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I assume this is common knowledge, but I personally find Hetzner to be exceptionally good. It's always been good to me when I was using their European data cen
by cmer 5y ago
I assume this is common knowledge, but I personally find Hetzner to be exceptionally good.
It's always been good to me when I was using their European data centers, but that was always a bit of a bummer because of latency. Now that they have a DC in the US, I just can't think of a single good reason to use other cloud providers for smaller deployments. They're pretty much the best bang for your buck you can get anywhere.
- martin_a 5y agoAlso: Get one of their managed webhosting packages (starting from 1,90 €/month) and you'll get a domain with it. You can't get your own mail hosted for much cheaper.
- XCSme 5y agoDoes it come with SMTP?
- martin_a 5y agoI think so, yes, see here: https://docs.hetzner.com/konsoleh/account-management/email/setting-up-an-email-account/ https://docs.hetzner.com/konsoleh/account-management/email/s...
- hansel_der 5y agowhat does that even mean? (i.e. how would an email service work w/o smtp)
- dkjaudyeqooe 5y agoSome hosts block port 25 (SMTP) and you have to use another server to send emails.
- na85 5y agoDon't the big players penalize mail coming from hosts without ipv4?
- amenod 5y ago> Don't the big players penalize mail coming from hosts? Ftfy. :) Yes, they do, unfortunately. I am still hoping for some regulation / fine to put an end to this.
- MaKey 5y agoMe too! You're in for a lot of pain, especially in the beginning, when trying to host your own mail server. Big players just dropping mails (Microsoft), local authorities refusing your mails (even on the postmaster inbox) and if your mail goes through it might still go straight to the spam folder. Granted, I'm using an .xyz domain, but I'm not sure how big of a role this really plays. Interestingly I didn't have problems with Google's mail servers so far.
- seanw444 5y agoI remember hearing that Google really downgrades the search rankings of .xyz domains. Not sure how it goes for email though.
- martin_a 5y agoI've not yet found this to be an issue with personal mails. If you're planning on setting up whatever system that needs to send _lots_ of mails, something else might be better indeed.
- 6jQhWNYh 5y agoYou can: buy a cheap 4€/year domain at OVH and you'll get your own mail with their free 10M web hosting plan.
- api 5y agoHow is reliability these days?
- leephillips 5y agoI have one at the 6€/mo level, with 498 days of uptime as of today.
- hackbinary 5y agoDo you not patch your kernel?
- leephillips 5y agoApparently not. Talk me into it.
- hackbinary 5y agoWhile having a long uptime sounds cool it is a signal that you don't patch that often. Maybe you patch your other stuff, but I would bet on even odds that you don't. So then that is the rest of the stack, eg systemd which has some mega flaws IIRC. You're leaving yourself open to having something exploited. Have a look at your ssh logs where "people" are constantly trying to get in. https://www.whitesourcesoftware.com/resources/blog/top-10-linux-kernel-vulnerabilities/ https://www.whitesourcesoftware.com/resources/blog/top-10-li...
- leephillips 5y agoI understand, and my uptime was just to show how reliable Hetzner has been. By “talk me into it” I meant please point out a real kernel security flaw that be exploited without already having access to the system. There very well might be some! I’m not well up on all of this. Yes, I check my logs and see the constant stream of breakin attempts. Basic security precautions seem to keep them out.
- 5y ago
- sneak 5y agoI always assume (to be clear: this has not happened to me) that Hetzner's margins being what they are, any customer that causes an undue support burden (regardless of culpability) is probably unlikely to remain a customer for very long. I am extremely cautious of the sources of UGC I host publicly on my Hetzner machines. In addition to the fact that Germany lacks freedom of speech/publication (thus obligating a German organization like Hetzner to censor content that is legal to publish in most places, but not Germany), I imagine it wouldn't take many legitimate/normal UGC-related issues (e.g. properly-responded-to-by-the-box-customer DMCA takedowns) to make my customer relationship turn negative ROI for them. I wouldn't, say, run a social media site open to the public on Hetzner, even if I responded to DMCA and other legally-mandated takedowns in single-digit minutes, 24/7/365. I just can't imagine they'd accept the overhead of such a customer. That said, it's great for hosting big files that CloudFlare's TOS prohibits (video, podcasts, etc), just as long as you're certain nobody at Hetzner's going to get a call over one of your URLs.
- sascha_sl 5y agoHappy to provide an anecdote here. Had my home searched for user generated content on a Hetzner server around 2014. Some reports were also forwarded to me when the service was still alive. Hetzner provided a signed statement of me responding to abuse reports within a few hours of me asking.
- diffeomorphism 5y ago> lacks freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is article 5 of the German constitution. What you mean is that it differs from the US version.
- sneak 5y agoNo, you're not allowed to publish gory video games or racist literature[1] in Germany, which is clearly prior restraint. It's not that the US has some crazy absolutist freedom of expression (it does not), it's that Germany simply lacks it. You can't have "mostly" free expression. It's either abridged or it isn't. Germany censors harmless digital art that the government deems inappropriate for adults to be able to see. It's a classic slippery slope (modern Germans defending their government's censorship and lack of free expression will usually cite Hitler/racist stuff, but that's not all that's banned). It doesn't really matter what the constitution says, if in practice you don't have those rights. It's sort of like how the 2A in the USA says that the people have the right to keep and bear arms, but I don't suggest attempting to exercise that right in Central Park, because you don't actually have it. Same goes for free expression in Germany. From https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/19123 https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/19123 : > Germany is one of the strictest censors of violence among the world’s video game consumers. Due to its history and a cohesive national opinion, the legislature limits content severely, much more severely than the surrounding European nations. This results in international developers choosing not to market to Germany, creating censored titles specifically for the German market, or finding themselves on a list of banned titles illegal to buy or sell. [1]: there's also no indication that racist publications were responsible for WW2 (versus, say, Hitler himself), making this censorship-for-censorship's sake. Many other countries do not prohibit racist literature and have not committed a holocaust. So, of course, they banned violent video games too, because those don't cause violence either.
- synthmeat 5y agoFor non-dedicated in the US? I can think of at least 2 reasons why not: - crappy network (advertised 300-500mbps, usually lower) - crappy cpus ("benchmarked" several providers, hetzner was lower end on cpu-bound loads) Dedicated ones are baller though, unfortunately no US.
- smarx007 5y agoI "benchmarked" the network across a few big VPS providers, they all seem to do 400Mpbs+ within the continent and 100-200Mpbs when you go across the ocean (iperf3, I assume you also meant heavy sustained traffic). It also aligns with what the creator of PHP found out: https://toys.lerdorf.com/low-cost-vps-testing https://toys.lerdorf.com/low-cost-vps-testing. Did you find a provider where the network would allow you to go 300Mbps+ across the ocean on a cheap VPS? Re: CPU, if you were comparing them with the VMs from "the big 3", you should look under the "Dedicated vCPU" tab: https://www.hetzner.com/de/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/de/cloud
- synthmeat 5y agoYeah, heavy sustained, and DO came up on top (even your link says so). Admittedly, I haven't tested across the pond. I've tested dcpu ones only AND only for my load (node.js with a worker). That's why "benchmarked" is in quotes. :) Linode/Vultr/DigitalOcean/Hetzner/Terrahost I can easily imagine cost savings on Hetzner could benefit certain loads, of course. It's always "depends".
- freemint 5y agoHow did you come to those numbers? I did my own benchmarks and Hetzner definitely came on top of Vultr. https://github.com/freemin7/discount-cloud-geekbench-5 https://github.com/freemin7/discount-cloud-geekbench-5
- synthmeat 5y agoI don't see Hetzner dedicated vCPU's on there? I did mention "dcpu" ones. But thank you for your benchmark, it's very useful for shared-cpu comparison. How did I come to it? Measuring performance of my node.js service I need to run on it, iperf, speedtest.
- pid-1 5y agoWhen running things that tolerate interruptions, AWS Spot Instances are way cheaper than Hertzner or any other VPS service.
- FDSGSG 5y agoDo you have numbers to share? That sounds really hard to believe. Can AWS Spot Instances really beat this? https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax
- dgudkov 5y agoThe beauty of Hetzner is its dedicated servers. You can get 8 core, 64GB ECC, 1TB SSD server for mere 64 EUR/mo. AWS has nothing like that, AFAIK.
- welterde 5y agoCan you name some instance types? I had a look at a couple random ones and the closest equivalent at hetzner was always significantly cheaper.
- smarx007 5y agoI think AWS will be at least 10x more if you include the traffic charges.
- e12e 5y agoNote that bandwidth is included for servers with gigabit uplink - for 10gb uplink "only" 30TB/month is included. How much is just 5TB/month egress on Amazon?
- saynay 5y agoTheir dedicated stuff is dirt cheap, although if you are trying to put your own OS on it they are quite a pain (some ancient Java web plugin). Networking has been occasionally unstable for me, though. Their vlan stuff being 1400 mtu is also annoying.
- hansel_der 5y ago> Their vlan stuff being 1400 mtu is also annoying. does this suggest that their networking gear is also dirt cheap or is this just an artifact of legacy compat and/or not wanting to wory about jumboframes?
- starptech 5y agoExactly! I use https://github.com/StarpTech/k-andy https://github.com/StarpTech/k-andy for most projects with a limited budget.
- gunapologist99 5y agohttps://github.com/StarpTech/k-andy https://github.com/StarpTech/k-andy : "Zero friction Kubernetes stack on Hetzner Cloud", basically specialized k3s with some pieces customized for Hetzner, and automatic deployment on Hetzner cloud instances.
- cyberpunk 5y agoI've had the opposite experience; OVH are much better, Hetzner support is absolutely awful and unskilled. I'm a big fan of OVH, they've never let me down.
- tinco 5y agoSo I take it your datacenter has never burned down? Sorry, had to poke fun a little bit, obviously there's always a chance of having a bad experience. I've only had to interact with Hetzner support once, and it was positive, we determined that a consumer grade CPU was aggressively going into some sleep mode the Linux kernel wasn't waking up from, and the Hetzner support guy agreed that was the problem and determined it was possible to disable that feature in the BIOS, and went ahead and did that for us. And of course the fact that that was necessary was on us for running our production on their consumer grade CPUs. I believe Hetzner and maybe also OVH have a much bigger role to play in the deployments of the future. The big cloud players are overplaying their hands, and it's becoming more and more attractive to run on bare metal as devops tooling improves.
- rmoriz 5y agoFun story: Hetzner lost a colocation due to overheating like almost 20 years ago. Everyone has to learn over time that eventually adds up to deep domain knowledge. Both Hetzner and OVH have built custom solutions for buildings, climate and energy monitoring.
- amenod 5y agoNot only that, but for some deployments it is actually preferable to limit the amount of money you can pay. In other words, better for the service to be down than for the company or person to be bankrupt. Last I checked, that simply wasn't possible with AWS (no, alerts are not the same thing).
- p1necone 5y agoImo that's a must have feature for any cloud hosting provider - I don't want to bankrupt my company/myself because I misconfigure something or write a bug. I recall there being discussion about it on HN before and a lot of people being confused as to why anyone needs it though.
- gibsonf1 5y agoWe've been using Hetzner since the last article about their VA service appeared last month on HN and are truly impressed in all respects with the performance and cost. We plan to move all our servers over to Hetzner from AWS, however continue using S3 (We didn't see a comparable service on Hetzner for S3)
- rlex 5y agoSadly i have quite opposite experience. Back in the day hetzner was my first dedicated server provider (after i grew up from shared hosting). I had some issues with HDDs and they replaced faulty one with another that failed shortly after, then another heavily used hdd. I migrated to OVH then. After some years i bought another server from them and it was okay, apart from couple of downtimes. Some time ago i got interested in k8s and decided to setup personal cluster. So i tried to register account with them again, because when you don't have any services they delete your account completely (really?) I failed. They silently suspended my account after i made payment for verification. I tried to register again, they asked for scan of my passport, i sent it, and they suspended my account again. No replies from support regarding that issue too. Funny, because i went through validation process 2 times already (when i rented dedicated servers from them) and now i can't create account to use their cloud offering (and dedicated servers too)
- t0mas88 5y agoThe account deletion when not having any services is a result of their privacy policy. Most European companies should do that but I think it's rare in practice. What they didn't do very well is that it's of course better to email you before deleting. The HDD thing is (was?) definitely an issue with Hetzner. I had the same experience some years ago. Best option was to get hardware raid and SAS disks, those were datacenter quality instead of consumer and worked great.
- bserge 5y agoVery German of them. Do something they don't like once and they ghost you forever lol.
- mike_d 5y agoHetzner's backend billing system broke. They couldn't charge my credit card no matter how hard they tried. Eventually it ended up as a billing dispute, I paid the balance and terminated the servers and moved them to a different account that magically worked with the same card. Got a letter in the mail a month ago that they had sent the broken account to a collections company in the US.
- lowwave 5y agonot to mention free DDoS protection. In Amazon I read in one hacker news article that it costs them around $6000 for the custom AWS DDoS team. Why people still use AWS? Other than that it is a corporate police. Honestly would like to know.
- blablabla123 5y agoI also have 2 servers there, one virtual with FreeBSD and one root server as Linux hypervisor. I run the guests from a tmux session because I was too lazy to create any systemd job for this. The guest works like this already more reliably than an instance from more well-known providers. Of course for larger deployments you'd have to take care of fail-over and all this, so it's not really an option unless you are up for setting this up all by yourself.