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I have been working in the industry since 20 years and i have not a single bad word to loose about Hetzner. Their Service has always been impeccable and their

I have been working in the industry since 20 years and i have not a single bad word to loose about Hetzner. Their Service has always been impeccable and their servers just run. I have been running k8s clusters on hetzner for quite some time now and the flexibility for the price is exactly what i expect from a hoster! Now with this addition Hetzner closes another gap that made projects spends thousands more on enterprise clouds. So im not only happy but also proud that they just keep innovating!

CodesInChaos 4y ago
I have heard complaints about the performance of their network connectivity and quality of their peerings.
jonatron 4y ago
I heard the devops guys at a previous job wrote a script to detect CPU fan failures. Then got asked to stop sending so many emails about CPU fan failures. Was still worth it because it's cheap, but they're cheap because it's not new and reliable hardware.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  I'm no particular Hetzner fan, but is it possible there were a load of false positives in there?
  - adql 4y ago
    "Oh look, fan stopped, means it's dead" CPU temperature: 40C
- wg0 4y ago
  Really? Been running few dedicated servers for several years straight without a fail. Even Herzner cloud just works and I don't know how they do it but it's dirt cheap.
  - jonatron 4y ago
    How many is a few? If you've have 500 servers for a long time, and a new script discovers 5% have a failure and sends 25 emails at the same time, I can see why Hetzner might want a single email. Numbers made up, but you get the idea.
- byefruit 4y ago
  Is this any worse than not even knowing when parts of your AWS instance are failing?
  - jonatron 4y ago
    If I search my emails: "EC2 has detected degradation of the underlying hardware hosting your Amazon EC2 instance" It's just something you have to do yourself with Hetzner.
    - byefruit 4y ago
      Right but AWS gets to make that choice, you have no idea whether they consider a failing fan as "degradation".
    - renonce 4y ago
      You should compare EC2 with Hetzner Cloud. Hetzner Cloud do send such alerts occasionally.
- adql 4y ago
  Maybe he detected 0 RPM without looking at temperature.... some controllers will just stop fans when there is enough cooling. We had a bunch of racks and fan failures gotta be one of rarest one. Even on my personal junk I had zero actual failures, just one getting noisy > Was still worth it because it's cheap, but they're cheap because it's not new and reliable hardware. Not really different than cloud, they aren't buying top of the line servers, they are making their own just like hetzner, for cheapest per performance unit.
  - lloydatkinson 4y ago
    Are controllers that throttle down to zero common in the data centre space though? I don't think I've ever heard a quiet or silent server, except for the ones tech people make themselves at home.
    - usrusr 4y ago
      Hetzner is known to do their own thing instead of blindly following datacenter conventions. E.g. having the physical architecture (how their buildings are designed) so optimized for convective flow that they get sufficient air flow without extra fans most hours of the year and only need active "heat pump" style cooling in rare exceptions. They do have board-level fans, but it it would be almost out-of-character if those did not throttle to zero whenever possible. Big german language report: https://www.golem.de/news/besuch-im-rechenzentrum-so-betreibt-hetzner-tausende-server-effizient-2211-169943.html https://www.golem.de/news/besuch-im-rechenzentrum-so-betreib...
jbverschoor 4y ago
They had some problems about 10-15 years ago (hardware, network). The fire some time ago wasn’t cool either
- Thev00d00 4y ago
  Fire was OVH? Or different incident?
- deaddabe 4y ago
  Which fire? Are you not confusing with OVH SGB2 fire in 2021?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- FooBarWidget 4y ago
  I also had problems with Hetzner hardware ~10 years ago, as in servers randomly freezing due to CPU bugs. But in the past few years I haven't encountered problems at all. I have two dedicated servers for running CPU-intensive CI/CD workloads and for the past few years they've run smoothly.
- nunodonato 4y ago
  I heard it was pretty hot (sorry, couldn't resist)
- jbverschoor 4y ago
  Hmmm I think you're right.. the fire was at OVH.. But I recall something in the past 2 or 3 years about dataloss at Hetzner. Personally I only had some network issues with them.
ur-whale 4y ago
> I have been working in the industry since 20 years and i have not a single bad word to loose about Hetzner. I use them, and I've been very happy with both pricing, reliability and the service. Only possible bad thing to say about them: their static IP's aren't always "clean": I had a couple of instances where the IP I was allocated was blacklisted and it took some back and forth with their customer service to fix the problem (got a new IP). But other than that quality / price ratio is way higher than GCP, AWS and their ilk. I also use OVH, they're pretty decent as well, in the same ballpark as Hetzner.
- jhoelzel 4y ago
  im an ovh customer too, mainly for their exchange offering. I disagree that they are on the same level as hetzner as support often doesnt know what their are doing and half their tools are broken. For instance i was trying to migrate a large exchange group off to office 365 recently and their migration assistant simply has not been updated to support modern auth for office 365 amongst other things. Also the migration failed from their own accounts for some reason.... As for the dirty ips: yes that happens but its not really hetzners fault, as the ip you had assigned had been taken away from the "bad actor" prior. If you tell that to your support agent, i have gotten a new one without a problem EDIT: Ironically, not i cant even list my exchange accounts in ovh. it just keeps on loading and loading
- arp242 4y ago
  > their static IP's aren't always "clean": I had a couple of instances where the IP I was allocated was blacklisted and it took some back and forth with their customer service to fix the problem (got a new IP). Isn't that a problem you're always going to get with $any provider? You never know who previously owned that IP and what they did with it.
akvadrako 4y ago
Not my experience. Hetzner is really a discount provider, though they may have gotten better. I used to work for a team that rented dozens of servers from them and we had disk failures almost every other week, which required creating a support ticket and asking them to swap out the drive so we could rebuild the RAID array. They used regular SATA consumer drives and they were probably pretty old or refurbished or something.
- izacus 4y ago
  Yeah, they indeed are a discount provider, which means that they're about as reliable as AWS or GCP services (which have constant partial failures). I've been very happy with Hetzner for some workloads.
  - nailer 4y ago
    The expectation with AWS and GCP is that the constant intermittent failures are shouldn’t be visible to end users. * So filing tickets is a big difference in user requirements. * Though GCP (back when it was just AppEngine) wasn’t always this way and as GAE users inside Google we had to write our own code for what we expected to fail, retries, backoffs etc.
    - darkwater 4y ago
      I still have a few times per month mails from AWS with an "instance retirement", for which then you have to plan accordingly (basically by not having a single instance as a single point of failure). If you do the same with Hetzner, you would not notice the failure either (failed disk on a single machine? just business as usual, it will eventually be replaced). Obviously replacing AWS features like RDS multi-AZ masters is not going to be as easy and might be worth paying the whole AWS premium, but that really depends on the business size, traffic, internal experience and many other factors.
      - nailer 4y ago
        Hah me too! EC2 instance retirement was so long ago I’d forgotten. :D
efxhoy 4y ago
How did you setup the k8s cluster? Is it running on bare metal or VMs?
- jhoelzel 4y ago
  both actually! it depends on what kind of workload you are running but for any kind of web application that "just" wants high availability the VMs are more than enough. They do provide a csi driver for kubernetes for their blockstorage and private networking for both too. you can even have the masters of VMS and the nodes on bare metal
wink 4y ago
You must be really lucky then :) My experience from ~2006 to 2014/15 (on and off, different companies, many different servers) was mostly bad, literal "you get what you pay for", with disks in dedicated servers dying left and right. I've only become a customer again since their vps cloud offering and I've actually been recommending that because it has been flawless for me for years.
- jhoelzel 4y ago
  and you must be a customer of the server auctions :D No but i get it, but i had a lot of failures in general with spinning disks. I think it has to do that SSDs and NVMEs are much better at telling you how much juice they got left in them. I don't neccesairily think its a problem of hetzner alone though, as disks on other hosters have failed too for me. I also used to maintain a couple of "plain old offices" and Hard disk failure is sadly just all around us, when you are using bare metal. Another reason for kubernetes!

CodesInChaos 4y ago

I have heard complaints about the performance of their network connectivity and quality of their peerings.

jonatron 4y ago

I heard the devops guys at a previous job wrote a script to detect CPU fan failures. Then got asked to stop sending so many emails about CPU fan failures. Was still worth it because it's cheap, but they're cheap because it's not new and reliable hardware.

robertlagrant 4y ago
I'm no particular Hetzner fan, but is it possible there were a load of false positives in there?
- adql 4y ago
  "Oh look, fan stopped, means it's dead" CPU temperature: 40C
wg0 4y ago
Really? Been running few dedicated servers for several years straight without a fail. Even Herzner cloud just works and I don't know how they do it but it's dirt cheap.
- jonatron 4y ago
  How many is a few? If you've have 500 servers for a long time, and a new script discovers 5% have a failure and sends 25 emails at the same time, I can see why Hetzner might want a single email. Numbers made up, but you get the idea.
byefruit 4y ago
Is this any worse than not even knowing when parts of your AWS instance are failing?
- jonatron 4y ago
  If I search my emails: "EC2 has detected degradation of the underlying hardware hosting your Amazon EC2 instance" It's just something you have to do yourself with Hetzner.
  - byefruit 4y ago
    Right but AWS gets to make that choice, you have no idea whether they consider a failing fan as "degradation".
  - renonce 4y ago
    You should compare EC2 with Hetzner Cloud. Hetzner Cloud do send such alerts occasionally.
adql 4y ago
Maybe he detected 0 RPM without looking at temperature.... some controllers will just stop fans when there is enough cooling. We had a bunch of racks and fan failures gotta be one of rarest one. Even on my personal junk I had zero actual failures, just one getting noisy > Was still worth it because it's cheap, but they're cheap because it's not new and reliable hardware. Not really different than cloud, they aren't buying top of the line servers, they are making their own just like hetzner, for cheapest per performance unit.
- lloydatkinson 4y ago
  Are controllers that throttle down to zero common in the data centre space though? I don't think I've ever heard a quiet or silent server, except for the ones tech people make themselves at home.
  - usrusr 4y ago
    Hetzner is known to do their own thing instead of blindly following datacenter conventions. E.g. having the physical architecture (how their buildings are designed) so optimized for convective flow that they get sufficient air flow without extra fans most hours of the year and only need active "heat pump" style cooling in rare exceptions. They do have board-level fans, but it it would be almost out-of-character if those did not throttle to zero whenever possible. Big german language report: https://www.golem.de/news/besuch-im-rechenzentrum-so-betreibt-hetzner-tausende-server-effizient-2211-169943.html https://www.golem.de/news/besuch-im-rechenzentrum-so-betreib...

jbverschoor 4y ago

They had some problems about 10-15 years ago (hardware, network). The fire some time ago wasn’t cool either

Thev00d00 4y ago
Fire was OVH? Or different incident?
deaddabe 4y ago
Which fire? Are you not confusing with OVH SGB2 fire in 2021?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
FooBarWidget 4y ago
I also had problems with Hetzner hardware ~10 years ago, as in servers randomly freezing due to CPU bugs. But in the past few years I haven't encountered problems at all. I have two dedicated servers for running CPU-intensive CI/CD workloads and for the past few years they've run smoothly.
nunodonato 4y ago
I heard it was pretty hot (sorry, couldn't resist)
jbverschoor 4y ago
Hmmm I think you're right.. the fire was at OVH.. But I recall something in the past 2 or 3 years about dataloss at Hetzner. Personally I only had some network issues with them.

ur-whale 4y ago

> I have been working in the industry since 20 years and i have not a single bad word to loose about Hetzner. I use them, and I've been very happy with both pricing, reliability and the service. Only possible bad thing to say about them: their static IP's aren't always "clean": I had a couple of instances where the IP I was allocated was blacklisted and it took some back and forth with their customer service to fix the problem (got a new IP). But other than that quality / price ratio is way higher than GCP, AWS and their ilk. I also use OVH, they're pretty decent as well, in the same ballpark as Hetzner.

jhoelzel 4y ago
im an ovh customer too, mainly for their exchange offering. I disagree that they are on the same level as hetzner as support often doesnt know what their are doing and half their tools are broken. For instance i was trying to migrate a large exchange group off to office 365 recently and their migration assistant simply has not been updated to support modern auth for office 365 amongst other things. Also the migration failed from their own accounts for some reason.... As for the dirty ips: yes that happens but its not really hetzners fault, as the ip you had assigned had been taken away from the "bad actor" prior. If you tell that to your support agent, i have gotten a new one without a problem EDIT: Ironically, not i cant even list my exchange accounts in ovh. it just keeps on loading and loading
arp242 4y ago
> their static IP's aren't always "clean": I had a couple of instances where the IP I was allocated was blacklisted and it took some back and forth with their customer service to fix the problem (got a new IP). Isn't that a problem you're always going to get with $any provider? You never know who previously owned that IP and what they did with it.

akvadrako 4y ago

Not my experience. Hetzner is really a discount provider, though they may have gotten better. I used to work for a team that rented dozens of servers from them and we had disk failures almost every other week, which required creating a support ticket and asking them to swap out the drive so we could rebuild the RAID array. They used regular SATA consumer drives and they were probably pretty old or refurbished or something.

izacus 4y ago
Yeah, they indeed are a discount provider, which means that they're about as reliable as AWS or GCP services (which have constant partial failures). I've been very happy with Hetzner for some workloads.
- nailer 4y ago
  The expectation with AWS and GCP is that the constant intermittent failures are shouldn’t be visible to end users. * So filing tickets is a big difference in user requirements. * Though GCP (back when it was just AppEngine) wasn’t always this way and as GAE users inside Google we had to write our own code for what we expected to fail, retries, backoffs etc.
  - darkwater 4y ago
    I still have a few times per month mails from AWS with an "instance retirement", for which then you have to plan accordingly (basically by not having a single instance as a single point of failure). If you do the same with Hetzner, you would not notice the failure either (failed disk on a single machine? just business as usual, it will eventually be replaced). Obviously replacing AWS features like RDS multi-AZ masters is not going to be as easy and might be worth paying the whole AWS premium, but that really depends on the business size, traffic, internal experience and many other factors.
    - nailer 4y ago
      Hah me too! EC2 instance retirement was so long ago I’d forgotten. :D

efxhoy 4y ago

How did you setup the k8s cluster? Is it running on bare metal or VMs?

jhoelzel 4y ago
both actually! it depends on what kind of workload you are running but for any kind of web application that "just" wants high availability the VMs are more than enough. They do provide a csi driver for kubernetes for their blockstorage and private networking for both too. you can even have the masters of VMS and the nodes on bare metal

wink 4y ago

You must be really lucky then :) My experience from ~2006 to 2014/15 (on and off, different companies, many different servers) was mostly bad, literal "you get what you pay for", with disks in dedicated servers dying left and right. I've only become a customer again since their vps cloud offering and I've actually been recommending that because it has been flawless for me for years.

jhoelzel 4y ago
and you must be a customer of the server auctions :D No but i get it, but i had a lot of failures in general with spinning disks. I think it has to do that SSDs and NVMEs are much better at telling you how much juice they got left in them. I don't neccesairily think its a problem of hetzner alone though, as disks on other hosters have failed too for me. I also used to maintain a couple of "plain old offices" and Hard disk failure is sadly just all around us, when you are using bare metal. Another reason for kubernetes!