7 ms·

> But I still do business with DO because it costs ~half the price of a comparable EC2 instance I'm curious why people who don't have massive scaling and varia

by jwr 7y ago

> But I still do business with DO because it costs ~half the price of a comparable EC2 instance I'm curious why people who don't have massive scaling and variability issues choose DO or AWS for their hosting. For 34€/month, Hetzner will rent you a physical server (i7-6700, 64GB RAM, 2x512GB SSD, 1Gbit/s networking). That's a monster of a machine and can run most sites out there. And if you need more oomph and better reliability, rent three. I looked at this many times and still check the pricing regularly, and it just doesn't make sense for me to switch from these physical servers to virtualized offerings, not in any foreseeable future.

geggam 7y ago
Because I can simply turn off everything and reduce my spend to storage alone. If I turn off that server I still pay for it
barkingcat 7y ago
Because DO has their $5 and $10 / month plan, and that's really enough for me.
- freehunter 7y ago
  That's exactly it for me too. The Hetzner plan costs about twice as much as my monthly DO bill. Not to mention I'm US based and all of my customers are US based so hosting a site in Germany or Finland doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
  - phoobahr 7y ago
    And here I am a Canadian and my client base is Canadian. While not a problem just yet it is likely that PIPEDA/PHIPA would make it complicated to serve data from outside the country. I am not a lawyer but the advice I have been given is murky. It’s much easier to stuck with DO which, at my usage, costs about the same number of $CAD as lightsail would in $USD
  - karussell 7y ago
    Since a year you can use their cloud product: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud starting at 2.5€ There are lots of "managed" features still missing but acceptable for a still young product.
- phonon 7y ago
  https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/?opdp1=pricing https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/?opdp1=pricing ?
  - metildaa 7y ago
    The CPU allocations on Lightsail are anemic compared to DO.
    - phonon 7y ago
      Are they? They come out fairly comparably here. I think Lightsail is a T3 instance "under the hood". https://joshtronic.com/2019/06/03/vps-showdown-digitalocean-lightsail-linode-upcloud-vultr/ https://joshtronic.com/2019/06/03/vps-showdown-digitalocean-...
      - metildaa 7y ago
        Notice the memory and file I/O, huge gulfs in performance. The focus of my comment though was about Amazon's restrictive leaky bucket CPU allocation scheme, you can burn through your allocation of high cpu use and then get throttled to 5% of peak use iirc for hours while this bucket refills. DO lets you use much more CPU comparatively.
        phonon 7y ago
        True. For intermittent (less than 10% high CPU usage per period) use though, it's equivalent, and comes with other advantages.
  - adolph 7y ago
    Nice, use Docker containers in it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z525kfneC6E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z525kfneC6E
  - geezerjay 7y ago
    AWS Lightsail charges $3.50/month for a vm with 512MB RAM. Hetzer charges €3.00/month for avm with 2GB RAM.
Someone1234 7y ago
Because hypothetically your instance should be hardware agnostic. If the physical hardware dies, it should automatically migrate to another physical server at their data center without your intervention. It will only look like an unexpected restart from your perspective. That's something worth paying for. It would be more comparable to two servers at Hetzner with rapid failover. But even that is more involved since you have to set up the logic of when to failover. Auto-scaling is a benefit of "cloud" services. But it isn't the only selling point. Hardware abstraction is perhaps bigger.
- olau 7y ago
  That's wishful thinking. If there's state in that virtual machine, it's probably either stored on the physical host or in a SAN. If it's in the physical host, it has to be fished out of that machine or restored from a backup. If it's a SAN, you can lose your virtual machine if the SAN goes down. I've seen both happen. Actually, a single machine with RAID is surprisingly stable. A provider like Hetzner can switch out a faulty disk in less than five minutes, or switch a faulty motherboard/power supply in less than half an hour. Virtualization on top of this does not increase stability, in my experience. Now, some cloud providers do have more sophisticated distributed systems that do not have single points of failure, and that's a completely different story. Of course, the software itself is a source of correlated failures, so even there you should never rely on a single cloud vendor. There's a poster here on this site who commented some months ago that he had for years rented three servers, each on a different continent, each from a different provider, and never had downtime. That's engineering.
  - treis 7y ago
    >If there's state in that virtual machine, it's probably either stored on the physical host or in a SAN I think the point is to write your application in a way that there's not state in the VM. My VMs are disposable and in fact the way I do deployments is to spin up a new VM in DO and then assign it the floating IP for production. If things go haywire I can easily swap back the IP address to the known good VM.
    - 7y ago
EugeneOZ 7y ago
Maybe because they had dozens of failures and DDOS outages? Why they have to keep their prices so low - because of reputation. Price is the only attractive thing in services like this.
- at-fates-hands 7y ago
  I came here to say this. Why people continue to think you can get everything on the cheap with services like this and not understand you're putting your business at risk by trying to cut corners on hosting and other services is beyond me. I pay around $20-$25/month for Azure hosting for several e-commerce and mobile app clients I have. I told them up front you don't want to cut corners on this stuff, it will come back to haunt you later. Sure, you'll save a few bucks year over year, but what happens in an outage? What happens when your clients can't order their stuff and you lose revenue for several days straight? Now the idea of saving a few hundred dollars a year evaporates as thousands of dollars are lost when your service provider takes a dump on you. Suddenly, it's not such a good deal anymore is it?
vorticalbox 7y ago
If you use a lambda on aws you get 1 million requests for free each month and after that factions of a penny per invoke.
- therein 7y ago
  That's wonderful. Now you can use those requests to read from or write to SQS, do DynamoDB stuff and play in the AWS walled garden where things seem cheap at first but things add up. You can then keep telling yourself you have a stable, managed infrastructure and you're cutting on operational expenses and able to move fast while the engineers in your organization are working harder to make things work with generic services with shortcomings, making your product actually work in less than optimal ways. Managed services feel like they are helping with operational costs but they have a cost when you're building your product. I worked on projects that would have ended up being simpler and cheaper to operate on physical dedicated servers, but instead they are running on "ASG's that autoscale and have zero downtime" with "ALBs that send traffic to any and all hosts when all origins report unhealthy". Things in the managed world is far less than ideal because one size doesn't fit all.
- opportune 7y ago
  The issue with lambda is that at high loads it's a lot more expensive than using a server. I looked into doing something with lambda that would take about ~10b invocations/day and it was so expensive compared to just standing up a microservice. So I've never deployed a lambda before and I'm sure at low loads it's fine, but I would be afraid of taking a dependency on lambda/functions in an application architecture.
jimnotgym 7y ago
I'm moving Azure, AWS and other VPS workloads to them right now. Very impressive service!
hadlock 7y ago
Most $10MM ARR startups are running on two medium T class aws instances behind a load balancer at $35/mo plus another small server for accessories (redis, message queue, etc) and then a sql backend. That's something like $200/mo for infrastructure, you never need to maintain the hardware and you have the option to autoscale at any time to support $100MM ARR. Plus you get access to backups and all the other tools and products that are constantly being released. Not having to hire an IT guy at $1200/mo to maintain your physical server and tend to it's networking rules is a significant savings over a developer-managed aws/gcp instance. Plus all the cloud interfaces are standardized so you can just hire someone to come through and fix/upgrade your infrastructure. Using a home-spun physical server means months if not years of undocumented tech debt for the next guy who comes along to have to maintain whatever kludges were installed long before he/she ever showed up. I just got done converting a bunch of physical servers over to the cloud and spent a year unwinding seven years of technical debt and now the dev/qa teams can actually spin up a new test environment in under 30 days (closer to 3 minutes).
- true_religion 7y ago
  You’re telling me that 10 million dollar “startup” companies can’t run 1 server without incurring “years” of tech debt? Sorry, that just sounds unbelievable.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    Welcome to startup fallacies. You don't know what you don't know, and it's easier (but not cheaper) to follow a crowd.
  - philjohn 7y ago
    They can, but let's be honest, people will be doing multiple roles when in the very early stage, so your lead programmer will be configuring the server ... probably won't be using a configuration management solution and whomever takes it over is going to have to comb through the various configuration files to work out what it's meant to be doing.
- social_quotient 7y ago
rkangel 7y ago
In our case, because it was easy to get thousands of dollars of free credit in Google cloud (the same appeared to be true for AWS). This went up to tens of thousands for Series A. We had zero serving costs and would have continued to do so for years. It makes perfect sense for Google/Amazon to incentivise startups to design themselves for their cloud.
- treis 7y ago
  >because it was easy to get thousands of dollars of free credit in Google cloud (the same appeared to be true for AWS) Can you share how?
  - brianwawok 7y ago
    https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/ https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/
ksec 7y ago
>For 34€/month, Hetzner ... Hetzner is only available in EU and specifically Germany. And my bet most of these people want it within US.
- hathawsh 7y ago
  I googled for "Hetzner USA" and found some similar offerings: https://www.wholesaleinternet.net/dedicated/ https://www.wholesaleinternet.net/dedicated/ https://www.nocix.net/dedicated/ https://www.nocix.net/dedicated/
  - ksec 7y ago
    I think most people goes with DO not because it was just "affordable", it has also been around long enough and large enough to be trusted. Both OVH and Hetzner is the same as DO in this regards. The two listed aren't really well known.
- floatboth 7y ago
  Hetzner is also a company that really wants you to send them a scan of your government ID / passport. Meanwhile e.g. prgmr takes bitcoin.
rando444 7y ago
I'm a bit late to the party, but Hetzner actually deleted all my VMs and backups. Their abuse team didn't like my name, despite me also having my name in my e-mail and my credit card info. I got an e-mail that my account was flagged, but they didn't even give me a chance to tell them they had my name correct. I responded to their email within 30 minutes, but everything had already been erased. Luckily I had some stuff in github, but I will never use them again.
sonnyblarney 7y ago
Because AWS et. al. are considerably more than just instances? There's a whole host of services that make dev and deployment at lot easier. Though instance costs are more expensive ... that's not the issue, the issue is 'TCO' (total cost of ownership) not 'server cost'. If your team can move at 2x the speed on AWS, well that's worth a lot. Cloud services are very useful, so the article raises a very legit concern/paradox.
wink 7y ago
My negative record is "getting access to the server" until "hard disk died" is 12h. And no, this isn't 1 out of 1 server. I'd never again run anything business-critical on Hetzner metal. I'm not even running my irc bouncer there, tbh. The cloud stuff I'm really happy though, higher uptimes than on most physical servers there. Oh, and remind me again of the time where we regularly called them because of outages because our monitoring was better than theirs and the customer support people hadn't yet learned of the network outage...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Operyl 7y ago
For me, it’s because I have some latency specific loads that I can’t really easily do overseas sometimes.

by jwr 7y ago

geggam 7y ago

Because I can simply turn off everything and reduce my spend to storage alone. If I turn off that server I still pay for it

barkingcat 7y ago

Because DO has their $5 and $10 / month plan, and that's really enough for me.

freehunter 7y ago
That's exactly it for me too. The Hetzner plan costs about twice as much as my monthly DO bill. Not to mention I'm US based and all of my customers are US based so hosting a site in Germany or Finland doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
- phoobahr 7y ago
  And here I am a Canadian and my client base is Canadian. While not a problem just yet it is likely that PIPEDA/PHIPA would make it complicated to serve data from outside the country. I am not a lawyer but the advice I have been given is murky. It’s much easier to stuck with DO which, at my usage, costs about the same number of $CAD as lightsail would in $USD
- karussell 7y ago
  Since a year you can use their cloud product: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud starting at 2.5€ There are lots of "managed" features still missing but acceptable for a still young product.
phonon 7y ago
https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/?opdp1=pricing https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/?opdp1=pricing ?
- metildaa 7y ago
  The CPU allocations on Lightsail are anemic compared to DO.
  - phonon 7y ago
    Are they? They come out fairly comparably here. I think Lightsail is a T3 instance "under the hood". https://joshtronic.com/2019/06/03/vps-showdown-digitalocean-lightsail-linode-upcloud-vultr/ https://joshtronic.com/2019/06/03/vps-showdown-digitalocean-...
    - metildaa 7y ago
      Notice the memory and file I/O, huge gulfs in performance. The focus of my comment though was about Amazon's restrictive leaky bucket CPU allocation scheme, you can burn through your allocation of high cpu use and then get throttled to 5% of peak use iirc for hours while this bucket refills. DO lets you use much more CPU comparatively.
      - phonon 7y ago
        True. For intermittent (less than 10% high CPU usage per period) use though, it's equivalent, and comes with other advantages.
- adolph 7y ago
  Nice, use Docker containers in it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z525kfneC6E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z525kfneC6E
- geezerjay 7y ago
  AWS Lightsail charges $3.50/month for a vm with 512MB RAM. Hetzer charges €3.00/month for avm with 2GB RAM.

Someone1234 7y ago

Because hypothetically your instance should be hardware agnostic. If the physical hardware dies, it should automatically migrate to another physical server at their data center without your intervention. It will only look like an unexpected restart from your perspective. That's something worth paying for. It would be more comparable to two servers at Hetzner with rapid failover. But even that is more involved since you have to set up the logic of when to failover. Auto-scaling is a benefit of "cloud" services. But it isn't the only selling point. Hardware abstraction is perhaps bigger.

olau 7y ago
That's wishful thinking. If there's state in that virtual machine, it's probably either stored on the physical host or in a SAN. If it's in the physical host, it has to be fished out of that machine or restored from a backup. If it's a SAN, you can lose your virtual machine if the SAN goes down. I've seen both happen. Actually, a single machine with RAID is surprisingly stable. A provider like Hetzner can switch out a faulty disk in less than five minutes, or switch a faulty motherboard/power supply in less than half an hour. Virtualization on top of this does not increase stability, in my experience. Now, some cloud providers do have more sophisticated distributed systems that do not have single points of failure, and that's a completely different story. Of course, the software itself is a source of correlated failures, so even there you should never rely on a single cloud vendor. There's a poster here on this site who commented some months ago that he had for years rented three servers, each on a different continent, each from a different provider, and never had downtime. That's engineering.
- treis 7y ago
  >If there's state in that virtual machine, it's probably either stored on the physical host or in a SAN I think the point is to write your application in a way that there's not state in the VM. My VMs are disposable and in fact the way I do deployments is to spin up a new VM in DO and then assign it the floating IP for production. If things go haywire I can easily swap back the IP address to the known good VM.
  - 7y ago

EugeneOZ 7y ago

Maybe because they had dozens of failures and DDOS outages? Why they have to keep their prices so low - because of reputation. Price is the only attractive thing in services like this.

at-fates-hands 7y ago
I came here to say this. Why people continue to think you can get everything on the cheap with services like this and not understand you're putting your business at risk by trying to cut corners on hosting and other services is beyond me. I pay around $20-$25/month for Azure hosting for several e-commerce and mobile app clients I have. I told them up front you don't want to cut corners on this stuff, it will come back to haunt you later. Sure, you'll save a few bucks year over year, but what happens in an outage? What happens when your clients can't order their stuff and you lose revenue for several days straight? Now the idea of saving a few hundred dollars a year evaporates as thousands of dollars are lost when your service provider takes a dump on you. Suddenly, it's not such a good deal anymore is it?

vorticalbox 7y ago

If you use a lambda on aws you get 1 million requests for free each month and after that factions of a penny per invoke.

therein 7y ago
That's wonderful. Now you can use those requests to read from or write to SQS, do DynamoDB stuff and play in the AWS walled garden where things seem cheap at first but things add up. You can then keep telling yourself you have a stable, managed infrastructure and you're cutting on operational expenses and able to move fast while the engineers in your organization are working harder to make things work with generic services with shortcomings, making your product actually work in less than optimal ways. Managed services feel like they are helping with operational costs but they have a cost when you're building your product. I worked on projects that would have ended up being simpler and cheaper to operate on physical dedicated servers, but instead they are running on "ASG's that autoscale and have zero downtime" with "ALBs that send traffic to any and all hosts when all origins report unhealthy". Things in the managed world is far less than ideal because one size doesn't fit all.
opportune 7y ago
The issue with lambda is that at high loads it's a lot more expensive than using a server. I looked into doing something with lambda that would take about ~10b invocations/day and it was so expensive compared to just standing up a microservice. So I've never deployed a lambda before and I'm sure at low loads it's fine, but I would be afraid of taking a dependency on lambda/functions in an application architecture.

jimnotgym 7y ago

I'm moving Azure, AWS and other VPS workloads to them right now. Very impressive service!

hadlock 7y ago

Most $10MM ARR startups are running on two medium T class aws instances behind a load balancer at $35/mo plus another small server for accessories (redis, message queue, etc) and then a sql backend. That's something like $200/mo for infrastructure, you never need to maintain the hardware and you have the option to autoscale at any time to support $100MM ARR. Plus you get access to backups and all the other tools and products that are constantly being released. Not having to hire an IT guy at $1200/mo to maintain your physical server and tend to it's networking rules is a significant savings over a developer-managed aws/gcp instance. Plus all the cloud interfaces are standardized so you can just hire someone to come through and fix/upgrade your infrastructure. Using a home-spun physical server means months if not years of undocumented tech debt for the next guy who comes along to have to maintain whatever kludges were installed long before he/she ever showed up. I just got done converting a bunch of physical servers over to the cloud and spent a year unwinding seven years of technical debt and now the dev/qa teams can actually spin up a new test environment in under 30 days (closer to 3 minutes).

true_religion 7y ago
You’re telling me that 10 million dollar “startup” companies can’t run 1 server without incurring “years” of tech debt? Sorry, that just sounds unbelievable.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  Welcome to startup fallacies. You don't know what you don't know, and it's easier (but not cheaper) to follow a crowd.
- philjohn 7y ago
  They can, but let's be honest, people will be doing multiple roles when in the very early stage, so your lead programmer will be configuring the server ... probably won't be using a configuration management solution and whomever takes it over is going to have to comb through the various configuration files to work out what it's meant to be doing.
social_quotient 7y ago

rkangel 7y ago

In our case, because it was easy to get thousands of dollars of free credit in Google cloud (the same appeared to be true for AWS). This went up to tens of thousands for Series A. We had zero serving costs and would have continued to do so for years. It makes perfect sense for Google/Amazon to incentivise startups to design themselves for their cloud.

treis 7y ago
>because it was easy to get thousands of dollars of free credit in Google cloud (the same appeared to be true for AWS) Can you share how?
- brianwawok 7y ago
  https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/ https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/

ksec 7y ago

>For 34€/month, Hetzner ... Hetzner is only available in EU and specifically Germany. And my bet most of these people want it within US.

hathawsh 7y ago
I googled for "Hetzner USA" and found some similar offerings: https://www.wholesaleinternet.net/dedicated/ https://www.wholesaleinternet.net/dedicated/ https://www.nocix.net/dedicated/ https://www.nocix.net/dedicated/
- ksec 7y ago
  I think most people goes with DO not because it was just "affordable", it has also been around long enough and large enough to be trusted. Both OVH and Hetzner is the same as DO in this regards. The two listed aren't really well known.
floatboth 7y ago
Hetzner is also a company that really wants you to send them a scan of your government ID / passport. Meanwhile e.g. prgmr takes bitcoin.

rando444 7y ago

I'm a bit late to the party, but Hetzner actually deleted all my VMs and backups. Their abuse team didn't like my name, despite me also having my name in my e-mail and my credit card info. I got an e-mail that my account was flagged, but they didn't even give me a chance to tell them they had my name correct. I responded to their email within 30 minutes, but everything had already been erased. Luckily I had some stuff in github, but I will never use them again.

sonnyblarney 7y ago

Because AWS et. al. are considerably more than just instances? There's a whole host of services that make dev and deployment at lot easier. Though instance costs are more expensive ... that's not the issue, the issue is 'TCO' (total cost of ownership) not 'server cost'. If your team can move at 2x the speed on AWS, well that's worth a lot. Cloud services are very useful, so the article raises a very legit concern/paradox.

wink 7y ago

My negative record is "getting access to the server" until "hard disk died" is 12h. And no, this isn't 1 out of 1 server. I'd never again run anything business-critical on Hetzner metal. I'm not even running my irc bouncer there, tbh. The cloud stuff I'm really happy though, higher uptimes than on most physical servers there. Oh, and remind me again of the time where we regularly called them because of outages because our monitoring was better than theirs and the customer support people hadn't yet learned of the network outage...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Operyl 7y ago

For me, it’s because I have some latency specific loads that I can’t really easily do overseas sometimes.