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Hetzner continues its growth in the US with a new location

545 points by matteocontrini 4y ago

heipei 4y ago
That's great to hear, happy Hetzner customer for many years. Now if they start offering dedicated servers in US locations with equally competitive pricing as for their Germany and Finland DCs then a lot of other players are going to feel the heat.
- Hetzner_OL 4y ago
  Thanks for the feedback about our dedicated root servers. It's great to know that we have fans there that would like to also see these products in the States. Installing the infrastructure for our own dedicated root servers in the USA means a much bigger investment in terms of making sure the DC/DC parks are up to our very high standards. For now at least, we are concentrating on gradually adding a few more cloud locations, and then we may test the waters when it comes to other products. But of course, if and when we do that, we'll let you know once it goes live! We hope you have fun today generating a few servers in our new location in Hillsboro, Oregon. :) :) --Katie
  - alberth 4y ago
    You should create a HN poll on who all wants dedicated servers in the US. I'd definitely vote on that!
  - coder543 4y ago
    Your dedicated servers are by far the most interesting product to me. The US server market needs more price competition, and Hetzner's dedicated servers would bring a lot of competition here if they were priced similarly to how they are priced in Europe.
  - eloff 4y ago
    I'm also waiting eagerly for Hetzner dedicated servers in the US ever since before your expansion plans initio the US were announced. There's just nothing like your EU dedicated offering in the states.
  - riku_iki 4y ago
    > Installing the infrastructure for our own dedicated root servers in the USA means a much bigger investment but you are hosting cloud offering on some physical servers already, so you can start selling these servers as dedicated..
- FpUser 4y ago
  This is for sure. I currently rent dedicated from for my client OVH because of strict data location requirement. Exactly the same dedicated on Hetzner is 2.5 or so times cheaper. Either beats the crap out of AWS price wise. Unfortunately we are in Canada and what are the chances of Hetzner to come here ;(
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
sgjohnson 4y ago
It would be great if they’d support BGP. I love their pricing. I’d love it even more if I could announce my IPs on their dedicated offerings.
- Hetzner_OL 4y ago
  Thanks for the feedback on both of these points. I will make sure to share these suggestions with the team! :) -Katie
andyp-kw 4y ago
The prices seem cheaper than Digital Ocean and AWS Lightsail. What's the catch ?
- konha 4y ago
  Their cloud offering isn’t as polished yet. No managed databases for example. Other than that they’ve got a long track record and a good reputation for providing competitively priced servers.
- jebronie 4y ago
  No catch, which is why Hetzner is so popular.
- princevegeta89 4y ago
  Less greed. This is the catch
- ducktective 4y ago
  You can't easily increase the balance of your account! I kid you not, the advocated method of paying is clearing the invoice at the end of the month.
  - Hetzner_OL 4y ago
    We are, indeed, very careful about new customers and limits, but we do this not to be mean, but to prevent abuse. Preventing abuse also means improving the overall performance for all of our customers. So by being careful about limits, we are also trying to make your experience -- in the end -- a much more positive one. --Katie, Hetzner
    - ducktective 4y ago
      I mean, is there a feature in the UI to charge the account by like 20$ for old customers? Last time I checked the FAQ, you can only do so by direct wire transfer of your bank not Hetzner UI.
Hetzner_OL 4y ago
Thanks for sharing the great news! --Katie, Hetzner
zelphirkalt 4y ago
I hope they created an offspring company with no access to the Hetzner main infrastructure. It would be very inconvenient to lose the "hosted in Germany" - a.k.a. "not accessible data for the US" - aspect in terms of GDPR.
- e61133e3 4y ago
  Same... hope to see a response from Hetzner on this!
- ukutaht 4y ago
  Yes, very important to understand the corporate structure and legal implications wrt to GDPR and the Schrems II decison.
- q-base 4y ago
  To the best of my knowledge, this is already too late. I remember reading through their FAQ and seeing that hence they now have a US-based owner, they are then within reach of US 3-letter agencies.
  - shafyy 4y ago
    I can't find any info that they are owned by a US company. Can you link to a source?
    - formerly_proven 4y ago
      Hetzner is owned by a holding company owned by Ensoxx and Ensoxx is Martin Hetzner's company as far as I can tell.
      - hnbad 4y ago
        That seems to be correct. My understanding (IANAL) of Schrems II is that the problem exists when a EU datacenter is under the direct or indirect control of a US company. Indirect in this case meaning operated by a EU company that is the subsidiary of a US company, as is the case with AWS, Google and Microsoft. Since the EU datacenters seem to be operated by EU companies and the US company is merely a sibling subsidiary of Ensoxx, which itself is also an EU company, this should provide sufficient isolation to prevent interference from US agencies short of direct sabotage or espionage (since the EU staff is not in the chain of command of the US company). So for a definitive answer you probably want your lawyers to talk to Hetzner's lawyers but at face value this is at least miles ahead of any US-based cloud provider, which in all honesty is still the default solution for most EU-based companies despite this ruling.
chocolatkey 4y ago
Very happy about this as a long-time Hetzner dedicated and cloud customer. The only "issue" I've had with cloud is the lack of video memory due to the virtualized environment they run in, but that's a special case because I'm running a custom Windows server install due to Adobe products, which is not officially supported. I await the day they add object storage to the mix, then my (hosting) life will be complete.
- Hetzner_OL 4y ago
  Object storage is, indeed, very high up on the list of hoped-for items on our customer wish list for cloud products. I can add a +1 to that for you and send it onto the dev team. As always, we don't announce roadmaps of upcoming features and when they will be ready. We prefer to announce things when they go live -- just like today! --Katie
  - dhdgrygev 4y ago
    You've been saying this for several years, and yet there is still no object storage. It's getting to the point where it seems more realistic to believe that it will never happen. Very happy with both the cloud and dedicated servers, but it's weird how bad the communication is on the object storage thing. If it's not going to happen, why not say so?
  - config_yml 4y ago
    I wouldn't hold your breath for this. I think Hetzner wants to stick to compute offerings, they don't have the manpower to run managed services like object storage or databases.
    - christophilus 4y ago
      I'm personally fine with this, if it allows them to continue offering such solid value. Wasabi is a great, inexpensive object store for anyone who's looking for that. I've had a really good experience with them (we have a little over 80TB of data there), and have found their support to be top-notch especially when you consider the price.
KingOfCoders 4y ago
Hetzner customer for 20 (?) years. Wish they would add managed databases to their cloud.
- Hetzner_OL 4y ago
  Wow! Twenty years in this industry is a lifetime! Thanks so much for supporting us all these years! I will pass on a +1 for you to the dev team about the managed databases. --Katie
  - ancieque 4y ago
    make that another +1
  - senko 4y ago
    +1 on managed DBs. I currently have hybrid DigitalOcean / Hetzner setup to take advantge of load balancer and managed database at DO. If Hetzner provided some of those, I'd gladly switch. I am not managing replicated postgresql myself ever again.
    - KingOfCoders 4y ago
      Yes, me too! (DO/H setup)
    - tarjei_huse 4y ago
      We considered DO but found that it was cheeper to hire a sysops firm (Linpro) to manage the DBs on Hetzner. This has the added bonus of humans that you can call if needed...
  - martin-adams 4y ago
    I absolutely love using Hetzner. Top of my wishlist is Managed Databases and Managed Kubernetes. This is the main of the reason why I'm using Digitalocean for production and Hetzner for more stateless use cases.
    - 4y ago
jhoelzel 4y ago
Go get them tiger. I want multi node, multi AZ hetzner k8s clusters ;)
- Hetzner_OL 4y ago
  Have you already checked out what is posted here? Maybe there is something there to whet your appetite. https://github.com/hetznercloud/awesome-hcloud https://github.com/hetznercloud/awesome-hcloud --Katie
  - jhoelzel 4y ago
    Yes of course and am a big fan! thank you though ;) I already run cluster in GER and US and what has happened in the last years has been amazing, but its not all the way there just yet!
- tobias_irmer 4y ago
  Take a look at kubeone. We are fairly happy running production loads on K8s distributed across Hetzner DCs...
  - jhoelzel 4y ago
    thank you! i do the same with ansible and or init scripts. but its not the same as a solution that is integrated with the hosting provider.
rumblefrog 4y ago
Awesome, been a customer of Hetzner for numerous years. Looking forward to dedicated servers offering in the US too :)
mightypirate 4y ago
holoduke 4y ago
I am running a cluster of machines at Hetzner for years. Generally i am satisfied, but i like to share some bad experiences which took a month to fix. At some point some of my servers were facing random cpu stalls mostly at occuring midnight. I spend hours and nights to find out the cause. But i wasnt able to find it. Tracing the issue resulting in different causes everytime. After I contacted the Hetzner support team they moved some of the servers to a different host system. Apparently there was a resource issue in their virtualization layer. It fixed all the issues for a week, but then it started again. I contacted support again and received an arrogant email that the issue is related to my software and that they couldnt help me further. I was perplexed. I solved the issue by creating servers in a different zone. Exact copies of the so called faulty ones. The whole stack is now running without issues for about 2 months. But still i am a bit worried.
- leoff 4y ago
  Something similar happened to me. A server I have was very frequently randomly restarting, and I tried everything to solve it, i.e factory reset, reinstalling my services. I contacted customer support and they offered me to take it offline and perform some tests on it that could take more than 10 hours. After I insisted a lot, they offered me a one time server replacement, which magically fixed the restarting issue.
  - Hetzner_OL 4y ago
    Thanks for writing about how our team helped you resolve the issue. Have you been happy with the rest of your experiences using the cloud products? --Katie
    - darkstar_16 4y ago
      That's not what we wrote. The support team replaced the server after a lot of cajoling. That experience needs to be fixed.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
Hetzner_OL 4y ago
@ducktective -- You asked about being able to charge your account €20 or soomething similar. Yes, this is possible with bank transfer. You can find our bank details at the bottom of every invoice. Please enter your invoice or client number as a reference to your bank transfer. You can add more than €20 if you would prefer. And then later, if you decide to close your account, we will transfer the money back to you within 14 business days. You can find the answer this this question and others here: https://docs.hetzner.com/accounts-panel/accounts/payment-faq/ https://docs.hetzner.com/accounts-panel/accounts/payment-faq... --Katie
nshm 4y ago
Seems related to energy prices in Europe. They try to diversify. Feels like a lot of German companies will move to US soon.
- tommek4077 4y ago
  And german customers will just endure the added latency? Seems more like opening the company to new markets.
  - frenchman99 4y ago
    If data centers have to temporarily shut down due electricity shortage, people won't have a choice but endure the latency.
  - formerly_proven 4y ago
    ~100 ms isn't that bad. Doubt it matters at all for most web apps. I've even played FPS games on US East servers a lot to escape eurotoxicity.
    - tommek4077 4y ago
      Yeah, with your standard web-app making 50+ calls to fetch JSON from your backend. This will play out nicely.
      - riku_iki 4y ago
        most calls run in parallel likely?..
        tommek4077 4y ago
        Try for yourself. Sounds good in theory...
mythz 4y ago
We're a long time Hetzner dedicated server customer currently transitioning from their dedicated servers in Germany to their US Cloud product (for reduced latency) which we can highly recommend as it was the best US Cloud provider we've found that works out to be an order of magnitude less expensive than equivalent specs on Azure/AWS and also includes 20TB free bandwidth that would cost a fortune in AWS/Azure's artificially inflated egress costs [1]. The UX behind managing instances is delightfully pleasant where new instances are available faster than any other cloud provider we've used, within seconds of creating an instance you can immediately login with your configured SSH keys. Another nice feature is being able to "rescale" your instance to higher specs after a restart [2], so you can confidentially start with a small instance that just meets your current workload knowing that you can easily scale up your instances as your workload increases. AWS RDS was the only critical service keeping us on AWS, a service we no longer need in our new Apps which we're building with SQLite thanks to the effortless replication in Litestream [3] that we're using to replicate to Cloudflare R2 - another great value S3 alternative with $0 egress fees [4] where you can get even greater value & performance when hosting behind their free CDN. [1] https://servicestack.net/blog/finding-best-us-value-cloud-provider https://servicestack.net/blog/finding-best-us-value-cloud-pr... [2] https://bizanosa.com/how-to-upgrade-resize-hetzner-cloud-server/ https://bizanosa.com/how-to-upgrade-resize-hetzner-cloud-ser... [3] https://docs.servicestack.net/ormlite/litestream https://docs.servicestack.net/ormlite/litestream [4] https://www.cloudflare.com/products/r2/ https://www.cloudflare.com/products/r2/
- Hetzner_OL 4y ago
  Thanks so much for the detailed recommendation! We're thrilled that you're with us, that you appreciate our low prices, that you find our Cloud Console pleasant to use, and that our rescale feature helps you grow so easily! --Katie
  - dtx1 4y ago
    Please do a managed Kubernetes next. I couldn't convince any of our customers to switch to Hetzner because they'd need to do "everything themselves". A managed Kubernetes instance would instantly make Hetzner an alternative for at least 75% of our customers. And honestly it's quite a cheap way to earn a bonus on your server instances. Edit: And if you do manged Kubernetes and managed Kafka Instances the number would go up to like 95%. Oh and those Videos with der8auer? Really awesome to see, do Linus Tech Tipps or Level1Techs next!
adeptima 4y ago
Waiting for GPU dedicated hosting for inference at Hetzner prices with max 2x-3x markup ...
- rmoriz 4y ago
  iirc Hetzner once had GPU offerings in Germany but it was discontinued. I guess it was hard to model a business case on short living hardware (from a business perspective as Hetzner hardware usually runs for a couple of years) and mad pricing/sourcing due to all the blockchain/ML hype. Today I guess eneregy is also an issue.
zac23or 4y ago
Seeing HN become "customer service" for many companies (including faang) is sad.
- nakedrobot2 4y ago
  Why? Customer service is marketing.
  - replwoacause 4y ago
    Exactly. Because it seems transparent. It would just be better if the customer service given through the company's support channels were adequate. Not these veiled attempts to market via customer support.
crote 4y ago
When I was moving my server to a new hoster Hetzner was on the top of the list, but they refused me as a customer. As it was going to host (among other things) my mail server, I could not use my primary (self-hosted) email address - because that's asking for trouble if I ever run into issues. It seems using Protonmail triggered something on their side. They asked me for a copy of my ID card, which I happily provided. But they still refused my account, without explanation. Oh well, their loss. I've been at OVH now for a few years without any issues. OVH's product is definitely worse, but at least they'll actually let you use them.
- Hetzner_OL 4y ago
  hi there, I am very sorry that we could not approve your account. We also do not publish a list of things that may or may not make your account accidentally appear fake. So I can't confirm whether or not it was the Protonmail or something else that may have triggered a review of your account. I am very sorry for the lack of transparency on this. I understand that it is frustrating and disappointing to be rejected as a customer. We are purposefully non-transparent about what triggers a review of new accounts. Why? If we published a list like this, it would very quickly become much easier for scammers and spammers to create realistic-looking accounts that they could use to abuse our products, and naturally, we don't want that. I glad that you have found another provider who could use to host your mail server. --Katie
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    I’m not sure if reading this response made me feel better or worse. Clearly if you are rejecting legitimate customers for arbitrary reasons there’s still some work to do on your approval process. I mean, I get that there are bad actors, and that it’s rationally better for Hetzner to have false positives than false negatives. But it just feels wrong. Legitimate customers shouldn’t be rejected until they prove they’re malicious.
  - electroly 4y ago
    This level of account paranoia (which is infamous at this point; it's one of the primary things mentioned every time Hetzner comes up) is one of several reasons why Hetzner is doomed to be a second-rate provider. If you have a credit card, you can get an AWS account. I've never provided any kind of ID to any American hosting provider. They wait until after you've done something bad to ban you.
xuki 4y ago
Cloud is nice but dedicated servers would be better :).
j3th9n 4y ago
- dang 4y ago
  The answer of course is zero, but would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments? You've been doing it a lot, unfortunately, and we eventually have to ban such accounts. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
nickjj 4y ago
This is certainly interesting. I've been using DO for something like 8 years and I really like them. I don't plan to switch but Hetzner offers a CPU optimized server with 4 CPU cores and 8 GB of memory for $17 USD / month. DigitalOcean offers the same thing for $56 USD / month. It's hard to ignore how much of a difference that is. Even the smaller'ish instances have a huge difference. Hetzner has a 2 CPU core 4 GB of memory server for $6.75 USD / month. DO offers the same thing for $24 USD / month and that's using the worse grade CPU. If you pick the higher end AMD CPU it's $28 a month (which sounds similar to what Hetzen is using but ~4x less price). For perspective DO's $7 USD / month price point gives you 1 CPU and 1 GB of memory. Edit: As someone brought up in the comments below, it's possible that the Hetzner price ends up being ~25% cheaper due to not charging VAT. This will depend where you live. I converted Euros to USD on Google based on their public pricing page https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud as a US site visitor.
- 411111111111111 4y ago
  And the difference is even bigger if you get a bare metal instance. Performance is insane if you compare it to dedicated VMs or worse cloud VMs. In one of my Java toy projects I got http responses to sub 10ms, that's includes, querying a small amount of data from postgres and responding as JSON. The tls handshakes might have been reused through, now that I think about it. The number was taken from the network tab while switching around routes in the pwa The bare metal instances generally have nvme storage, so you get incredible IO As a reference from a recent test: I went with the smallest OVH bare metal server that was discounted to 30€/month the other day (normal price 60€) and got about 2k with hdparm. Running the same test on my 45€ hetzner instance got me over 3.1k. And the hetzner instance also got twice the memory (64gb), though that didn't impact this particular metric.
  - jeremyjh 4y ago
    Hetzner only offers cloud servers in North America; bare metal is only available in Europe.
- mythz 4y ago
  The price increase of Digital Ocean is what prompted us to evaluate different US Cloud providers in which we found Hetzner offering by far the best value [1], what's even nicer was that the prices for the instances ended up being ~25% cheaper than what they're advertising, e.g. their 4x vCPU / 8GB RAM / 160GB HDD is advertised at €17.27 but when creating instances of them in their cloud console it only ends up costing €13.10. Not sure why that is, perhaps it's the difference of their hourly vs monthly cost. [1] https://servicestack.net/blog/finding-best-us-value-cloud-provider https://servicestack.net/blog/finding-best-us-value-cloud-pr...
frankjr 4y ago
For those curious about what it actually looks like in a Hetzner datacenter, der8auer made a video about their Falkenstein, Germany location: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM
bicijay 4y ago
Lovely, but as a customer from Brazil i they never accepted me on their verification step. I even sent a picture from my passport, did the whole face scan verification but nothing. Gave some pretty sensitive information, got a rejection in return lol.
- cryptolake 4y ago
  same for tunisia
  - Hetzner_OL 4y ago
    Again, I am sorry that we could not accept your accounts. Every day, we also reject a large number of accounts from German and European users if there are red flags. (And unfortunately, there are some real situations that are logical that can lead still to false red flags.) For example, I have an unusual last name, especially for here in Germany, and when I have done personal shopping, I have had a number of online e-shops reject my new accounts because that looked suspicious or because they didn't think an address I wanted to send something to was real. So I understand that your frustration is real, and I am sorry for it. --Katie
    - aent 4y ago
      You are the only business I have ever tried to use that straight up rejected me with no explanation, and obviously it's a huge issue as in just this one thread there are multiple people saying the same thing, so there must be thousands if not tens of thousands of legitimate customers you've turned down.
- profwalkstr 4y ago
  I’m also a customer from Brazil and sent a picture of my passport. Got it accepted with no problems.
m3drano 4y ago
As a long time customer of their dedicated servers first and their Cloud offering now, I can only recommend them and be glad they are growing. Simple UI, certainly robust infra (for my case at least) and the best, by far, prices in the market.
szarnyasg 4y ago
Does anyone have some experience regarding the bandwidth between Hetzner's old US location, Virginia, and the big cloud providers (AWS/GCP/Azure)? My use case requires lots of ingress into these clouds. I am currently using Cloudflare's R2 object storage but I'm not satisfied with the bandwidth as it fluctuates between 40 MB/s and 200 MB/s when loading to AWS.
- jakub_jo 4y ago
  Couldn't you just try out? Last time I checked through Vultr[0] from South America, Ashburn was significantly faster than Digital Ocean in SFO. Though, not sure if this helps you. [0]: https://sao-br-ping.vultr.com https://sao-br-ping.vultr.com
woodson 4y ago
> The new location at Hillsboro will host Hetzner Cloud servers mounted with AMD processors A kind of interesting statement, given that Intel has a large presence in Hillsboro (>15K employees IIRC). Not that this would matter to Hetzner, but still curious.
- ThePhysicist 4y ago
  Are you worried Intel folks will drive over to their DC and smash their servers because "this is an Intel town"?
  - woodson 4y ago
    At no point did I say or imply anything to that end. I found it curious, as their other DCs offer servers with Intel and AMD processors, while in this new DC they specifically call out using AMD processors.
    - ThePhysicist 4y ago
      I didn't think you were, I was just joking, pardon me.
- Hetzner_OL 4y ago
  Hillsboro, Oregon's network connections have a lot of advantages. It's worthwhile checking it out here: https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ --Katie
ThePhysicist 4y ago
Have been using Hetzner for the last three years for some medium-traffic (but growing) SaaS offerings, has been a fantastic experience and the pricing is very competitive. They offer only a small feature set but it's good enough for us. Looking forward to spawning some servers in the US region to reduce latency. Only thing that's missing are BGP sessions, would make it easier to build anycast networks with them. You can get it if you buy rackspace but I really don't want to manage my own servers anymore. Another thing that's missing is geo-redundant load balancing, i.e. the ability to spin up a single logical load balancer in multiple regions and dynamically route client traffic to the nearest DC via BGP. Currently LB targets need to be in the same DC, which is kind of weird. You can use DNS load balancing but given the larger footprint they should really invest in a proper anycast setup, I think.
jbb67 4y ago
I have one of their cheapest dedicated servers and a Sunday evening a few weeks ago the hard drive died. I put in a ticket and within about half an hour they had installed a replacement disk. I then had to reinstall everything because I'd messed up my raid config but that was totally my fault not theirs. I was very pleased with that efficiency on what is a very cheap server.
luckylion 4y ago
I really like Hetzner (very inexpensive and generally good quality), but their TOS are difficult and their DMCA is just broken. The TOS are vague. You're not allowed to "violate the rights of third parties", but they don't have a clear policy on what is a violation. If you review a product and the company files a DMCA, they may or may not say that naming a brand is a violation (I've experienced them coming down on both sides of the issue), when it's clearly fair use. For DMCA claims, they tell you to use a form to reply, but the responses from the form will not be received and/or read reliably, so half the time you get a follow up email after 24h saying you haven't replied, so they will now manually check resolution and might block your server. Tech and pricing are fine and I recommend them, legal is an issue, and I'd include some "but only if you're in an industry where DMCA claims are unheard of" caveat with my recommendation.
- nicexe 4y ago
  Their ToS states that cryptocurrency mining is forbidden (which is fair). But, comments from hetzner officials on social media clarify that Ethereum nodes (even if they don't produce any blocks) are also against their ToS. This is like mentioning in your rule-book that metal toothpicks are forbidden because I don't know, people can short your batteries or whatever. But also banning wooden toothpicks without mentioning this in your rule-book. Their ToS are not always vague but the way their terms are executed is definitely arbitrary.
seydor 4y ago
I am embarrassed to report that my server has 760 days uptime. I wonder if they ll just forget that it exists and stop charging me
- wizeman 4y ago
  You never update the kernel? What about security flaws?
andix 4y ago
I love Hetzner Cloud, it’s similar to Digital Ocean, but the performance is much better. Funnily it’s cheaper too. There are just two things I’m missing: - snapshots for volumes!!! - restricting the dns api token (I don’t want to give one acme solver full access to 20+ domains)
- ehou 4y ago
  +1 for more restrictions on DNS API tokens. Ways to mitigate the riscs: - Separate account per domain .. which is a lot of work, see acceptation process in other comments - Use a NS record for _acme-challenge.domain.tld when having the DNS hosted elsewhere and point this to the Hetzner DNS servers
- wartijn_ 4y ago
  The way they communicate is better too. Both companies increased their prices in the past year. DigitalOcean announced[0] theirs in an article that mainly focused on a new cheaper droplet supplemented by lots of useless text about how they “ adapt our offerings to meet the needs of our customers and their desire to create software that changes the world.” The link to the page with the new prices didn’t have some overview of the changes, and figuring out how much more I was going to pay was frustratingly hard. Hetzner’s article[1] just clearly explained why they increased their prices and had a table with the new prices. I really appreciate that no-bs way of communicating. [0] https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/new-4-dollar-droplet-updated-pricing https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/new-4-dollar-droplet-updat... [1] https://docs.hetzner.com/general/others/price-adjustment/ https://docs.hetzner.com/general/others/price-adjustment/
  - andix 4y ago
    I completely moved away from DO, because most IPs I got were in some blacklists. And some smaller providers completely blocked the IPs of those networks. So I had customers who weren’t able to visit my website hosted on DO. Their provider refused to unblock the IP range, because there were a lot of attacks coming from there. DO doesn’t seem to care a lot about reputation.
tunnuz 4y ago
After AWS and DigitalOcean, I'm using Hetzner for my personal needs. I have been satisfied so far with the network performance. I haven't dealt with support yet.
jacooper 4y ago
Can't wait for ARM VPSs.
hardwaresofton 4y ago
As soon as I saw the "P" in their "guess where we're going" social media post, I was secretly hoping it was PDX! Hetzner has been my absolute favorite infrastructure/cloud provider to date, it's criminally underrated. They've also got a great list of community tutorials for new sysadmins to peruse[0]. I like Hetzner so much I think it deserves a more varied managed service offering, so I'm building it[0]. [0]: https://community.hetzner.com/tutorials https://community.hetzner.com/tutorials [1]: https://nimbusws.com https://nimbusws.com
tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
They have extremely impressive prices, but I've always been hesitant to use them for anything important because they've historically been known for very aggressively shutting down your service if their automated systems detect e.g. suspicious traffic. The most recent and egregious example would be banning users who run cryptocurrency-related nodes, even if not mining, despite only mining and similar activities being prohibited in the ToS. Here's a reddit comment from the official account stating that trading is also prohibited: https://old.reddit.com/r/hetzner/comments/wucxs4/is_it_allowed_to_run_a_crypto_block_chain_node/ilfoj8u/ https://old.reddit.com/r/hetzner/comments/wucxs4/is_it_allow... While banning mining is perfectly understandable (the data centers are likely built around an assumption of normal usage patterns and not 100% CPU 100% of the time, and at least one cryptocurrency is infamous for wearing out SSDs with its mining), banning trading bots, proof of stake, and the operation of nodes for blockchain analysis is extremely surprising, even if you have read the TOS. And like in the earlier cases I've heard about, the servers seem to have been blocked without warning.
- mccorrinall 4y ago
  I would totally understand this on VPS and dedis where the crypto is mining ssd blocks (I think it’s name is Chia). But preventing me from running a normal bitcoin node on my server, which writes 400GB once and is done makes me left confused.
  - newaccount74 4y ago
    Providing services to the crypto community probably makes you a huge target for cyber attacks and all kinds of fraud. It's the reason I would never get into that business, so I kind of understand why a company would prefer not to allow anything crypto related on their platform.
    - tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
      While surprisingly banning a class of services that few others ban is a problem in itself, what's a bigger problem is that a) the ToS doesn't mention it b) it's enforced without warning. If these are not toy projects, outages can get expensive (due to networks imposing penalties on nodes that don't fulfill promises, or trading getting messed up).
a_square_peg 4y ago
Also another very, very happy Hetzner user - we've migrated all of our servers to Hetzner over the last year and couldn't be happier with the service. Along with Wasabi cloud for object storage, the set up has allowed me to run a very large infrastructure at a fraction of the cost it would have been elsewhere. If taking requests... showing memory charts along with the usual CPU, network bandwidth plots woudl be very helpful. :)
- Hetzner_OL 4y ago
  That's not a request I think I have seen before. I will make sure to pass that on. I believe some of the dev team members will be checking out this thread throughout the day to catch up on y'alls suggestions. --Katie
  - a_square_peg 4y ago
    Fantastic - thanks!
  - christophilus 4y ago
    I second the request. It's a really helpful metric.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  I feel like this is something someone will read, think ‘wait, we don’t?’ and then implement in an hour.
rwaksmunski 4y ago
Since we have Hetzner employees reading this, please bring back FreeBSD image support. Operating system diversity is good for Internet's resilience.
- openplatypus 4y ago
  OVH Public Cloud allows your images. It even supports private registry. You do you.
  - rwaksmunski 4y ago
    Already OVH customer, I just need a less flammable failover.
- ac29 4y ago
  This might interest you: https://github.com/paulc/hcloud-freebsd https://github.com/paulc/hcloud-freebsd
nigma1337 4y ago
Does anyone have any experience running kubernetes on hetzner? We're currently using DOKS, but are strongly considering setting something up on bare metal servers, as digital ocean are rather expensive (compared to hetzner that is)
- derfabianpeter 4y ago
  My company [1] offers this as a managed services and we’re very happy with hetzners offerings for the K8s ecosystem. Fairly easy to use a variety of tools to get K8s up and running reliably (we roll our own solution though) [1] https://www.ayedo.de https://www.ayedo.de
pfoof 4y ago
We were using Hetzner in one of the companies and we had pretty good performance per price. After acquisition the parent corporate decided to switch to AWS because "procedures". Imagine the shock when my manager saw how much it would cost per month, not to mention that corporate had their own special IT department for which we also had to pay because of "procedures". Changes needed on Hetzner took less than a day, like buying a new server from auction. Changes through corporate took somewhere around a week. P.S. Sorry for digression
- jlokier 4y ago
  Their server auction is great if you find one you like. Much less than a day. I found new auction servers took only a few minutes to be up and running after selecting them. Same with default config new servers (no extra SSDs etc).
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  Sounds like an issue with the company and not AWS.
  - pfoof 4y ago
    Yes, the second (digressed) part but all in all costs were a huge leap after going into cloud
    - philliphaydon 4y ago
      Maybe. Maybe not. Obviously we can only take your word for it as we have not look and analyse what’s currently there and what’s required etc. I suspect it does cost more but i doubt it’s a “huge leap” but it also defines what you define as huge leap.
jeremyjh 4y ago
I like the look of Hetzner's pricing and while its VMs and SSDs seem to have pretty good performance, its block storage volumes are basically unusable for most applications, I was seeing 70-80 IOPS and something like 4mbps in fio.
pcdoodle 4y ago
Wow, these are fast. I use XRDP on EC2 and thought i'd try hetzner again. It's like i'm sitting in front of a linux desktop, better than EC2.
Filligree 4y ago
I ran a server there for years. Eventually it developed a fault on... either the PCIe bus, one of the paired NVMes, or something in that vein. This manifested as poor performance, followed by the NVMe falling off the bus, often followed by the machine rebooting. Upon doing so it would stall at the BIOS, complaining that it had been overclocked. It had not been overclocked... as far as I know, at any rate. I went back and forth on this with support for several months. They were not able to reproduce (it was a rare fault, happening on average only about once every few weeks), and blamed me for 'overclocking'. Eventually I shut off the account. Hetzner is cheap, but you're on your own if you need any form of help.
- jlokier 4y ago
  I had a similar problem, where my AMD server kept freezing up about once a month. It was my critical mail server, and used by other people, so not good. Unfortunately I just kept reacting to it by rebooting, instead of writing to Hetzner support. When I did eventually write to them, they scheduled a date for complete replacement of the main hardware transferring over the SSDs without any fuss, and the problems have never reoccurred, so that was great. The reason I didn't write to them for a long time is I'd heard stories like yours, and I thought I'd have to gather lots of evidence to prove the server was unreliable. I did that and presented it, but I was still surprised at how instantly they just proposed a date for replacement without any discussion.
koolba 4y ago
Any plans for Hetzner dedicated servers in USA? This looks like it’s only the cloud offering.
lakomen 4y ago
I don't like that they're milking old SB servers. I have a 12 year old server there ddr3 RAM, xeon e3 v2, 4x2tb hdd with raid controller. I paid 51€ for this for years, then like a year ago asked if I could get a price reduction. They agreed, down to 35€ but ni backup. Then, 3 months later, they increased prices because "electric cost" and now they'll increase them again because "inflation". So that I'll pay freaking 45€ for soon 13 year old hardware that can break any moment. It doesn't cost them even half of it. The server barely has any load, rarely reboots and they still increase prices. And I can't even run a discord bot because their network is banned. And they keep sending me false email spam positives, from freaking sign up confirmation mails. When you criticize them on their forum you get banned. I had the computer since 2014. It was already paid when I rented it. It had now been paid 4 times over. And they still increase prices. If there was a similarly priced alternative I'd be gone in a second. Their idk.. the guy who makes the systems and orders hardware is stuck in the past. Arno or what his name is. I'd rather have 4×2TB than 2×10TB HDDs. I'd rather have low powered cores but more cores than those beast machines. Anything below highest tier is a consumer computer. And that highest tier is expensive, more expensive than comparable alternatives from Leaseweb or similar providers. Connectivity is only good for the country it's in and the immediate neighbors. That's for Germany. The Helsinki DC has an unreliable connection to Europe mainland. 20ms-60ms-80ms latency is not what I'd consider stable. They are greedy.
- coolgoose 4y ago
  Why don't you just move to a new server ? And electricity did go sky high in Europe at least, that's a moot point. "If there was a similarly priced alternative I'd be gone in a second." Cool, so they're cheap, decently-ish on support and there are no alternatives, yet you complain they are making some money from people that don't upgrade their old hardware.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  Get a new server? It’s not as if they make it hard. I replaced my two €20 instances with one new €40 instance when they got price increases to €33/server or so. Of course now that’ll also increase to €50, but yeah, war.
tzartz 4y ago
Ah Hetzner. Good prices, screwy business practices. Got a quote from them for one rate, setup a demo and got shut us down saying that our application was against their TOS. Funny considering our app was at that point nothing but a near blank static website- we hadn't even fully deployed it. Talked to the sales guys who assured us it would 'be fixed'- but after 3 weeks of zero feed back we bolted. FWIW, the app we were going to deploy there was a simple website that provided contact info and PDFs of product manuals for their German clients.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  I don’t follow, why would you get a quote? All their prices are listed on the website. Especially if it’s a simple contact list, why would you need to interact with sales at all?
  - tzartz 4y ago
    Formal quotes were required for the company I was working for at the time, company policy.
philip1209 4y ago
I thought that the point of GDPR was to prevent American spy agencies from having access to European customer data. Hetzner has gained customers because it was a non-US data hosting provider. But, if Hetzner now has a nexus in the USA - does that dilute their ability to fulfill on the spirit of GDPR? Even if the US data center doesn't have access or control of the European data centers, these US data centers could be used as leverage by American spy agencies against European customer data.
jlokier 4y ago
I've been using Hetzner for 10 years for a wide variety of bespoke networking services, in-store VPNs for commercial clients, video content distribution, and standard services like websites, mail servers, compute resources, and development servers. All sorts of things. They are one of my largest IT expenses, and I'm happy with their service in many respects. They're easily my favourite hosting provider! But their recent reputation around "crypto" [except we make up what that means on the fly] mega-bans is toxic to any business that wants to use Hetzner for reliable hosting of anything mission critical. Here's how I understand their reputation at the moment. (Clarification from Hetzner would be very welcome!): A combination of not clearly saying what they will ban, giving zero notice, banning all of a customer's servers at once, blocking access to backup data as well, and providing no recourse to recover (e.g. by stopping running something). So at best they should be used as a cheap backup or compute resource, but it's an uncomfortable risk to use them for something mission critical - a mail server or customer data processing server for example - as long as they keep to this "intentionally vague surprise mega-ban" policy. They don't seem to ban a lot of customers, but the recent uncertainty affects more. It's not good that a number of customers, including me, simply can't tell if they are at risk of a ban, especially when running novel complex services. Even if they just banned one server and let you carry on operations with the others, that would be a big improvement. Or if they told you what to stop doing. Or if they provided time to get your data off or to correct an issue to their satisfaction. It's one thing to have a policy preferring nobody runs a blockchain node, or a news or software distribution website which is blockchain-adjacent. Similar perhaps to those places that have a policy against IRC or gaming nodes. It's another thing to not say what the real policy is anywhere and associate it with abrupt mega-bans. The ToS only says mining. Advice I've seen to someone banned that "you should have taken backups, tough" is mocking: After a ban you can't access your backups which they encourage to keep on their backup service, of course. It also makes sense technically to backup onto another Hetzner server, maybe at a different datacenter. Unfortunately the only safe thing to do is backup outside Hetzner entirely but they won't recommend that until it's too late. As far as I can tell, there is no place at Hetzner which says what their mega-ban policy really is, and it looks capricious and unpredictable in practice. Different Hetzner staff say different things. The few public responses on this show that they appear to not care to understand the question, which adds to that sense that you don't know what activities are a risk and what aren't. Part of the problem is that peer-to-peer distributed systems in general are being ever more relevant, and look like "crypto" from the outside (and crypto-related techniques underly some technical methods of stabilising p2p networks). Someone who only runs a website they think is safe will get banned one day under that policy, because it has some crypto news or something on it, or because some Wordpress module uses a p2p client to fetch some files, and they will be completely surprised. It reminds me of Google and Stripe, where we hear a trickle of randomly banned customers whose lives or businesses are ruined through no fault of their own, with no recourse. Except as far as I can tell, unlike with Google and Stripe, complaining about a Hetzner ban on Hacker News seems unlikely to have an effect. There is no Edwin for Hetzner. Or is there? Maybe that will change now they have a USA presence :-)
kamikazechaser 4y ago
Overall it is a good provider. Performance/cost ratio is better than linode/DO/Scaleway by a huge margin. That being said, its anti-abuse is super strict. Any heavy p2p networking usually triggers their anti-ban e.g. IPFS. They have a 0 crypto policy that includes making a HTTP(s) call to any external crypto API. I find this a very weird TOS enforcement tbh. Not an issue, but a general observation is that their block ranges are more aggressively scanned by bots.
- nov21b 4y ago
  I've run trading bots on Hetzner without issue (Binance and Bybit api)
jlokier 4y ago
Hey Katie :-) If taking requests, it would be great to be able to test occasional root servers before committing, even if it's only a few hours access. I have my eye on one of those new ARM many-core servers, but I'm not going to pay the setup fee and month rent in advance only to measure the performance and find out quickly that it's not what I'm looking for (because the AMD line is really good). You offer a refund policy by writing to support, but I always felt a bit dirty at the idea of using it, as though it's abusing the process if I know before I buy that I'm probably going to return the server.
- Hetzner_OL 4y ago
  Well, if you already know before you order the server that you are probably going to cancel it, then it does sound a bit like you would be abusing the cancellation policy. A policy like this is not meant for testing out a dedicated root server for fun -- instead, you could ask people in our customer forum about what kinds of benchmarks they tend to get. (https://forum.hetzner.com/ https://forum.hetzner.com/) A lot of our customers are happy to share these kinds of details with people on the forum, and perhaps even someone here on Hacker News would be willing to do the same thing. However, if you really do plan on keeping the server, and then you try it out for a few days and are truly disappointed with the performance, of course you can cancel your order within the first 14 days. --Katie
  - jlokier 4y ago
    Thanks for the reply. Don't worry, I won't be abusing the policy. What I suggested is a feature that might win you some more customers. I'd find it useful so I imagine some other customers would as well. As a data point, my purchase of an Ampere is contingent on gathering more knowledge about it, so that's at least one customer who's hesitating over a purchase. I would happily pay double rent during a short test period - I'm not looking for a freebie. Unfortunately, I don't think general benchmarks and other customer experiences are likely to tell me what I'm looking for. I'm working on a new compiler focused on performance of various workloads, which is why the Amperes seem interesting, because of their unusual system architecture. They are different from other ARMs, so (for example) experience with an Apple M1 or Amazon Graviton does not translate. I'll probably end up renting another cloud provider's Ampere VM for a few days when I'm ready; this is not a blocker for me. I just wanted to share that it's a feature I would have found useful if Hetzner offered, and the same has been true with other Hetzner servers in the past.
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staunch 4y ago
Please allow third-parties to add server apps to Hetzner! Currently there's like a dozen added by Hetzner (presumably), so many cool ones are missing.
jszymborski 4y ago
I've always been eager to try out Hetzner as they always come up as a very affordable provider of VPS' and small dedis. However, whenever I price compare, I always find OVH and Kimsufi far under-price them on small servers. Am I missing out on a Hetzner product line or are they offering features I'm not getting on OVH?
- unity1001 4y ago
  Good luck getting any customer support at OVH. Something happens with your dedicated, it may be a week until they reply to your ticket. They say its better with French-language support. But for English, their support sucked a few years ago when I tried them.
  - jszymborski 4y ago
    Good to know, thanks... I speak French so I might just go straight to the French support if I ever need them.
UnnoTed 4y ago
I used to be a Hetzner customer for a few years (2018-2020), one day my card stopped working, while I tried to get a new one I ended up with a 5 EUR invoice, once I got a new card I tried to pay the invoice but they had blocked my account, so I had to transfer the money to their account to pay the invoice, once paid they told me to create a new account, I did and was asked for a picture of my passport after being a customer for years, I stopped trying to use their service at that moment. Now paying twice the price at Linode but at least they only ask for a phone number.
devmunchies 4y ago
Since they are making big moves toward US expansion, one small improvement would be to change the prices on the pricing page to show Dollars instead of Euros, either with a toggle or if my IP is in North America. It's more work for the customer to do price comparison with comparable cloud providers.
icelancer 4y ago
This is great news. Hetzner is our choice for inexpensive redundancy, especially on non-US soil for data duplication on other continents. They've been very good with us on customer service and their auction prices can't be beaten. The latency to the EU somewhat stops us using them for production-level work, but this deployment to the US (especially on the West Coast, how lucky) will definitely shift our spend from DigitalOcean (which has been garbage lately both in terms of customer service and product offerings being much worse than advertised) to them. Hetzner's control panel and automated systems are pretty bad, but that's a small thing when the price is right and customer service is much better than other offerings. EDIT: I am a consumer of dedicated servers from them only. I don't really believe in cloud-based / AWS-type services for small businesses, and would like to get off most of our VPSes as well.
sieabah 4y ago
My big question is whether any US based companies hosted are beholden to the German government because it's a German based company. This in turn makes everyone beholden to the EU regulations and German censorship regulations. Yeah no thanks!
unity1001 4y ago
A managed kubernetes offering from Hetzner would be great. If they added managed databases, maybe even a managed shared filesystem (rwx volumes or something similar to Google filestore) then they would knock it out of the park...
vondur 4y ago
Ooh, when are the NextCloud bundles coming to the US? I see they have them on the German based datacenters.
akulbe 4y ago
Have any of you switched from Digital Ocean to Hetzner? I've been with DO for years, but after some problems and lackluster/non-existent service recently, I'm considering moving off to another provider.
g42gregory 4y ago
Does Hetzner has any plans to offer GPUs on the cloud?
mike503 4y ago
I hope they look at opening up colocation. Maybe dedicated servers too, but colo would be cool :)
amai 4y ago
There is good article ( in German unfortunately, but Google Translate might help ) with quite some technical details about how they manage their data centers: https://www.golem.de/news/besuch-im-rechenzentrum-so-betreibt-hetzner-tausende-server-effizient-2211-169943.amp.html https://www.golem.de/news/besuch-im-rechenzentrum-so-betreib...

That's great to hear, happy Hetzner customer for many years. Now if they start offering dedicated servers in US locations with equally competitive pricing as for their Germany and Finland DCs then a lot of other players are going to feel the heat.

Hetzner_OL 4y ago
Thanks for the feedback about our dedicated root servers. It's great to know that we have fans there that would like to also see these products in the States. Installing the infrastructure for our own dedicated root servers in the USA means a much bigger investment in terms of making sure the DC/DC parks are up to our very high standards. For now at least, we are concentrating on gradually adding a few more cloud locations, and then we may test the waters when it comes to other products. But of course, if and when we do that, we'll let you know once it goes live! We hope you have fun today generating a few servers in our new location in Hillsboro, Oregon. :) :) --Katie
- alberth 4y ago
  You should create a HN poll on who all wants dedicated servers in the US. I'd definitely vote on that!
- coder543 4y ago
  Your dedicated servers are by far the most interesting product to me. The US server market needs more price competition, and Hetzner's dedicated servers would bring a lot of competition here if they were priced similarly to how they are priced in Europe.
- eloff 4y ago
  I'm also waiting eagerly for Hetzner dedicated servers in the US ever since before your expansion plans initio the US were announced. There's just nothing like your EU dedicated offering in the states.
- riku_iki 4y ago
  > Installing the infrastructure for our own dedicated root servers in the USA means a much bigger investment but you are hosting cloud offering on some physical servers already, so you can start selling these servers as dedicated..
FpUser 4y ago
This is for sure. I currently rent dedicated from for my client OVH because of strict data location requirement. Exactly the same dedicated on Hetzner is 2.5 or so times cheaper. Either beats the crap out of AWS price wise. Unfortunately we are in Canada and what are the chances of Hetzner to come here ;(
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sgjohnson 4y ago

It would be great if they’d support BGP. I love their pricing. I’d love it even more if I could announce my IPs on their dedicated offerings.

Hetzner_OL 4y ago
Thanks for the feedback on both of these points. I will make sure to share these suggestions with the team! :) -Katie

andyp-kw 4y ago

The prices seem cheaper than Digital Ocean and AWS Lightsail. What's the catch ?

konha 4y ago
Their cloud offering isn’t as polished yet. No managed databases for example. Other than that they’ve got a long track record and a good reputation for providing competitively priced servers.
jebronie 4y ago
No catch, which is why Hetzner is so popular.
princevegeta89 4y ago
Less greed. This is the catch
ducktective 4y ago
You can't easily increase the balance of your account! I kid you not, the advocated method of paying is clearing the invoice at the end of the month.
- Hetzner_OL 4y ago
  We are, indeed, very careful about new customers and limits, but we do this not to be mean, but to prevent abuse. Preventing abuse also means improving the overall performance for all of our customers. So by being careful about limits, we are also trying to make your experience -- in the end -- a much more positive one. --Katie, Hetzner
  - ducktective 4y ago
    I mean, is there a feature in the UI to charge the account by like 20$ for old customers? Last time I checked the FAQ, you can only do so by direct wire transfer of your bank not Hetzner UI.

Hetzner_OL 4y ago

Thanks for sharing the great news! --Katie, Hetzner

zelphirkalt 4y ago

I hope they created an offspring company with no access to the Hetzner main infrastructure. It would be very inconvenient to lose the "hosted in Germany" - a.k.a. "not accessible data for the US" - aspect in terms of GDPR.

e61133e3 4y ago
Same... hope to see a response from Hetzner on this!
ukutaht 4y ago
Yes, very important to understand the corporate structure and legal implications wrt to GDPR and the Schrems II decison.
q-base 4y ago
To the best of my knowledge, this is already too late. I remember reading through their FAQ and seeing that hence they now have a US-based owner, they are then within reach of US 3-letter agencies.
- shafyy 4y ago
  I can't find any info that they are owned by a US company. Can you link to a source?
  - formerly_proven 4y ago
    Hetzner is owned by a holding company owned by Ensoxx and Ensoxx is Martin Hetzner's company as far as I can tell.
    - hnbad 4y ago
      That seems to be correct. My understanding (IANAL) of Schrems II is that the problem exists when a EU datacenter is under the direct or indirect control of a US company. Indirect in this case meaning operated by a EU company that is the subsidiary of a US company, as is the case with AWS, Google and Microsoft. Since the EU datacenters seem to be operated by EU companies and the US company is merely a sibling subsidiary of Ensoxx, which itself is also an EU company, this should provide sufficient isolation to prevent interference from US agencies short of direct sabotage or espionage (since the EU staff is not in the chain of command of the US company). So for a definitive answer you probably want your lawyers to talk to Hetzner's lawyers but at face value this is at least miles ahead of any US-based cloud provider, which in all honesty is still the default solution for most EU-based companies despite this ruling.

chocolatkey 4y ago

Very happy about this as a long-time Hetzner dedicated and cloud customer. The only "issue" I've had with cloud is the lack of video memory due to the virtualized environment they run in, but that's a special case because I'm running a custom Windows server install due to Adobe products, which is not officially supported. I await the day they add object storage to the mix, then my (hosting) life will be complete.

Hetzner_OL 4y ago
Object storage is, indeed, very high up on the list of hoped-for items on our customer wish list for cloud products. I can add a +1 to that for you and send it onto the dev team. As always, we don't announce roadmaps of upcoming features and when they will be ready. We prefer to announce things when they go live -- just like today! --Katie
- dhdgrygev 4y ago
  You've been saying this for several years, and yet there is still no object storage. It's getting to the point where it seems more realistic to believe that it will never happen. Very happy with both the cloud and dedicated servers, but it's weird how bad the communication is on the object storage thing. If it's not going to happen, why not say so?
- config_yml 4y ago
  I wouldn't hold your breath for this. I think Hetzner wants to stick to compute offerings, they don't have the manpower to run managed services like object storage or databases.
  - christophilus 4y ago
    I'm personally fine with this, if it allows them to continue offering such solid value. Wasabi is a great, inexpensive object store for anyone who's looking for that. I've had a really good experience with them (we have a little over 80TB of data there), and have found their support to be top-notch especially when you consider the price.

KingOfCoders 4y ago

Hetzner customer for 20 (?) years. Wish they would add managed databases to their cloud.

Hetzner_OL 4y ago
Wow! Twenty years in this industry is a lifetime! Thanks so much for supporting us all these years! I will pass on a +1 for you to the dev team about the managed databases. --Katie
- ancieque 4y ago
  make that another +1
- senko 4y ago
  +1 on managed DBs. I currently have hybrid DigitalOcean / Hetzner setup to take advantge of load balancer and managed database at DO. If Hetzner provided some of those, I'd gladly switch. I am not managing replicated postgresql myself ever again.
  - KingOfCoders 4y ago
    Yes, me too! (DO/H setup)
  - tarjei_huse 4y ago
    We considered DO but found that it was cheeper to hire a sysops firm (Linpro) to manage the DBs on Hetzner. This has the added bonus of humans that you can call if needed...
- martin-adams 4y ago
  I absolutely love using Hetzner. Top of my wishlist is Managed Databases and Managed Kubernetes. This is the main of the reason why I'm using Digitalocean for production and Hetzner for more stateless use cases.
  - 4y ago

jhoelzel 4y ago

Go get them tiger. I want multi node, multi AZ hetzner k8s clusters ;)

Hetzner_OL 4y ago
Have you already checked out what is posted here? Maybe there is something there to whet your appetite. https://github.com/hetznercloud/awesome-hcloud https://github.com/hetznercloud/awesome-hcloud --Katie
- jhoelzel 4y ago
  Yes of course and am a big fan! thank you though ;) I already run cluster in GER and US and what has happened in the last years has been amazing, but its not all the way there just yet!
tobias_irmer 4y ago
Take a look at kubeone. We are fairly happy running production loads on K8s distributed across Hetzner DCs...
- jhoelzel 4y ago
  thank you! i do the same with ansible and or init scripts. but its not the same as a solution that is integrated with the hosting provider.

rumblefrog 4y ago

Awesome, been a customer of Hetzner for numerous years. Looking forward to dedicated servers offering in the US too :)

mightypirate 4y ago

holoduke 4y ago

I am running a cluster of machines at Hetzner for years. Generally i am satisfied, but i like to share some bad experiences which took a month to fix. At some point some of my servers were facing random cpu stalls mostly at occuring midnight. I spend hours and nights to find out the cause. But i wasnt able to find it. Tracing the issue resulting in different causes everytime. After I contacted the Hetzner support team they moved some of the servers to a different host system. Apparently there was a resource issue in their virtualization layer. It fixed all the issues for a week, but then it started again. I contacted support again and received an arrogant email that the issue is related to my software and that they couldnt help me further. I was perplexed. I solved the issue by creating servers in a different zone. Exact copies of the so called faulty ones. The whole stack is now running without issues for about 2 months. But still i am a bit worried.

leoff 4y ago
Something similar happened to me. A server I have was very frequently randomly restarting, and I tried everything to solve it, i.e factory reset, reinstalling my services. I contacted customer support and they offered me to take it offline and perform some tests on it that could take more than 10 hours. After I insisted a lot, they offered me a one time server replacement, which magically fixed the restarting issue.
- Hetzner_OL 4y ago
  Thanks for writing about how our team helped you resolve the issue. Have you been happy with the rest of your experiences using the cloud products? --Katie
  - darkstar_16 4y ago
    That's not what we wrote. The support team replaced the server after a lot of cajoling. That experience needs to be fixed.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]

Hetzner_OL 4y ago

@ducktective -- You asked about being able to charge your account €20 or soomething similar. Yes, this is possible with bank transfer. You can find our bank details at the bottom of every invoice. Please enter your invoice or client number as a reference to your bank transfer. You can add more than €20 if you would prefer. And then later, if you decide to close your account, we will transfer the money back to you within 14 business days. You can find the answer this this question and others here: https://docs.hetzner.com/accounts-panel/accounts/payment-faq/ https://docs.hetzner.com/accounts-panel/accounts/payment-faq... --Katie

nshm 4y ago

Seems related to energy prices in Europe. They try to diversify. Feels like a lot of German companies will move to US soon.

tommek4077 4y ago
And german customers will just endure the added latency? Seems more like opening the company to new markets.
- frenchman99 4y ago
  If data centers have to temporarily shut down due electricity shortage, people won't have a choice but endure the latency.
- formerly_proven 4y ago
  ~100 ms isn't that bad. Doubt it matters at all for most web apps. I've even played FPS games on US East servers a lot to escape eurotoxicity.
  - tommek4077 4y ago
    Yeah, with your standard web-app making 50+ calls to fetch JSON from your backend. This will play out nicely.
    - riku_iki 4y ago
      most calls run in parallel likely?..
      - tommek4077 4y ago
        Try for yourself. Sounds good in theory...

mythz 4y ago

We're a long time Hetzner dedicated server customer currently transitioning from their dedicated servers in Germany to their US Cloud product (for reduced latency) which we can highly recommend as it was the best US Cloud provider we've found that works out to be an order of magnitude less expensive than equivalent specs on Azure/AWS and also includes 20TB free bandwidth that would cost a fortune in AWS/Azure's artificially inflated egress costs [1]. The UX behind managing instances is delightfully pleasant where new instances are available faster than any other cloud provider we've used, within seconds of creating an instance you can immediately login with your configured SSH keys. Another nice feature is being able to "rescale" your instance to higher specs after a restart [2], so you can confidentially start with a small instance that just meets your current workload knowing that you can easily scale up your instances as your workload increases. AWS RDS was the only critical service keeping us on AWS, a service we no longer need in our new Apps which we're building with SQLite thanks to the effortless replication in Litestream [3] that we're using to replicate to Cloudflare R2 - another great value S3 alternative with $0 egress fees [4] where you can get even greater value & performance when hosting behind their free CDN. [1] https://servicestack.net/blog/finding-best-us-value-cloud-provider https://servicestack.net/blog/finding-best-us-value-cloud-pr... [2] https://bizanosa.com/how-to-upgrade-resize-hetzner-cloud-server/ https://bizanosa.com/how-to-upgrade-resize-hetzner-cloud-ser... [3] https://docs.servicestack.net/ormlite/litestream https://docs.servicestack.net/ormlite/litestream [4] https://www.cloudflare.com/products/r2/ https://www.cloudflare.com/products/r2/

Hetzner_OL 4y ago
Thanks so much for the detailed recommendation! We're thrilled that you're with us, that you appreciate our low prices, that you find our Cloud Console pleasant to use, and that our rescale feature helps you grow so easily! --Katie
- dtx1 4y ago
  Please do a managed Kubernetes next. I couldn't convince any of our customers to switch to Hetzner because they'd need to do "everything themselves". A managed Kubernetes instance would instantly make Hetzner an alternative for at least 75% of our customers. And honestly it's quite a cheap way to earn a bonus on your server instances. Edit: And if you do manged Kubernetes and managed Kafka Instances the number would go up to like 95%. Oh and those Videos with der8auer? Really awesome to see, do Linus Tech Tipps or Level1Techs next!

adeptima 4y ago

Waiting for GPU dedicated hosting for inference at Hetzner prices with max 2x-3x markup ...

rmoriz 4y ago
iirc Hetzner once had GPU offerings in Germany but it was discontinued. I guess it was hard to model a business case on short living hardware (from a business perspective as Hetzner hardware usually runs for a couple of years) and mad pricing/sourcing due to all the blockchain/ML hype. Today I guess eneregy is also an issue.

zac23or 4y ago

Seeing HN become "customer service" for many companies (including faang) is sad.

nakedrobot2 4y ago
Why? Customer service is marketing.
- replwoacause 4y ago
  Exactly. Because it seems transparent. It would just be better if the customer service given through the company's support channels were adequate. Not these veiled attempts to market via customer support.

crote 4y ago

When I was moving my server to a new hoster Hetzner was on the top of the list, but they refused me as a customer. As it was going to host (among other things) my mail server, I could not use my primary (self-hosted) email address - because that's asking for trouble if I ever run into issues. It seems using Protonmail triggered something on their side. They asked me for a copy of my ID card, which I happily provided. But they still refused my account, without explanation. Oh well, their loss. I've been at OVH now for a few years without any issues. OVH's product is definitely worse, but at least they'll actually let you use them.

Hetzner_OL 4y ago
hi there, I am very sorry that we could not approve your account. We also do not publish a list of things that may or may not make your account accidentally appear fake. So I can't confirm whether or not it was the Protonmail or something else that may have triggered a review of your account. I am very sorry for the lack of transparency on this. I understand that it is frustrating and disappointing to be rejected as a customer. We are purposefully non-transparent about what triggers a review of new accounts. Why? If we published a list like this, it would very quickly become much easier for scammers and spammers to create realistic-looking accounts that they could use to abuse our products, and naturally, we don't want that. I glad that you have found another provider who could use to host your mail server. --Katie
- Aeolun 4y ago
  I’m not sure if reading this response made me feel better or worse. Clearly if you are rejecting legitimate customers for arbitrary reasons there’s still some work to do on your approval process. I mean, I get that there are bad actors, and that it’s rationally better for Hetzner to have false positives than false negatives. But it just feels wrong. Legitimate customers shouldn’t be rejected until they prove they’re malicious.
- electroly 4y ago
  This level of account paranoia (which is infamous at this point; it's one of the primary things mentioned every time Hetzner comes up) is one of several reasons why Hetzner is doomed to be a second-rate provider. If you have a credit card, you can get an AWS account. I've never provided any kind of ID to any American hosting provider. They wait until after you've done something bad to ban you.

xuki 4y ago

Cloud is nice but dedicated servers would be better :).

j3th9n 4y ago

dang 4y ago
The answer of course is zero, but would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments? You've been doing it a lot, unfortunately, and we eventually have to ban such accounts. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

nickjj 4y ago

This is certainly interesting. I've been using DO for something like 8 years and I really like them. I don't plan to switch but Hetzner offers a CPU optimized server with 4 CPU cores and 8 GB of memory for $17 USD / month. DigitalOcean offers the same thing for $56 USD / month. It's hard to ignore how much of a difference that is. Even the smaller'ish instances have a huge difference. Hetzner has a 2 CPU core 4 GB of memory server for $6.75 USD / month. DO offers the same thing for $24 USD / month and that's using the worse grade CPU. If you pick the higher end AMD CPU it's $28 a month (which sounds similar to what Hetzen is using but ~4x less price). For perspective DO's $7 USD / month price point gives you 1 CPU and 1 GB of memory. Edit: As someone brought up in the comments below, it's possible that the Hetzner price ends up being ~25% cheaper due to not charging VAT. This will depend where you live. I converted Euros to USD on Google based on their public pricing page https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud as a US site visitor.

411111111111111 4y ago
And the difference is even bigger if you get a bare metal instance. Performance is insane if you compare it to dedicated VMs or worse cloud VMs. In one of my Java toy projects I got http responses to sub 10ms, that's includes, querying a small amount of data from postgres and responding as JSON. The tls handshakes might have been reused through, now that I think about it. The number was taken from the network tab while switching around routes in the pwa The bare metal instances generally have nvme storage, so you get incredible IO As a reference from a recent test: I went with the smallest OVH bare metal server that was discounted to 30€/month the other day (normal price 60€) and got about 2k with hdparm. Running the same test on my 45€ hetzner instance got me over 3.1k. And the hetzner instance also got twice the memory (64gb), though that didn't impact this particular metric.
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  Hetzner only offers cloud servers in North America; bare metal is only available in Europe.
mythz 4y ago
The price increase of Digital Ocean is what prompted us to evaluate different US Cloud providers in which we found Hetzner offering by far the best value [1], what's even nicer was that the prices for the instances ended up being ~25% cheaper than what they're advertising, e.g. their 4x vCPU / 8GB RAM / 160GB HDD is advertised at €17.27 but when creating instances of them in their cloud console it only ends up costing €13.10. Not sure why that is, perhaps it's the difference of their hourly vs monthly cost. [1] https://servicestack.net/blog/finding-best-us-value-cloud-provider https://servicestack.net/blog/finding-best-us-value-cloud-pr...

frankjr 4y ago

For those curious about what it actually looks like in a Hetzner datacenter, der8auer made a video about their Falkenstein, Germany location: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM

bicijay 4y ago

Lovely, but as a customer from Brazil i they never accepted me on their verification step. I even sent a picture from my passport, did the whole face scan verification but nothing. Gave some pretty sensitive information, got a rejection in return lol.

cryptolake 4y ago
same for tunisia
- Hetzner_OL 4y ago
  Again, I am sorry that we could not accept your accounts. Every day, we also reject a large number of accounts from German and European users if there are red flags. (And unfortunately, there are some real situations that are logical that can lead still to false red flags.) For example, I have an unusual last name, especially for here in Germany, and when I have done personal shopping, I have had a number of online e-shops reject my new accounts because that looked suspicious or because they didn't think an address I wanted to send something to was real. So I understand that your frustration is real, and I am sorry for it. --Katie
  - aent 4y ago
    You are the only business I have ever tried to use that straight up rejected me with no explanation, and obviously it's a huge issue as in just this one thread there are multiple people saying the same thing, so there must be thousands if not tens of thousands of legitimate customers you've turned down.
profwalkstr 4y ago
I’m also a customer from Brazil and sent a picture of my passport. Got it accepted with no problems.

m3drano 4y ago

As a long time customer of their dedicated servers first and their Cloud offering now, I can only recommend them and be glad they are growing. Simple UI, certainly robust infra (for my case at least) and the best, by far, prices in the market.

szarnyasg 4y ago

Does anyone have some experience regarding the bandwidth between Hetzner's old US location, Virginia, and the big cloud providers (AWS/GCP/Azure)? My use case requires lots of ingress into these clouds. I am currently using Cloudflare's R2 object storage but I'm not satisfied with the bandwidth as it fluctuates between 40 MB/s and 200 MB/s when loading to AWS.

jakub_jo 4y ago
Couldn't you just try out? Last time I checked through Vultr[0] from South America, Ashburn was significantly faster than Digital Ocean in SFO. Though, not sure if this helps you. [0]: https://sao-br-ping.vultr.com https://sao-br-ping.vultr.com

woodson 4y ago

> The new location at Hillsboro will host Hetzner Cloud servers mounted with AMD processors A kind of interesting statement, given that Intel has a large presence in Hillsboro (>15K employees IIRC). Not that this would matter to Hetzner, but still curious.

ThePhysicist 4y ago
Are you worried Intel folks will drive over to their DC and smash their servers because "this is an Intel town"?
- woodson 4y ago
  At no point did I say or imply anything to that end. I found it curious, as their other DCs offer servers with Intel and AMD processors, while in this new DC they specifically call out using AMD processors.
  - ThePhysicist 4y ago
    I didn't think you were, I was just joking, pardon me.
Hetzner_OL 4y ago
Hillsboro, Oregon's network connections have a lot of advantages. It's worthwhile checking it out here: https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ --Katie

ThePhysicist 4y ago

Have been using Hetzner for the last three years for some medium-traffic (but growing) SaaS offerings, has been a fantastic experience and the pricing is very competitive. They offer only a small feature set but it's good enough for us. Looking forward to spawning some servers in the US region to reduce latency. Only thing that's missing are BGP sessions, would make it easier to build anycast networks with them. You can get it if you buy rackspace but I really don't want to manage my own servers anymore. Another thing that's missing is geo-redundant load balancing, i.e. the ability to spin up a single logical load balancer in multiple regions and dynamically route client traffic to the nearest DC via BGP. Currently LB targets need to be in the same DC, which is kind of weird. You can use DNS load balancing but given the larger footprint they should really invest in a proper anycast setup, I think.

jbb67 4y ago

I have one of their cheapest dedicated servers and a Sunday evening a few weeks ago the hard drive died. I put in a ticket and within about half an hour they had installed a replacement disk. I then had to reinstall everything because I'd messed up my raid config but that was totally my fault not theirs. I was very pleased with that efficiency on what is a very cheap server.

luckylion 4y ago

I really like Hetzner (very inexpensive and generally good quality), but their TOS are difficult and their DMCA is just broken. The TOS are vague. You're not allowed to "violate the rights of third parties", but they don't have a clear policy on what is a violation. If you review a product and the company files a DMCA, they may or may not say that naming a brand is a violation (I've experienced them coming down on both sides of the issue), when it's clearly fair use. For DMCA claims, they tell you to use a form to reply, but the responses from the form will not be received and/or read reliably, so half the time you get a follow up email after 24h saying you haven't replied, so they will now manually check resolution and might block your server. Tech and pricing are fine and I recommend them, legal is an issue, and I'd include some "but only if you're in an industry where DMCA claims are unheard of" caveat with my recommendation.

nicexe 4y ago
Their ToS states that cryptocurrency mining is forbidden (which is fair). But, comments from hetzner officials on social media clarify that Ethereum nodes (even if they don't produce any blocks) are also against their ToS. This is like mentioning in your rule-book that metal toothpicks are forbidden because I don't know, people can short your batteries or whatever. But also banning wooden toothpicks without mentioning this in your rule-book. Their ToS are not always vague but the way their terms are executed is definitely arbitrary.

seydor 4y ago

I am embarrassed to report that my server has 760 days uptime. I wonder if they ll just forget that it exists and stop charging me

wizeman 4y ago
You never update the kernel? What about security flaws?

andix 4y ago

I love Hetzner Cloud, it’s similar to Digital Ocean, but the performance is much better. Funnily it’s cheaper too. There are just two things I’m missing: - snapshots for volumes!!! - restricting the dns api token (I don’t want to give one acme solver full access to 20+ domains)

ehou 4y ago
+1 for more restrictions on DNS API tokens. Ways to mitigate the riscs: - Separate account per domain .. which is a lot of work, see acceptation process in other comments - Use a NS record for _acme-challenge.domain.tld when having the DNS hosted elsewhere and point this to the Hetzner DNS servers
wartijn_ 4y ago
The way they communicate is better too. Both companies increased their prices in the past year. DigitalOcean announced[0] theirs in an article that mainly focused on a new cheaper droplet supplemented by lots of useless text about how they “ adapt our offerings to meet the needs of our customers and their desire to create software that changes the world.” The link to the page with the new prices didn’t have some overview of the changes, and figuring out how much more I was going to pay was frustratingly hard. Hetzner’s article[1] just clearly explained why they increased their prices and had a table with the new prices. I really appreciate that no-bs way of communicating. [0] https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/new-4-dollar-droplet-updated-pricing https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/new-4-dollar-droplet-updat... [1] https://docs.hetzner.com/general/others/price-adjustment/ https://docs.hetzner.com/general/others/price-adjustment/
- andix 4y ago
  I completely moved away from DO, because most IPs I got were in some blacklists. And some smaller providers completely blocked the IPs of those networks. So I had customers who weren’t able to visit my website hosted on DO. Their provider refused to unblock the IP range, because there were a lot of attacks coming from there. DO doesn’t seem to care a lot about reputation.

tunnuz 4y ago

After AWS and DigitalOcean, I'm using Hetzner for my personal needs. I have been satisfied so far with the network performance. I haven't dealt with support yet.

jacooper 4y ago

Can't wait for ARM VPSs.

hardwaresofton 4y ago

As soon as I saw the "P" in their "guess where we're going" social media post, I was secretly hoping it was PDX! Hetzner has been my absolute favorite infrastructure/cloud provider to date, it's criminally underrated. They've also got a great list of community tutorials for new sysadmins to peruse[0]. I like Hetzner so much I think it deserves a more varied managed service offering, so I'm building it[0]. [0]: https://community.hetzner.com/tutorials https://community.hetzner.com/tutorials [1]: https://nimbusws.com https://nimbusws.com

tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago

They have extremely impressive prices, but I've always been hesitant to use them for anything important because they've historically been known for very aggressively shutting down your service if their automated systems detect e.g. suspicious traffic. The most recent and egregious example would be banning users who run cryptocurrency-related nodes, even if not mining, despite only mining and similar activities being prohibited in the ToS. Here's a reddit comment from the official account stating that trading is also prohibited: https://old.reddit.com/r/hetzner/comments/wucxs4/is_it_allowed_to_run_a_crypto_block_chain_node/ilfoj8u/ https://old.reddit.com/r/hetzner/comments/wucxs4/is_it_allow... While banning mining is perfectly understandable (the data centers are likely built around an assumption of normal usage patterns and not 100% CPU 100% of the time, and at least one cryptocurrency is infamous for wearing out SSDs with its mining), banning trading bots, proof of stake, and the operation of nodes for blockchain analysis is extremely surprising, even if you have read the TOS. And like in the earlier cases I've heard about, the servers seem to have been blocked without warning.

mccorrinall 4y ago
I would totally understand this on VPS and dedis where the crypto is mining ssd blocks (I think it’s name is Chia). But preventing me from running a normal bitcoin node on my server, which writes 400GB once and is done makes me left confused.
- newaccount74 4y ago
  Providing services to the crypto community probably makes you a huge target for cyber attacks and all kinds of fraud. It's the reason I would never get into that business, so I kind of understand why a company would prefer not to allow anything crypto related on their platform.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
    While surprisingly banning a class of services that few others ban is a problem in itself, what's a bigger problem is that a) the ToS doesn't mention it b) it's enforced without warning. If these are not toy projects, outages can get expensive (due to networks imposing penalties on nodes that don't fulfill promises, or trading getting messed up).

a_square_peg 4y ago

Also another very, very happy Hetzner user - we've migrated all of our servers to Hetzner over the last year and couldn't be happier with the service. Along with Wasabi cloud for object storage, the set up has allowed me to run a very large infrastructure at a fraction of the cost it would have been elsewhere. If taking requests... showing memory charts along with the usual CPU, network bandwidth plots woudl be very helpful. :)

Hetzner_OL 4y ago
That's not a request I think I have seen before. I will make sure to pass that on. I believe some of the dev team members will be checking out this thread throughout the day to catch up on y'alls suggestions. --Katie
- a_square_peg 4y ago
  Fantastic - thanks!
- christophilus 4y ago
  I second the request. It's a really helpful metric.
Aeolun 4y ago
I feel like this is something someone will read, think ‘wait, we don’t?’ and then implement in an hour.

rwaksmunski 4y ago

Since we have Hetzner employees reading this, please bring back FreeBSD image support. Operating system diversity is good for Internet's resilience.

openplatypus 4y ago
OVH Public Cloud allows your images. It even supports private registry. You do you.
- rwaksmunski 4y ago
  Already OVH customer, I just need a less flammable failover.
ac29 4y ago
This might interest you: https://github.com/paulc/hcloud-freebsd https://github.com/paulc/hcloud-freebsd

nigma1337 4y ago

Does anyone have any experience running kubernetes on hetzner? We're currently using DOKS, but are strongly considering setting something up on bare metal servers, as digital ocean are rather expensive (compared to hetzner that is)

derfabianpeter 4y ago
My company [1] offers this as a managed services and we’re very happy with hetzners offerings for the K8s ecosystem. Fairly easy to use a variety of tools to get K8s up and running reliably (we roll our own solution though) [1] https://www.ayedo.de https://www.ayedo.de

pfoof 4y ago

We were using Hetzner in one of the companies and we had pretty good performance per price. After acquisition the parent corporate decided to switch to AWS because "procedures". Imagine the shock when my manager saw how much it would cost per month, not to mention that corporate had their own special IT department for which we also had to pay because of "procedures". Changes needed on Hetzner took less than a day, like buying a new server from auction. Changes through corporate took somewhere around a week. P.S. Sorry for digression

jlokier 4y ago
Their server auction is great if you find one you like. Much less than a day. I found new auction servers took only a few minutes to be up and running after selecting them. Same with default config new servers (no extra SSDs etc).
philliphaydon 4y ago
Sounds like an issue with the company and not AWS.
- pfoof 4y ago
  Yes, the second (digressed) part but all in all costs were a huge leap after going into cloud
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    Maybe. Maybe not. Obviously we can only take your word for it as we have not look and analyse what’s currently there and what’s required etc. I suspect it does cost more but i doubt it’s a “huge leap” but it also defines what you define as huge leap.

jeremyjh 4y ago

I like the look of Hetzner's pricing and while its VMs and SSDs seem to have pretty good performance, its block storage volumes are basically unusable for most applications, I was seeing 70-80 IOPS and something like 4mbps in fio.

pcdoodle 4y ago

Wow, these are fast. I use XRDP on EC2 and thought i'd try hetzner again. It's like i'm sitting in front of a linux desktop, better than EC2.

Filligree 4y ago

I ran a server there for years. Eventually it developed a fault on... either the PCIe bus, one of the paired NVMes, or something in that vein. This manifested as poor performance, followed by the NVMe falling off the bus, often followed by the machine rebooting. Upon doing so it would stall at the BIOS, complaining that it had been overclocked. It had not been overclocked... as far as I know, at any rate. I went back and forth on this with support for several months. They were not able to reproduce (it was a rare fault, happening on average only about once every few weeks), and blamed me for 'overclocking'. Eventually I shut off the account. Hetzner is cheap, but you're on your own if you need any form of help.

jlokier 4y ago
I had a similar problem, where my AMD server kept freezing up about once a month. It was my critical mail server, and used by other people, so not good. Unfortunately I just kept reacting to it by rebooting, instead of writing to Hetzner support. When I did eventually write to them, they scheduled a date for complete replacement of the main hardware transferring over the SSDs without any fuss, and the problems have never reoccurred, so that was great. The reason I didn't write to them for a long time is I'd heard stories like yours, and I thought I'd have to gather lots of evidence to prove the server was unreliable. I did that and presented it, but I was still surprised at how instantly they just proposed a date for replacement without any discussion.

koolba 4y ago

Any plans for Hetzner dedicated servers in USA? This looks like it’s only the cloud offering.

lakomen 4y ago

I don't like that they're milking old SB servers. I have a 12 year old server there ddr3 RAM, xeon e3 v2, 4x2tb hdd with raid controller. I paid 51€ for this for years, then like a year ago asked if I could get a price reduction. They agreed, down to 35€ but ni backup. Then, 3 months later, they increased prices because "electric cost" and now they'll increase them again because "inflation". So that I'll pay freaking 45€ for soon 13 year old hardware that can break any moment. It doesn't cost them even half of it. The server barely has any load, rarely reboots and they still increase prices. And I can't even run a discord bot because their network is banned. And they keep sending me false email spam positives, from freaking sign up confirmation mails. When you criticize them on their forum you get banned. I had the computer since 2014. It was already paid when I rented it. It had now been paid 4 times over. And they still increase prices. If there was a similarly priced alternative I'd be gone in a second. Their idk.. the guy who makes the systems and orders hardware is stuck in the past. Arno or what his name is. I'd rather have 4×2TB than 2×10TB HDDs. I'd rather have low powered cores but more cores than those beast machines. Anything below highest tier is a consumer computer. And that highest tier is expensive, more expensive than comparable alternatives from Leaseweb or similar providers. Connectivity is only good for the country it's in and the immediate neighbors. That's for Germany. The Helsinki DC has an unreliable connection to Europe mainland. 20ms-60ms-80ms latency is not what I'd consider stable. They are greedy.

coolgoose 4y ago
Why don't you just move to a new server ? And electricity did go sky high in Europe at least, that's a moot point. "If there was a similarly priced alternative I'd be gone in a second." Cool, so they're cheap, decently-ish on support and there are no alternatives, yet you complain they are making some money from people that don't upgrade their old hardware.
Aeolun 4y ago
Get a new server? It’s not as if they make it hard. I replaced my two €20 instances with one new €40 instance when they got price increases to €33/server or so. Of course now that’ll also increase to €50, but yeah, war.

tzartz 4y ago

Ah Hetzner. Good prices, screwy business practices. Got a quote from them for one rate, setup a demo and got shut us down saying that our application was against their TOS. Funny considering our app was at that point nothing but a near blank static website- we hadn't even fully deployed it. Talked to the sales guys who assured us it would 'be fixed'- but after 3 weeks of zero feed back we bolted. FWIW, the app we were going to deploy there was a simple website that provided contact info and PDFs of product manuals for their German clients.

Aeolun 4y ago
I don’t follow, why would you get a quote? All their prices are listed on the website. Especially if it’s a simple contact list, why would you need to interact with sales at all?
- tzartz 4y ago
  Formal quotes were required for the company I was working for at the time, company policy.

philip1209 4y ago

I thought that the point of GDPR was to prevent American spy agencies from having access to European customer data. Hetzner has gained customers because it was a non-US data hosting provider. But, if Hetzner now has a nexus in the USA - does that dilute their ability to fulfill on the spirit of GDPR? Even if the US data center doesn't have access or control of the European data centers, these US data centers could be used as leverage by American spy agencies against European customer data.

jlokier 4y ago

I've been using Hetzner for 10 years for a wide variety of bespoke networking services, in-store VPNs for commercial clients, video content distribution, and standard services like websites, mail servers, compute resources, and development servers. All sorts of things. They are one of my largest IT expenses, and I'm happy with their service in many respects. They're easily my favourite hosting provider! But their recent reputation around "crypto" [except we make up what that means on the fly] mega-bans is toxic to any business that wants to use Hetzner for reliable hosting of anything mission critical. Here's how I understand their reputation at the moment. (Clarification from Hetzner would be very welcome!): A combination of not clearly saying what they will ban, giving zero notice, banning all of a customer's servers at once, blocking access to backup data as well, and providing no recourse to recover (e.g. by stopping running something). So at best they should be used as a cheap backup or compute resource, but it's an uncomfortable risk to use them for something mission critical - a mail server or customer data processing server for example - as long as they keep to this "intentionally vague surprise mega-ban" policy. They don't seem to ban a lot of customers, but the recent uncertainty affects more. It's not good that a number of customers, including me, simply can't tell if they are at risk of a ban, especially when running novel complex services. Even if they just banned one server and let you carry on operations with the others, that would be a big improvement. Or if they told you what to stop doing. Or if they provided time to get your data off or to correct an issue to their satisfaction. It's one thing to have a policy preferring nobody runs a blockchain node, or a news or software distribution website which is blockchain-adjacent. Similar perhaps to those places that have a policy against IRC or gaming nodes. It's another thing to not say what the real policy is anywhere and associate it with abrupt mega-bans. The ToS only says mining. Advice I've seen to someone banned that "you should have taken backups, tough" is mocking: After a ban you can't access your backups which they encourage to keep on their backup service, of course. It also makes sense technically to backup onto another Hetzner server, maybe at a different datacenter. Unfortunately the only safe thing to do is backup outside Hetzner entirely but they won't recommend that until it's too late. As far as I can tell, there is no place at Hetzner which says what their mega-ban policy really is, and it looks capricious and unpredictable in practice. Different Hetzner staff say different things. The few public responses on this show that they appear to not care to understand the question, which adds to that sense that you don't know what activities are a risk and what aren't. Part of the problem is that peer-to-peer distributed systems in general are being ever more relevant, and look like "crypto" from the outside (and crypto-related techniques underly some technical methods of stabilising p2p networks). Someone who only runs a website they think is safe will get banned one day under that policy, because it has some crypto news or something on it, or because some Wordpress module uses a p2p client to fetch some files, and they will be completely surprised. It reminds me of Google and Stripe, where we hear a trickle of randomly banned customers whose lives or businesses are ruined through no fault of their own, with no recourse. Except as far as I can tell, unlike with Google and Stripe, complaining about a Hetzner ban on Hacker News seems unlikely to have an effect. There is no Edwin for Hetzner. Or is there? Maybe that will change now they have a USA presence :-)

kamikazechaser 4y ago

Overall it is a good provider. Performance/cost ratio is better than linode/DO/Scaleway by a huge margin. That being said, its anti-abuse is super strict. Any heavy p2p networking usually triggers their anti-ban e.g. IPFS. They have a 0 crypto policy that includes making a HTTP(s) call to any external crypto API. I find this a very weird TOS enforcement tbh. Not an issue, but a general observation is that their block ranges are more aggressively scanned by bots.

nov21b 4y ago
I've run trading bots on Hetzner without issue (Binance and Bybit api)

jlokier 4y ago

Hey Katie :-) If taking requests, it would be great to be able to test occasional root servers before committing, even if it's only a few hours access. I have my eye on one of those new ARM many-core servers, but I'm not going to pay the setup fee and month rent in advance only to measure the performance and find out quickly that it's not what I'm looking for (because the AMD line is really good). You offer a refund policy by writing to support, but I always felt a bit dirty at the idea of using it, as though it's abusing the process if I know before I buy that I'm probably going to return the server.

Hetzner_OL 4y ago
Well, if you already know before you order the server that you are probably going to cancel it, then it does sound a bit like you would be abusing the cancellation policy. A policy like this is not meant for testing out a dedicated root server for fun -- instead, you could ask people in our customer forum about what kinds of benchmarks they tend to get. (https://forum.hetzner.com/ https://forum.hetzner.com/) A lot of our customers are happy to share these kinds of details with people on the forum, and perhaps even someone here on Hacker News would be willing to do the same thing. However, if you really do plan on keeping the server, and then you try it out for a few days and are truly disappointed with the performance, of course you can cancel your order within the first 14 days. --Katie
- jlokier 4y ago
  Thanks for the reply. Don't worry, I won't be abusing the policy. What I suggested is a feature that might win you some more customers. I'd find it useful so I imagine some other customers would as well. As a data point, my purchase of an Ampere is contingent on gathering more knowledge about it, so that's at least one customer who's hesitating over a purchase. I would happily pay double rent during a short test period - I'm not looking for a freebie. Unfortunately, I don't think general benchmarks and other customer experiences are likely to tell me what I'm looking for. I'm working on a new compiler focused on performance of various workloads, which is why the Amperes seem interesting, because of their unusual system architecture. They are different from other ARMs, so (for example) experience with an Apple M1 or Amazon Graviton does not translate. I'll probably end up renting another cloud provider's Ampere VM for a few days when I'm ready; this is not a blocker for me. I just wanted to share that it's a feature I would have found useful if Hetzner offered, and the same has been true with other Hetzner servers in the past.

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staunch 4y ago

Please allow third-parties to add server apps to Hetzner! Currently there's like a dozen added by Hetzner (presumably), so many cool ones are missing.

jszymborski 4y ago

I've always been eager to try out Hetzner as they always come up as a very affordable provider of VPS' and small dedis. However, whenever I price compare, I always find OVH and Kimsufi far under-price them on small servers. Am I missing out on a Hetzner product line or are they offering features I'm not getting on OVH?

unity1001 4y ago
Good luck getting any customer support at OVH. Something happens with your dedicated, it may be a week until they reply to your ticket. They say its better with French-language support. But for English, their support sucked a few years ago when I tried them.
- jszymborski 4y ago
  Good to know, thanks... I speak French so I might just go straight to the French support if I ever need them.

UnnoTed 4y ago

I used to be a Hetzner customer for a few years (2018-2020), one day my card stopped working, while I tried to get a new one I ended up with a 5 EUR invoice, once I got a new card I tried to pay the invoice but they had blocked my account, so I had to transfer the money to their account to pay the invoice, once paid they told me to create a new account, I did and was asked for a picture of my passport after being a customer for years, I stopped trying to use their service at that moment. Now paying twice the price at Linode but at least they only ask for a phone number.

devmunchies 4y ago

Since they are making big moves toward US expansion, one small improvement would be to change the prices on the pricing page to show Dollars instead of Euros, either with a toggle or if my IP is in North America. It's more work for the customer to do price comparison with comparable cloud providers.

icelancer 4y ago

This is great news. Hetzner is our choice for inexpensive redundancy, especially on non-US soil for data duplication on other continents. They've been very good with us on customer service and their auction prices can't be beaten. The latency to the EU somewhat stops us using them for production-level work, but this deployment to the US (especially on the West Coast, how lucky) will definitely shift our spend from DigitalOcean (which has been garbage lately both in terms of customer service and product offerings being much worse than advertised) to them. Hetzner's control panel and automated systems are pretty bad, but that's a small thing when the price is right and customer service is much better than other offerings. EDIT: I am a consumer of dedicated servers from them only. I don't really believe in cloud-based / AWS-type services for small businesses, and would like to get off most of our VPSes as well.

sieabah 4y ago

My big question is whether any US based companies hosted are beholden to the German government because it's a German based company. This in turn makes everyone beholden to the EU regulations and German censorship regulations. Yeah no thanks!

unity1001 4y ago

A managed kubernetes offering from Hetzner would be great. If they added managed databases, maybe even a managed shared filesystem (rwx volumes or something similar to Google filestore) then they would knock it out of the park...

vondur 4y ago

Ooh, when are the NextCloud bundles coming to the US? I see they have them on the German based datacenters.

akulbe 4y ago

Have any of you switched from Digital Ocean to Hetzner? I've been with DO for years, but after some problems and lackluster/non-existent service recently, I'm considering moving off to another provider.

g42gregory 4y ago

Does Hetzner has any plans to offer GPUs on the cloud?

mike503 4y ago

I hope they look at opening up colocation. Maybe dedicated servers too, but colo would be cool :)

amai 4y ago

There is good article ( in German unfortunately, but Google Translate might help ) with quite some technical details about how they manage their data centers: https://www.golem.de/news/besuch-im-rechenzentrum-so-betreibt-hetzner-tausende-server-effizient-2211-169943.amp.html https://www.golem.de/news/besuch-im-rechenzentrum-so-betreib...