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Would Hetzner be a good choice for hosting a site with mostly US-based visitors? If I got a 1Gbps Hetzner server would I be able to serve 1Gbps to the US?

structural 7y ago
Hetzner is about 100ms from the US east coast, which is doable. Closer to 200-225ms from the US west coast, which takes quite a bit more effort to deliver a good user experience. You'd probably want a secondary west coast datacenter/CDN. That said, architecting your application so that all the small, latency-sensitive data was served from a CDN and all the bulk data was served from Hetzner would be a good/affordable option.
chmod775 7y ago
I have 3 Hetzner "1 Gbps" servers in my fleet right now, and my experience is that you're only going to get about 50% of that bandwidth reliably to any place in the world (I suspect they secretly capped me, considering how exactly each server keeps hovering around that number). They're still a good deal at that price point though. A server provider that delivered on exactly what they're selling has been online.net, though they ramped up their prices recently. When they sell you X Mbit/s amount of "premium" bandwidth, you're always going to get at least that. If you exceed it a lot they'll cap you to exactly that though. I used to have 8 dedicated servers with them at ~30 Euro/month (excl. taxes) each for a total of ~3Gbit/s bandwidth. I've had some complaints about download speeds by users from NA when using German-based providers and significantly less complaints when using servers in France (i.e. online.net) or elsewhere west of Germany. I cap download speeds at 3MB/s per user anyways though. Though beggars can't be choosers. I buy any cheap bandwidth offers I see. Another thing to look out for if you're planning to saturate 1Ggbit/s is using SSDs and/or a good amount (>=32GB) of RAM. You'll probably not manage to do that if you have 1TB worth of files on a HDD and 8GB RAM for your OS's page cache. If you're planning to use SSL to serve stuff make sure your CPU isn't super old or an Intel Atom or something (I tried having a fleet of a lot of mini dedis once...). I should write a blog post about all this and more at some point. Maybe next year?
- continuations 7y ago
  So bandwidth from Hetzner to USA isn't any worse than to Europe? In both cases you're getting about 500 Mbps for a 1 Gbps server? > I should write a blog post about all this and more at some point. Maybe next year? Please do. I'd be interested to read more about your experiences.
  - chmod775 7y ago
    > So bandwidth from Hetzner to USA isn't any worse than to Europe? Europe is always going to be better by some margin. And, as I said, I've had some complaints with German-based providers (like Hetzner) from users in NA. Not enough to be a serious consideration though when weighted against cost.
- mayeaux 7y ago
  I'd definitely be interested in reading that.

structural 7y ago

Hetzner is about 100ms from the US east coast, which is doable. Closer to 200-225ms from the US west coast, which takes quite a bit more effort to deliver a good user experience. You'd probably want a secondary west coast datacenter/CDN. That said, architecting your application so that all the small, latency-sensitive data was served from a CDN and all the bulk data was served from Hetzner would be a good/affordable option.

chmod775 7y ago

I have 3 Hetzner "1 Gbps" servers in my fleet right now, and my experience is that you're only going to get about 50% of that bandwidth reliably to any place in the world (I suspect they secretly capped me, considering how exactly each server keeps hovering around that number). They're still a good deal at that price point though. A server provider that delivered on exactly what they're selling has been online.net, though they ramped up their prices recently. When they sell you X Mbit/s amount of "premium" bandwidth, you're always going to get at least that. If you exceed it a lot they'll cap you to exactly that though. I used to have 8 dedicated servers with them at ~30 Euro/month (excl. taxes) each for a total of ~3Gbit/s bandwidth. I've had some complaints about download speeds by users from NA when using German-based providers and significantly less complaints when using servers in France (i.e. online.net) or elsewhere west of Germany. I cap download speeds at 3MB/s per user anyways though. Though beggars can't be choosers. I buy any cheap bandwidth offers I see. Another thing to look out for if you're planning to saturate 1Ggbit/s is using SSDs and/or a good amount (>=32GB) of RAM. You'll probably not manage to do that if you have 1TB worth of files on a HDD and 8GB RAM for your OS's page cache. If you're planning to use SSL to serve stuff make sure your CPU isn't super old or an Intel Atom or something (I tried having a fleet of a lot of mini dedis once...). I should write a blog post about all this and more at some point. Maybe next year?

continuations 7y ago
So bandwidth from Hetzner to USA isn't any worse than to Europe? In both cases you're getting about 500 Mbps for a 1 Gbps server? > I should write a blog post about all this and more at some point. Maybe next year? Please do. I'd be interested to read more about your experiences.
- chmod775 7y ago
  > So bandwidth from Hetzner to USA isn't any worse than to Europe? Europe is always going to be better by some margin. And, as I said, I've had some complaints with German-based providers (like Hetzner) from users in NA. Not enough to be a serious consideration though when weighted against cost.
mayeaux 7y ago
I'd definitely be interested in reading that.