autoscaling groups, you'll find many other examples. [0]: https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/scryer-netflixs-predictive-auto-scaling-engine-a3f8fc922270 https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/scryer-netflixs-predicti...
        • ju-st 8y ago
          But I suppose it's still not cheaper than just renting enough Hetzner servers for the peak?
• whitepoplar 8y ago
  Hetzner is cheap, but I'd be reluctant to run any business-critical stuff on it. I wish DigitalOcean would launch baremetal hardware. Even at a 100% markup compared to Hetzner, it'd be worth it for the peace of mind for better support/hardware.
  • wmf 8y ago
    What do you think about Packet.net?
    • ksec 8y ago
      $720 per month, with 64GB less Memory. Nearly 4x.
      • coder543 8y ago
        What's the catch? If Hetzner were that good at that cheap with no catches, why haven't they steamrolled AWS, Packet, DO, and everyone else?
        • TheDong 8y ago
          There are multiple "catches" here. 1. Ease of use -- Bare metal servers are harder to use than VMs; you can't trivially snapshot your bare metal server, you can't trivially clone it, there aren't tons of AMIs available. Hetzner has fewer UX designers and has less control of the platform to provide a better UX / console experience / onboarding experience. 2. Cost/availability of personal -- More people know AWS than how to PXE boot machines. Sure, you might not actually have to do complicated stuff for Hetzner's bare metal, but it's still more complicated. You might have to get some real ops people (rather than just saying the word devops and pretending everything is okay). 3. Other cloud services (ELB, RDS, etc) -- Sure, you can connect a hetzner machine to an RDS endpoint, but it's slower and harder than just using the AWS ecosystem. People want S3, ELB, RDS... They don't want to hire 5 more guys to run Ceph, HAProxy, and database clusters. 4. Ecosystem of tools -- People have used AWS and its APIs for so long that you can find pre-built tooling to do all sorts of things, from libraries to make lambda functions, to terraform modules to manage machines. I don't even know if Hetzner has a real API. It certainly has a smaller ecosystem. 5. Mindshare -- The cheaper/better service doesn't actually steamroll people who have mindshare / brand recognition in every case, so even if hetzner were better, AWS already might have enough critical mass. 6. Easier "region expansion" -- With AWS, if you want to reduce latency to some customers for application servers, moving between regions is trivial. Hetzner, not so much. Also, hetzner's networking is qualitatively worse for reaching other services (most of which are on AWS). I think the main issue here is that people are comparing two things that can't really be compared. AWS includes S3, ELBs, RDS, etc. Hetzner does not help. AWS offers robust APIs and features. Hetzner, not so much. AWS has brand recognition, and no one will get fired for going with AWS. I know how to run my own servers, I know how to use AWS. For a startup that had a focus on software, not hardware, I'd still absolutely go with AWS because I know for a fact the ecosystem of services and tools, coupled with the ease of finding more people who know AWS, make it the much safer choice.
• jread 8y ago
  EC2 on-demand/hourly to Hetzner monthly pricing is not really an apples-to-apples comparison. EC2 reserve pricing is more similar and about 1/2 or less of on-demand fees. Hetzner is still cheaper, and if all you need is a low cost dedicated server w/local disks and bandwidth, this is a great choice - but AWS provides an entire ecosystem of services including configurable EBS and S3 storage, as well as more diverse and scalable purchase/provisioning options.
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  • Spivak 8y ago
    Having a large ecosystem of services should be a reason AWS is cheaper since on average you'll spend money on those integrations -- not a reason to pay a premium.
    • bduerst 8y ago
      Increased complexity leads to increased overhead costs. A bare metal instance is going to be cheaper to maintain than a full-service instance that interfaces with a robust ecosystem (even if that instance doesn't use any of it).
      • MaxBarraclough 8y ago
        Doesn't this discount the considerable economy-of-scale advantage that Amazon should have?
        • Donald 8y ago
          Not when Amazon's scaling benefits are used to mostly benefit themselves.
• api 8y ago
  OVH is also quite inexpensive and in our experience is a bit less problematic than Hetzner. With Hetzner you get a lot of power really cheap but you also get fairly minimal tech support. We had a lot of issues with instances being randomly blocked due to services' traffic being miscategorized as a "port scan" and were able to get nowhere with their tech support so we had to go to OVH. Haven't had any similar issues at OVH or anywhere else for that matter.
  • js4ever 8y ago
    In the past I had the exact same issues and server network port blocked for several days by OVH... Also with DO. The only place where this never happend for me is AWS
• movedx 8y ago
  You're forgetting geographical availability. Where is their DC in Sydney or Brisbane, Australia? How about Singapore? Or Japan? Unless you're in Germany, Germany, or, perhaps, Germany (or Finland) then you're adding a lot (yes, a lot) of latency to network requests for anyone outside of Germany and especially anyone on another landmass.
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  • metildaa 8y ago
    OVH has POPs all over despite being a value server provider. You get quite a bit for how little you pay, plus they have working IPv6 (really important for mobile networks) unlike the major cloud vendors.
    • zaarn 8y ago
      From experience, OVH's IPv6 is sadly a bit... broken. They don't send proper router advertisements on the network, which confuses the hell out of any proper firewall or router you try to setup for it.
      • deleted 8y ago
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      • metildaa 8y ago
        OVH does have its quirks (eg: pushing systemd-networkd and not using route advertisments) but their network is significantly better if you need to avoid the IPv4 CGNAT that cellphones sit behind, as IPv6 is the only means of doing so (long lived connections, 20ms or so latency savings, skip Firebase messaging, etc). Other issues we ran into with AWS include congested peering with Centurylink & most Asian Pacific countries. Having gigabit via Centurylink and only being able to fill 2MB/s from AWS is crummy, esp. when competitors can reliably push many multiples of that.
  • Bootvis 8y ago
• MarkMc 8y ago
  Yes you are right - Hetzner is much cheaper than AWS. But that begs the question: why is AWS so much more popular than Hetzner?
• fabioyy 8y ago
  Agree!! insanely high! If you use a lot of bandwidth, aws doen't make sense at all I'm getting 10x cheaper bandwidth solutions on bare metal, 8x cheaper on digital ocean
• jillesvangurp 8y ago
  I've used both. Hetzner definitely has attractive pricing and Amazon tends to charge extemely high amounts for relatively slow machines. For reference, one or two months of usage, basically pays for the hardware cost already with a lot of these instances. The profit margins on this stuff must be insane for Amazon because they run these machines for years non stop. However being able to pay for these machines by the minute and spin them up and down in minutes is a level of flexibility you don't have in Hetzner. You could spin up a few dozen of these instances, run some expensive batch jobs and shut them down in 40 minutes. There's no need to have them idling while you are not using them. Also they have lots of stuff you simply don't get in Hetzner. And, support is kind of barebones in Hetzner, their network security is not great, and if you need to be reachable world wide, they are not an option. If you know what you are doing they can still be a great option. But you'll need to compensate for what they are not doing with expensive devops work. People don't tend to count this but this is by far the most expensive factor in operations these days. You might be paying pennies for the hardware but having a single senior devops person stuck doing the devops work would set you back around 10K/month. And one month is of course not going to be the end of this. Doing things in Hetzner means investing in that kind of stuff. You basically get to reinvent a lot of wheels that you get to use off the shelf in AWS. Some competition would be nice though. AWS is overcharging because they have very few real competitors and they tend to charge similar amounts. Azure and Google cloud are also not that cheap if you need fast machines.