7 ms·

Wasn't sure if April fools or not. German companies have launched so many of those "rivals" to AWS by now, all of them require you to call someone/send a letter

Wasn't sure if April fools or not. German companies have launched so many of those "rivals" to AWS by now, all of them require you to call someone/send a letter/FAX to create a VM. I wonder if they understand that the success of cloud, SaaS and generally majority of modern, scalable businesses comes from the fact that it _can_ be self-served.

exar0815 5y ago
Strange, I never had to send a single FAX in my life in germany. Especially not for any cloud offerings located in EU/germany. I would LOVE to see proof for that.
- vdfs 5y ago
  Some even use Telegram
- belter 5y ago
  German Newspaper (2018): "...Two-thirds of German companies regularly use faxes, whereas only half of them use video conferencing technologies, and just one-third use messaging services or online collaboration tools..." https://www.handelsblatt.com/english/companies/digitization-the-fax-is-dead-long-live-the-fax/23583118.html https://www.handelsblatt.com/english/companies/digitization-...
  - progre 5y ago
    Not proof. The question was about cloud companies.
    - belter 5y ago
      The second part of the comment yes. The first was about how pervasive the use of fax was within German business. But in Japan it's worst: "Japan’s reliance on fax machines lambasted by coronavirus doctor": https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/coronavirus-japan-fax-machine-online-hanko-a9501906.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/coronavirus-ja... "Japan Can't Get Rid of the Fax Machine With Offices Demanding It Stays": https://www.insider.com/japan-cant-get-rid-the-fax-machine-offices-demanding-stay-2021-7 https://www.insider.com/japan-cant-get-rid-the-fax-machine-o...
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    86% of German companies employ 10 or fewer people [1]. I'm not why we would expect them to use online collaboration tools or video conferencing pre-pandemic? Fax still being common is true though, it's mostly used as a quicker alternative to mail with established legal standing and more convenient than rolling out electronic signature schemes. You can still live and work without a fax in Germany, you will just be sending more letters. I've never sent a fax or letter to a German cloud provider though (despite using several of them) 1: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1929/umfrage/unternehmen-nach-beschaeftigtengroessenklassen/ https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1929/umfrage/...
- sorokod 5y ago
  When switching cell phone number away from Vodafone de I was required to send a fax. A data point rather than proof.
mpfundstein 5y ago
can you name a few rivals? i wonder btw... are you German? ;-)
KingOfCoders 5y ago
"all of them require you to call someone/send a letter/FAX to create a VM." Have ordered servers from Hetzner online for the last 20 years, since their cloud offering via API/cli.
- dazc 5y ago
  Hetzner requested a copy of my UK passport though. An image of a passport proves nothing btw, especially since Hetzner is not a UK Govt Agency, that I am aware of, and has zero methods of authenticating such 'evidence' of ID.
  - bayindirh 5y ago
    I assume it happened while the UK was in the EU. You can verify a passport electronically via the identifiers via the EU border control network, AFAIK. So, it's enough of a verification.
  - jensus 5y ago
    I've not needed to verify identity to spin up VPS or order storage boxes. For what reason did you have to verify yourself?
    - detaro 5y ago
      Plenty providers have verification only when something seems "off" in some way. Amazon has both lots of experience and data for payment verification and the margin to absorb fraud costs that do go through, smaller providers not so much.
    - dazc 5y ago
      I assumed because I was not an EU citizen?
      - belter 5y ago
        No, they ask for EU citizens also.
flexie 5y ago
We've used Hetzner for years. We never called or faxed them. Great service, by the way.
ramboldio 5y ago
This time is different: This is not backed by the govt or german telecom but by the richest German alive (> 50B net worth). I think (hope), the chances are much higher that he's in for the long run with an appropriate amount of ressources.
- EugeneOZ 5y ago
  Still, this site has no prices, only “contact us”.
  - ramboldio 5y ago
    I think, the long-run is much more important than whatever the specific feature set it rn. (Also, actually talking to people might be more of a feature than a bug, after all?)
    - EugeneOZ 5y ago
      No, talking to people is stressful and it's unreliable.
  - wasmitnetzen 5y ago
    There is a "Prices" link at the top?
    - EugeneOZ 5y ago
      Only “from...” prices - I can not compare their prices to AWS with the same resources.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
tut-urut-utut 5y ago
While the bureaucracy certainly applies to German government, companies here are no better and no worse than anywhere in the world. If you have an example of a German IT company requiring a fax, please share, so I can mock my German co-workers ;)
- belter 5y ago
  Does Health Care counts? "German health care: Tackling COVID with paper, pen and a fax machine": https://www.dw.com/en/german-health-care-tackling-covid-with-paper-pen-and-a-fax-machine/a-56360491 https://www.dw.com/en/german-health-care-tackling-covid-with...
  - tut-urut-utut 5y ago
    No, Health care is a government institution, not a private company.
    - hansel_der 5y ago
      not to dispute the point in light of the question, but: german health-care is thoroughly privatized, thou heavily regulated by the government.
      - tut-urut-utut 5y ago
        That's true. But Covid tracking in Germany is done by the Gesundheitsamt (health office), which is the government institution (like everything ending with -amt).
jwsteigerwalt 5y ago
Had to send documents to substantiate the business location on account creation, but nothing asynchronous after that.
rgavuliak 5y ago
This may be due to unions. In one of my previous jobs we were providing a software for digital subscriptions to their news site. The plan was to also integrate with their SAP for offline subscriptions. We offered to do the integration in a way where a user would buy online and it would get inserted into their SAP via an API. This was a no go, since before they've had a couple of people doing this manually and they couldn't fire them due to unions so they decided we would be sending the orders for offline subscriptions to them and they'll physically enter it into SAP. I wish I was joking.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
asah 5y ago
Hetzner has entered the chat. (They rock)
rvz 5y ago
> Wasn't sure if April fools or not. Wasn't sure if you were paying attention or not? [0] What is wrong with having competition? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23151069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23151069
belter 5y ago
Not sure how they plan to offer competitive prices. "Electricity prices in Germany ranked amongst highest globally" (2021): https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/electricity-prices-germany-ranked-amongst-highest-globally https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/electri...
- b3orn 5y ago
  Just like anyone else having datacenters in Germany. AWS and Hetzner come to mind. Even though end customer electricity prices are among the highest not just globally but especially within Europe electricity prices for businesses with high demand are generally much lower and even ignoring that electricity prices won't have much of an effect on product prices.
- locallost 5y ago
  It's because of heavy taxation, but the industries pay a lot less since they get taxed less.
- jhgb 5y ago
  What percentage of cloud service costs as paid for by customers is electricity cost? BTW what you're showing here is small consumer electricity rates. Large consumers of electricity in Germany have significant fee exemptions. It's one of the reasons why small consumers have it more expensive: in Germany, lots of the costs are offloaded away from the industrial users.
  - belter 5y ago
    One important percentage. Solutions development and other overhead's also count naturally. "Data Center Power Costs": "...In a data center, typically 20-40 % of the operating cost is related to data center power costs..." https://greenmountain.no/2020/07/01/data-center-power-costs/ https://greenmountain.no/2020/07/01/data-center-power-costs/ Also in the article above there this bar chart: https://greenmountain.no/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Cost-of-power-in-Europe-1024x576.png https://greenmountain.no/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Cost-of-... were once more Germany costs for electricity are so much higher than anybody else. "How Much Does it Cost to Power One Rack in a Data Center?": https://www.nlyte.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-power-one-rack-in-a-data-center/ https://www.nlyte.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-power-on... "...The energy cost to power a single server rack in a data center in the US can be as high as almost $30,000 a year, depending on its configuration. In a data center with 100 cabinets, the cost to power those racks each year can be over $3 million. Data center professionals need to ensure that they are correctly monitoring energy consumption and efficiently managing capacity..."
ivan_gammel 5y ago
Strictly speaking, this is not Lidl (chain of grocery stores). Lidl is owned by the same parent company - Schwarz Gruppe, which has a pretty big digital branch with several companies focusing on different products (e-commerce, cloud infrastructure etc). StackIt is one of those companies. It is good to see one more local competitor to AWS backed by the largest retailer in Europe, who also uses those solutions for their own e-commerce projects.
locallost 5y ago
I don't know the answer to this question, but living in Germany and interacting with their products, I'd say they are pretty good at what they do -- for consumers. I don't use Amazon since years, but recently had to and was shocked that it's basically impossible to find anything, just hundreds of products and no way to filter through anything. Their competition is way ahead of them. So I don't know if this translates to IT / cloud / etc, but it's not like they are completely clueless. And as others have noted it's not just Lidl, this group owns also Kaufland which also swallowed up another chain (Real) recently. So they are huge.
frenchman99 5y ago
There are also PaaS providers in Germany, such as Fortrabbit for PHP, which do a great job. Competes with some parts of AWS.
- tutanchamun 5y ago
  Maybe I'm missing something, but the prices look bad for what is offered. Why would you use them over say a managed server, for example from Hetzner [0] or Netcup [1]? [0] https://www.hetzner.com/managed-server https://www.hetzner.com/managed-server [1] https://www.netcup.eu/professional/managed-server/managed-privateserver.php https://www.netcup.eu/professional/managed-server/managed-pr...
  - frenchman99 5y ago
    I think Fortrabbit allows you to scale easily to have a fault tolerant infrastructure without needing know-how. Kind of Like Heroku in some regards. A dedicated server is nice but if it fails and you have no redundancy, your service goes offline.
slig 5y ago
Tried to use IBM Cloud, they wanted my passport for verification. Big nope.

exar0815 5y ago

Strange, I never had to send a single FAX in my life in germany. Especially not for any cloud offerings located in EU/germany. I would LOVE to see proof for that.

vdfs 5y ago
Some even use Telegram
belter 5y ago
German Newspaper (2018): "...Two-thirds of German companies regularly use faxes, whereas only half of them use video conferencing technologies, and just one-third use messaging services or online collaboration tools..." https://www.handelsblatt.com/english/companies/digitization-the-fax-is-dead-long-live-the-fax/23583118.html https://www.handelsblatt.com/english/companies/digitization-...
- progre 5y ago
  Not proof. The question was about cloud companies.
  - belter 5y ago
    The second part of the comment yes. The first was about how pervasive the use of fax was within German business. But in Japan it's worst: "Japan’s reliance on fax machines lambasted by coronavirus doctor": https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/coronavirus-japan-fax-machine-online-hanko-a9501906.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/coronavirus-ja... "Japan Can't Get Rid of the Fax Machine With Offices Demanding It Stays": https://www.insider.com/japan-cant-get-rid-the-fax-machine-offices-demanding-stay-2021-7 https://www.insider.com/japan-cant-get-rid-the-fax-machine-o...
- wongarsu 5y ago
  86% of German companies employ 10 or fewer people [1]. I'm not why we would expect them to use online collaboration tools or video conferencing pre-pandemic? Fax still being common is true though, it's mostly used as a quicker alternative to mail with established legal standing and more convenient than rolling out electronic signature schemes. You can still live and work without a fax in Germany, you will just be sending more letters. I've never sent a fax or letter to a German cloud provider though (despite using several of them) 1: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1929/umfrage/unternehmen-nach-beschaeftigtengroessenklassen/ https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1929/umfrage/...
sorokod 5y ago
When switching cell phone number away from Vodafone de I was required to send a fax. A data point rather than proof.

mpfundstein 5y ago

can you name a few rivals? i wonder btw... are you German? ;-)

KingOfCoders 5y ago

"all of them require you to call someone/send a letter/FAX to create a VM." Have ordered servers from Hetzner online for the last 20 years, since their cloud offering via API/cli.

dazc 5y ago
Hetzner requested a copy of my UK passport though. An image of a passport proves nothing btw, especially since Hetzner is not a UK Govt Agency, that I am aware of, and has zero methods of authenticating such 'evidence' of ID.
- bayindirh 5y ago
  I assume it happened while the UK was in the EU. You can verify a passport electronically via the identifiers via the EU border control network, AFAIK. So, it's enough of a verification.
- jensus 5y ago
  I've not needed to verify identity to spin up VPS or order storage boxes. For what reason did you have to verify yourself?
  - detaro 5y ago
    Plenty providers have verification only when something seems "off" in some way. Amazon has both lots of experience and data for payment verification and the margin to absorb fraud costs that do go through, smaller providers not so much.
  - dazc 5y ago
    I assumed because I was not an EU citizen?
    - belter 5y ago
      No, they ask for EU citizens also.

flexie 5y ago

We've used Hetzner for years. We never called or faxed them. Great service, by the way.

ramboldio 5y ago

This time is different: This is not backed by the govt or german telecom but by the richest German alive (> 50B net worth). I think (hope), the chances are much higher that he's in for the long run with an appropriate amount of ressources.

EugeneOZ 5y ago
Still, this site has no prices, only “contact us”.
- ramboldio 5y ago
  I think, the long-run is much more important than whatever the specific feature set it rn. (Also, actually talking to people might be more of a feature than a bug, after all?)
  - EugeneOZ 5y ago
    No, talking to people is stressful and it's unreliable.
- wasmitnetzen 5y ago
  There is a "Prices" link at the top?
  - EugeneOZ 5y ago
    Only “from...” prices - I can not compare their prices to AWS with the same resources.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

tut-urut-utut 5y ago

While the bureaucracy certainly applies to German government, companies here are no better and no worse than anywhere in the world. If you have an example of a German IT company requiring a fax, please share, so I can mock my German co-workers ;)

belter 5y ago
Does Health Care counts? "German health care: Tackling COVID with paper, pen and a fax machine": https://www.dw.com/en/german-health-care-tackling-covid-with-paper-pen-and-a-fax-machine/a-56360491 https://www.dw.com/en/german-health-care-tackling-covid-with...
- tut-urut-utut 5y ago
  No, Health care is a government institution, not a private company.
  - hansel_der 5y ago
    not to dispute the point in light of the question, but: german health-care is thoroughly privatized, thou heavily regulated by the government.
    - tut-urut-utut 5y ago
      That's true. But Covid tracking in Germany is done by the Gesundheitsamt (health office), which is the government institution (like everything ending with -amt).

jwsteigerwalt 5y ago

Had to send documents to substantiate the business location on account creation, but nothing asynchronous after that.

rgavuliak 5y ago

This may be due to unions. In one of my previous jobs we were providing a software for digital subscriptions to their news site. The plan was to also integrate with their SAP for offline subscriptions. We offered to do the integration in a way where a user would buy online and it would get inserted into their SAP via an API. This was a no go, since before they've had a couple of people doing this manually and they couldn't fire them due to unions so they decided we would be sending the orders for offline subscriptions to them and they'll physically enter it into SAP. I wish I was joking.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

asah 5y ago

Hetzner has entered the chat. (They rock)

rvz 5y ago

> Wasn't sure if April fools or not. Wasn't sure if you were paying attention or not? [0] What is wrong with having competition? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23151069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23151069

belter 5y ago

Not sure how they plan to offer competitive prices. "Electricity prices in Germany ranked amongst highest globally" (2021): https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/electricity-prices-germany-ranked-amongst-highest-globally https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/electri...

b3orn 5y ago
Just like anyone else having datacenters in Germany. AWS and Hetzner come to mind. Even though end customer electricity prices are among the highest not just globally but especially within Europe electricity prices for businesses with high demand are generally much lower and even ignoring that electricity prices won't have much of an effect on product prices.
locallost 5y ago
It's because of heavy taxation, but the industries pay a lot less since they get taxed less.
jhgb 5y ago
What percentage of cloud service costs as paid for by customers is electricity cost? BTW what you're showing here is small consumer electricity rates. Large consumers of electricity in Germany have significant fee exemptions. It's one of the reasons why small consumers have it more expensive: in Germany, lots of the costs are offloaded away from the industrial users.
- belter 5y ago
  One important percentage. Solutions development and other overhead's also count naturally. "Data Center Power Costs": "...In a data center, typically 20-40 % of the operating cost is related to data center power costs..." https://greenmountain.no/2020/07/01/data-center-power-costs/ https://greenmountain.no/2020/07/01/data-center-power-costs/ Also in the article above there this bar chart: https://greenmountain.no/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Cost-of-power-in-Europe-1024x576.png https://greenmountain.no/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Cost-of-... were once more Germany costs for electricity are so much higher than anybody else. "How Much Does it Cost to Power One Rack in a Data Center?": https://www.nlyte.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-power-one-rack-in-a-data-center/ https://www.nlyte.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-power-on... "...The energy cost to power a single server rack in a data center in the US can be as high as almost $30,000 a year, depending on its configuration. In a data center with 100 cabinets, the cost to power those racks each year can be over $3 million. Data center professionals need to ensure that they are correctly monitoring energy consumption and efficiently managing capacity..."

ivan_gammel 5y ago

Strictly speaking, this is not Lidl (chain of grocery stores). Lidl is owned by the same parent company - Schwarz Gruppe, which has a pretty big digital branch with several companies focusing on different products (e-commerce, cloud infrastructure etc). StackIt is one of those companies. It is good to see one more local competitor to AWS backed by the largest retailer in Europe, who also uses those solutions for their own e-commerce projects.

locallost 5y ago

I don't know the answer to this question, but living in Germany and interacting with their products, I'd say they are pretty good at what they do -- for consumers. I don't use Amazon since years, but recently had to and was shocked that it's basically impossible to find anything, just hundreds of products and no way to filter through anything. Their competition is way ahead of them. So I don't know if this translates to IT / cloud / etc, but it's not like they are completely clueless. And as others have noted it's not just Lidl, this group owns also Kaufland which also swallowed up another chain (Real) recently. So they are huge.

frenchman99 5y ago

There are also PaaS providers in Germany, such as Fortrabbit for PHP, which do a great job. Competes with some parts of AWS.

tutanchamun 5y ago
Maybe I'm missing something, but the prices look bad for what is offered. Why would you use them over say a managed server, for example from Hetzner [0] or Netcup [1]? [0] https://www.hetzner.com/managed-server https://www.hetzner.com/managed-server [1] https://www.netcup.eu/professional/managed-server/managed-privateserver.php https://www.netcup.eu/professional/managed-server/managed-pr...
- frenchman99 5y ago
  I think Fortrabbit allows you to scale easily to have a fault tolerant infrastructure without needing know-how. Kind of Like Heroku in some regards. A dedicated server is nice but if it fails and you have no redundancy, your service goes offline.

slig 5y ago

Tried to use IBM Cloud, they wanted my passport for verification. Big nope.