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We're a long time Hetzner dedicated server customer currently transitioning from their dedicated servers in Germany to their US Cloud product (for reduced laten

by 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!
  - _cenw 4y ago
    Kubeone on Hetzner is honestly one of the smoothest non-managed experiences I've ever had with Kubernetes - better than some managed ones. Includes all of the things Hetzner already provides for Kubernetes (so I'm sure they're working on their own) - internal networking support, load balancers, volumes. And you scale worker nodes with a CRD too. https://github.com/kubermatic/kubeone/tree/main/examples/terraform/hetzner https://github.com/kubermatic/kubeone/tree/main/examples/ter...
    - dtx1 4y ago
      That's wicked cool, thank you. For me and a little more experimental customers, this is a nice option but for the more legacy customers out there, if it doesn't have an SLA, it doesn't exist. I know it doesn't make sense but it's how big companies tend to work.
      - _cenw 4y ago
        Oh, I've been there. I just wanted to highlight an outstanding option. Though I'm sure if you ask and they have the money for it lying around, Kubermatic will sell you an SLA.
      - Aeolun 4y ago
        I don’t think Hetzner is the company to provide that. The reason they’re so cheap is that they limit themselves to hardware/VPS.
        rat9988 4y ago
        They do have managed offerings.
        _cenw 4y ago
        That product is at least one and a half decade old though. I wouldn't call any of their new products "managed".
    - 4y ago
- sebhook 4y ago
  Are you going to be hiring in the US?
oblio 4y ago
How are their APIs for Configuration as Code?
- _cenw 4y ago
  Pretty good. https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hetznercloud/hcloud/latest/docs https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hetznercloud/hcloud/...
ptman 4y ago
I wonder when Aiven https://aiven.io/ https://aiven.io/ (or something similar) will start supporting hetzner.
- openplatypus 4y ago
  A few months ago I heard that Aiven was warming up to collaboration with OVH, which is even better IMO.
- MaKey 4y ago
  Whenever I hear Aiven, I think of an incident I witnessed 2nd hand in January 2020. They accidentally terminated the services for (at least) one big customer and had to restore them from backups. This lead to data loss in production (Kafka topic data and configuration gone) and was a huge mess for the customer to clean up. Of course they abandoned Aiven after that.
- js4ever 4y ago
  You might be interested by Elestio, we support 13 managed DB and 170 other open-source software. We also support hetzner including this new Hillsboro region. https://elest.io/ https://elest.io/ Disclaimer: I'm the CTO
Archelaos 4y ago
> Cloudflare R2 - another great value S3 alternative with $0 egress fees I don't understand their price page. They claim $0 egress fees, but their free "Class A operations (mutate state)" and "Class B operations (read state)" have a mothly cap. After that you pay by the number. Isn't that an egress free?
- heipei 4y ago
  Not if you download a small number of large files ;)
  - sam1r 4y ago
    Adds up really fast! One time I hosted a new movie (mkv, 23gb+), that cost like $17 to “rent” on Amazon prime… so my extended family could just take the link, download it, or just watch it in their mobile browser or laptop. The egress of the streaming alone (not downloading), while they aircasted, definitely adds up much more than one would expect!
- foolswisdom 4y ago
  No, because you pay by the operation, but by the amount of data in that operation. S3 also has operations costs, but those are separate from the egress costs, which are throb the roof.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
    Does anyone know what the actual margin on outbound data / egress is? S3 is charging $0.023 per GB, right? IIUC - there's not a fixed cost for sending 1 GB of data. The cost differs based on where you send from and send to. So it'd be hard to have a really good estimate - but I'm wondering if anyone has a good ballpark figure. My understanding is that transferring data on the same continent (vast majority of traffic) should be <$0.0005 - meaning the margin is really high. I know it's more in Amazon's interest for your cloud usage to be as inefficient as possible - so they can charge you as much as possible and get as much margin as possible. However, this product doesn't seem to make sense to me. Why would you even pick your S3 regions? Shouldn't AWS balance your data for you across continents so that your data egress is automatically optimized? Is that how Cloudflare works?
hobs 4y ago
First thing on signup: YOU HAVE TO DO ADDITIONAL IDENTITY VALIDATION, yes, even though we took your home address and credit card and phone number already. No thanks, I'll keep using Digital Ocean or someone who doesn't make me jump through hoops.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  Interestingly, I've never used Digital Ocean because when I went to sign up (in my memory it would be circa 2015, but my memory is not what it once was) you had to give them something like your Twitter or Github name, which I didn't feel like sharing.
  - jmartrican 4y ago
    I signed up to DO about 2 years ago. They didn't ask me for Twitter or GitHub. As I recall, it was a normal setup process.
- danw1979 4y ago
  A one-off hoop that maybe helps to keep spammers off their systems ? Fine by me.
  - hobs 4y ago
    If your fraud detection cant do anything with name, address, phone number, and credit card and you need Drivers License/Passports then you probably need to pay for a better one.
    - Aeolun 4y ago
      What do you expect a German company to do with a copy of your drivers license or passport? Is this one of those situations where it contains your your social security number and it therefore becomes direct access to your bank account? The only thing I imagine someone could do with the copy of my passport is pretend to be me when they sign up for a similar service.
karlerss 4y ago
I'll add a +1 to managed database product. We've migrated all workloads except main application servers to Hetzner. Having a managed DB service (with backups, point-in-time recovery, etc) would have us quitting AWS in an instant.
- aflukasz 4y ago
  I was considering something similar and then found this: https://gist.github.com/frozenice/fafb1565f8299a888f94d1113705de6c https://gist.github.com/frozenice/fafb1565f8299a888f94d11137... (benchmarking Hetzner's cloud volumes, with unfavorable comments from people trying PG and MySQL deployments). I emphasize that I personally did not run any such tests, yet. But was wondering, since this is Hetzner thread, that maybe someone can share their experience, in particular comparing AWS's gp2/gp3 based deployments vs Hetzner's volumes. I would also add that on AWS, for example, you can nearly seamlessly expand EBS volumes in size without downtime. Last time I checked, not an option on Hetzner - you must take care of expanding the file system yourself. Which makes sense, as Hetzner is more basic service, but it's worth remembering that there are various differences like that, when comparing the day to day operations between such providers.
  - tpetry 4y ago
    > I was considering something similar and then found this: https://gist.github.com/frozenice/fafb1565f8299a888f94d11137 https://gist.github.com/frozenice/fafb1565f8299a888f94d11137... (benchmarking Hetzner's cloud volumes, with unfavorable comments from people trying PG and MySQL deployments). Network volumes always have lower iops than local disks. Thats expected, except when you pay a huge price. > I emphasize that I personally did not run any such tests, yet. But was wondering, since this is Hetzner thread, that maybe someone can share their experience, in particular comparing AWS's gp2/gp3 based deployments vs Hetzner's volumes. AWS GP3 has a baseline performance of 3000 iops, and from there on you have to pay for each iop/s. To reach the performance of hetzner volumes you have to add 20$/month. But with AWS you can get higher than the hetzner value. But the iops performance of the dedicated machine is not possible with gp3 (max. 16k, compared to hetzner 30-40k for local disks). With io2 devices you can get higher than 16k iops, and higher than the hetzner local disk. https://aws.amazon.com/de/ebs/general-purpose/ https://aws.amazon.com/de/ebs/general-purpose/
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nlittlepoole 4y ago
Doing the exact same for some side projects. It's been a delight.
mdasen 4y ago
Hetzner Cloud is great, but I do wish they'd offer dedicated servers in the US as well, even if it was just a fraction of their European offering. Hetzner Cloud pricing is great, but their dedicated servers are even cheaper. For example, they offer a 16-core (32-vCPU) Ryzen 9 5950X for €103 with 128GB RAM and 2 x 3.84 TB NVMe SSDs. They offer a cloud server with 32 vCPU, 128GB RAM, and 600GB of storage for €296 - nearly triple the price and those CPU cores are probably not as good since they're likely Zen2 cores rather than the Zen3 cores of the Ryzen 9 5950X. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+EPYC+7502P https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+EPYC+7502P https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+9+5950X https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+9+5950X I know, benchmarks aren't everything, but the Ryzen is getting 1,432 per vCPU while the EPYC is getting 766. The AX51 costs €59 for 8 Zen2 cores (16 vCPU) and 64GB RAM while the CCX41 costs €154 for 16 vCPU and 64GB RAM. I know, the cloud servers come with flexibility, hourly billing, and no set-up fees. I also know that their cloud pricing is very good. Still, I wish I could get a few AX101s in the US. 3 AX101 servers would be €310/mo, each with 16 Zen3 cores, 128GB RAM, and 2x 3.8TB of storage.
- unity1001 4y ago
  Their AX line has 32 core, 64 thread AMDs for ~200 dollars/euro. That is unmatched by any major provider. So, so attractive. https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax

by mythz 4y ago

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!
- _cenw 4y ago
  Kubeone on Hetzner is honestly one of the smoothest non-managed experiences I've ever had with Kubernetes - better than some managed ones. Includes all of the things Hetzner already provides for Kubernetes (so I'm sure they're working on their own) - internal networking support, load balancers, volumes. And you scale worker nodes with a CRD too. https://github.com/kubermatic/kubeone/tree/main/examples/terraform/hetzner https://github.com/kubermatic/kubeone/tree/main/examples/ter...
  - dtx1 4y ago
    That's wicked cool, thank you. For me and a little more experimental customers, this is a nice option but for the more legacy customers out there, if it doesn't have an SLA, it doesn't exist. I know it doesn't make sense but it's how big companies tend to work.
    - _cenw 4y ago
      Oh, I've been there. I just wanted to highlight an outstanding option. Though I'm sure if you ask and they have the money for it lying around, Kubermatic will sell you an SLA.
    - Aeolun 4y ago
      I don’t think Hetzner is the company to provide that. The reason they’re so cheap is that they limit themselves to hardware/VPS.
      - rat9988 4y ago
        They do have managed offerings.
        _cenw 4y ago
        That product is at least one and a half decade old though. I wouldn't call any of their new products "managed".
  - 4y ago
sebhook 4y ago
Are you going to be hiring in the US?

oblio 4y ago

How are their APIs for Configuration as Code?

_cenw 4y ago
Pretty good. https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hetznercloud/hcloud/latest/docs https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hetznercloud/hcloud/...

ptman 4y ago

I wonder when Aiven https://aiven.io/ https://aiven.io/ (or something similar) will start supporting hetzner.

openplatypus 4y ago
A few months ago I heard that Aiven was warming up to collaboration with OVH, which is even better IMO.
MaKey 4y ago
Whenever I hear Aiven, I think of an incident I witnessed 2nd hand in January 2020. They accidentally terminated the services for (at least) one big customer and had to restore them from backups. This lead to data loss in production (Kafka topic data and configuration gone) and was a huge mess for the customer to clean up. Of course they abandoned Aiven after that.
js4ever 4y ago
You might be interested by Elestio, we support 13 managed DB and 170 other open-source software. We also support hetzner including this new Hillsboro region. https://elest.io/ https://elest.io/ Disclaimer: I'm the CTO

Archelaos 4y ago

> Cloudflare R2 - another great value S3 alternative with $0 egress fees I don't understand their price page. They claim $0 egress fees, but their free "Class A operations (mutate state)" and "Class B operations (read state)" have a mothly cap. After that you pay by the number. Isn't that an egress free?

heipei 4y ago
Not if you download a small number of large files ;)
- sam1r 4y ago
  Adds up really fast! One time I hosted a new movie (mkv, 23gb+), that cost like $17 to “rent” on Amazon prime… so my extended family could just take the link, download it, or just watch it in their mobile browser or laptop. The egress of the streaming alone (not downloading), while they aircasted, definitely adds up much more than one would expect!
foolswisdom 4y ago
No, because you pay by the operation, but by the amount of data in that operation. S3 also has operations costs, but those are separate from the egress costs, which are throb the roof.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  Does anyone know what the actual margin on outbound data / egress is? S3 is charging $0.023 per GB, right? IIUC - there's not a fixed cost for sending 1 GB of data. The cost differs based on where you send from and send to. So it'd be hard to have a really good estimate - but I'm wondering if anyone has a good ballpark figure. My understanding is that transferring data on the same continent (vast majority of traffic) should be <$0.0005 - meaning the margin is really high. I know it's more in Amazon's interest for your cloud usage to be as inefficient as possible - so they can charge you as much as possible and get as much margin as possible. However, this product doesn't seem to make sense to me. Why would you even pick your S3 regions? Shouldn't AWS balance your data for you across continents so that your data egress is automatically optimized? Is that how Cloudflare works?

hobs 4y ago

First thing on signup: YOU HAVE TO DO ADDITIONAL IDENTITY VALIDATION, yes, even though we took your home address and credit card and phone number already. No thanks, I'll keep using Digital Ocean or someone who doesn't make me jump through hoops.

hotpotamus 4y ago
Interestingly, I've never used Digital Ocean because when I went to sign up (in my memory it would be circa 2015, but my memory is not what it once was) you had to give them something like your Twitter or Github name, which I didn't feel like sharing.
- jmartrican 4y ago
  I signed up to DO about 2 years ago. They didn't ask me for Twitter or GitHub. As I recall, it was a normal setup process.
danw1979 4y ago
A one-off hoop that maybe helps to keep spammers off their systems ? Fine by me.
- hobs 4y ago
  If your fraud detection cant do anything with name, address, phone number, and credit card and you need Drivers License/Passports then you probably need to pay for a better one.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    What do you expect a German company to do with a copy of your drivers license or passport? Is this one of those situations where it contains your your social security number and it therefore becomes direct access to your bank account? The only thing I imagine someone could do with the copy of my passport is pretend to be me when they sign up for a similar service.

karlerss 4y ago

I'll add a +1 to managed database product. We've migrated all workloads except main application servers to Hetzner. Having a managed DB service (with backups, point-in-time recovery, etc) would have us quitting AWS in an instant.

aflukasz 4y ago
I was considering something similar and then found this: https://gist.github.com/frozenice/fafb1565f8299a888f94d1113705de6c https://gist.github.com/frozenice/fafb1565f8299a888f94d11137... (benchmarking Hetzner's cloud volumes, with unfavorable comments from people trying PG and MySQL deployments). I emphasize that I personally did not run any such tests, yet. But was wondering, since this is Hetzner thread, that maybe someone can share their experience, in particular comparing AWS's gp2/gp3 based deployments vs Hetzner's volumes. I would also add that on AWS, for example, you can nearly seamlessly expand EBS volumes in size without downtime. Last time I checked, not an option on Hetzner - you must take care of expanding the file system yourself. Which makes sense, as Hetzner is more basic service, but it's worth remembering that there are various differences like that, when comparing the day to day operations between such providers.
- tpetry 4y ago
  > I was considering something similar and then found this: https://gist.github.com/frozenice/fafb1565f8299a888f94d11137 https://gist.github.com/frozenice/fafb1565f8299a888f94d11137... (benchmarking Hetzner's cloud volumes, with unfavorable comments from people trying PG and MySQL deployments). Network volumes always have lower iops than local disks. Thats expected, except when you pay a huge price. > I emphasize that I personally did not run any such tests, yet. But was wondering, since this is Hetzner thread, that maybe someone can share their experience, in particular comparing AWS's gp2/gp3 based deployments vs Hetzner's volumes. AWS GP3 has a baseline performance of 3000 iops, and from there on you have to pay for each iop/s. To reach the performance of hetzner volumes you have to add 20$/month. But with AWS you can get higher than the hetzner value. But the iops performance of the dedicated machine is not possible with gp3 (max. 16k, compared to hetzner 30-40k for local disks). With io2 devices you can get higher than 16k iops, and higher than the hetzner local disk. https://aws.amazon.com/de/ebs/general-purpose/ https://aws.amazon.com/de/ebs/general-purpose/

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

nlittlepoole 4y ago

Doing the exact same for some side projects. It's been a delight.

mdasen 4y ago

Hetzner Cloud is great, but I do wish they'd offer dedicated servers in the US as well, even if it was just a fraction of their European offering. Hetzner Cloud pricing is great, but their dedicated servers are even cheaper. For example, they offer a 16-core (32-vCPU) Ryzen 9 5950X for €103 with 128GB RAM and 2 x 3.84 TB NVMe SSDs. They offer a cloud server with 32 vCPU, 128GB RAM, and 600GB of storage for €296 - nearly triple the price and those CPU cores are probably not as good since they're likely Zen2 cores rather than the Zen3 cores of the Ryzen 9 5950X. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+EPYC+7502P https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+EPYC+7502P https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+9+5950X https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+9+5950X I know, benchmarks aren't everything, but the Ryzen is getting 1,432 per vCPU while the EPYC is getting 766. The AX51 costs €59 for 8 Zen2 cores (16 vCPU) and 64GB RAM while the CCX41 costs €154 for 16 vCPU and 64GB RAM. I know, the cloud servers come with flexibility, hourly billing, and no set-up fees. I also know that their cloud pricing is very good. Still, I wish I could get a few AX101s in the US. 3 AX101 servers would be €310/mo, each with 16 Zen3 cores, 128GB RAM, and 2x 3.8TB of storage.

unity1001 4y ago
Their AX line has 32 core, 64 thread AMDs for ~200 dollars/euro. That is unmatched by any major provider. So, so attractive. https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax