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Unless you consider it essential for your product to scale by few orders of magnitude on a dime, it would be sensible to add "non-cloud" hosting into considerat

Unless you consider it essential for your product to scale by few orders of magnitude on a dime, it would be sensible to add "non-cloud" hosting into consideration - Hetzner, OVH, Scaleway, ... Those are considerably cheaper, suffer less from unpredictable performance, a.k.a. "loud neighbour" problem, and are less likely to make you lock into some API/feature that would become a huge headache if you ever decide to move.

jpgvm 4y ago
You can also make them feel pretty cloud-like by running k8s on them.
jhugo 4y ago
We had a lot of noisy neighbour issues on Hetzner's VPSes, to the point that we stopped using them entirely. Their bare metal is a great offer though. And fully agreed about lock-in. If you can, design cloud-agnostic from the start. You get a lot more flexibility and you're in a much better negotiating position as you grow. Not realistic or necessarily sensible for every company/team though.
- mgbmtl 4y ago
  I'm a happy Hetzner baremetal (and OVH) user, just don't use Hetzner's Finland DC, the network is very unpredictable (a lot of random packet loss).
  - usr1106 4y ago
    You don't say where you notice that packet loss from, so I guess you are talking about the US? The by far biggest cable goes from Finland to Germany. No idea what happens after that. I believe Hetzner uses it and I have never heard that they wouldn't have enough bandwidth. But I have neither inside knowledge nor do I use them. Being in Finland myself I have better latencies from real cheap Scaleway in Paris than from far more expensive AWS in Frankfurt. So it's not always you get what you pay for. Still no drops from either. Maybe Hetzner has more noisy neighbor issues because they are cheaper? The same could hold for Scaleway, but I have never noticed anything.
    - mgbmtl 4y ago
      I'm from Canada. The packet loss can be really random. Despite having various checks between our servers at various providers, and being fairly sure the problem is Hetzner, they always blame the other network.
    - jhugo 4y ago
      > The by far biggest cable goes from Finland to Germany. No idea what happens after that. I believe Hetzner uses it and I have never heard that they wouldn't have enough bandwidth. But I have neither inside knowledge nor do I use them. Packet loss can have numerous causes, not having enough bandwidth is one but faulty or misconfigured gear or misconfigured routing can also cause issues. > Maybe Hetzner has more noisy neighbor issues because they are cheaper? The same could hold for Scaleway, but I have never noticed anything. Yeah, in general, cheaper virtual servers are more likely to have these problems, just like cheaper bandwidth is more likely to be oversold. Low-cost providers can push it pretty far if most of their customers are hosting low-to-moderate-traffic websites or other HTTP services, which are pretty forgiving of steal time, low-level packet loss & latency.
GekkePrutser 4y ago
Scaleway isn't really non-cloud. Their services are very similar to EC2, S3, Glacier etc. I would compare them more with Digital Ocean. They're just cheaper and you can actually chat with them on slack without going to all the 'raise a ticket' rigmarole that all the big players do. At work I deal with Microsoft's double-outsourced "premium" support which is awful. If the question is not in the docs (in which case I would have found it myself) tickets keep ping-ponging for months without solution, going through the same useless troubleshooting over and over because they keep handing over to different agents. I use scaleway privately only but very happy with them. I wish I had their kind of support from the vendors at work. You can often try out upcoming services for free, too. Hetzner wants a copy of your ID which I was not willing to provide so I couldn't try them. Germans are normally really privacy-conscious so this surprised me. This was > 10 years ago though so perhaps they stopped this practice.

jpgvm 4y ago

You can also make them feel pretty cloud-like by running k8s on them.

jhugo 4y ago

We had a lot of noisy neighbour issues on Hetzner's VPSes, to the point that we stopped using them entirely. Their bare metal is a great offer though. And fully agreed about lock-in. If you can, design cloud-agnostic from the start. You get a lot more flexibility and you're in a much better negotiating position as you grow. Not realistic or necessarily sensible for every company/team though.

mgbmtl 4y ago
I'm a happy Hetzner baremetal (and OVH) user, just don't use Hetzner's Finland DC, the network is very unpredictable (a lot of random packet loss).
- usr1106 4y ago
  You don't say where you notice that packet loss from, so I guess you are talking about the US? The by far biggest cable goes from Finland to Germany. No idea what happens after that. I believe Hetzner uses it and I have never heard that they wouldn't have enough bandwidth. But I have neither inside knowledge nor do I use them. Being in Finland myself I have better latencies from real cheap Scaleway in Paris than from far more expensive AWS in Frankfurt. So it's not always you get what you pay for. Still no drops from either. Maybe Hetzner has more noisy neighbor issues because they are cheaper? The same could hold for Scaleway, but I have never noticed anything.
  - mgbmtl 4y ago
    I'm from Canada. The packet loss can be really random. Despite having various checks between our servers at various providers, and being fairly sure the problem is Hetzner, they always blame the other network.
  - jhugo 4y ago
    > The by far biggest cable goes from Finland to Germany. No idea what happens after that. I believe Hetzner uses it and I have never heard that they wouldn't have enough bandwidth. But I have neither inside knowledge nor do I use them. Packet loss can have numerous causes, not having enough bandwidth is one but faulty or misconfigured gear or misconfigured routing can also cause issues. > Maybe Hetzner has more noisy neighbor issues because they are cheaper? The same could hold for Scaleway, but I have never noticed anything. Yeah, in general, cheaper virtual servers are more likely to have these problems, just like cheaper bandwidth is more likely to be oversold. Low-cost providers can push it pretty far if most of their customers are hosting low-to-moderate-traffic websites or other HTTP services, which are pretty forgiving of steal time, low-level packet loss & latency.

GekkePrutser 4y ago

Scaleway isn't really non-cloud. Their services are very similar to EC2, S3, Glacier etc. I would compare them more with Digital Ocean. They're just cheaper and you can actually chat with them on slack without going to all the 'raise a ticket' rigmarole that all the big players do. At work I deal with Microsoft's double-outsourced "premium" support which is awful. If the question is not in the docs (in which case I would have found it myself) tickets keep ping-ponging for months without solution, going through the same useless troubleshooting over and over because they keep handing over to different agents. I use scaleway privately only but very happy with them. I wish I had their kind of support from the vendors at work. You can often try out upcoming services for free, too. Hetzner wants a copy of your ID which I was not willing to provide so I couldn't try them. Germans are normally really privacy-conscious so this surprised me. This was > 10 years ago though so perhaps they stopped this practice.