6 ms·

I moved from DO to Hetzner ( cheaper), I am happy about it.

x86hacker1010 3y ago
Same here
brylie 3y ago
I'm enjoying the DO App Platform (Heroku alternative). Do you know if Hetzner has a similar service that I could compare?
- hardwaresofton 3y ago
  Hey I'm building a managed service platform (not quite an app store!) on top of Hetzner -- would you be interested in trying it out? Contact is in my profile but I'd love to have some more people kick the tires and tell me what they want built the most.
- realusername 3y ago
  Personally I just install Dokku onto the machine, it replaced all my Heroku (and competitors) uses. Additionally, you still keep the full ssh access to the machine if you ever need it.
YetAnotherNick 3y ago
Does anyone know how Hetzner pricing is half of DO yet is profitable, while DO is loss making with 6% operating margin?
- stevefan1999 3y ago
  Simple, Hetzner mainly operates on Germany, the people are mostly Germans, and they automate the stuff to a point a small team could manage it well even if not remotely, so they have less cost on human resources.
  - rahkiin 3y ago
    They also build their own servers in their own datacenters
    - raybb 3y ago
      Does digital ocean not do this?
      - re-thc 3y ago
        They don’t.
        cutemonster 3y ago
        Where do DO get their servers and data centers from? ... Apparently they run on AWS, I'm surprised
        re-thc 3y ago
        > Apparently they run on AWS, I'm surprised They don't run on AWS. Not sure what sort of rumors are running :( > data centers from? The major players e.g. Equinix, Coresite, etc. Varies per location. Even AWS don't build most of their data centers.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - stevefan1999 3y ago
        The competitor of DO, Vultr does this IIRC, yet it is not really cheaper
  - KronisLV 3y ago
    > Simple, Hetzner mainly operates on Germany, the people are mostly Germans, and they automate the stuff to a point a small team could manage it well even if not remotely, so they have less cost on human resources. I feel like there might be more to it, especially considering the situation with electricity prices in some places in EU recently. I used (and still use) a Lithuanian platform called Time4VPS which was cheaper than Hetzner previously, yet had to increase their prices somewhat for that reason. Now only some of their plans are competitive with Hetzner, while Hetzner also provides some managed services as well. Hetzner docs also went into some of the details regarding the pricing: https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/pricing/hetzner-pricing https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/pricing/hetzner-prici... And yet, I can't help but to wonder why they don't give in to the desire to maximize profit margins, like happened to say Scaleway (good platform, but as expensive as DigitalOcean).
- ushakov 3y ago
  Me and my partner have paid a visit to their datacenter in Nüremberg. The answer is efficiency. They get more processing power than the other providers for the energy they have to put in
  - arrowsmith 3y ago
    What do they do that makes them more efficient?
    - abwizz 3y ago
      i'll guess they pick optimized components for it. like the longtime workhorse was a high performance skylake desktop cpu w/o ecc ram
      - ushakov 3y ago
        The secret is in the cooling system. They have individual cooling systems for each server. Less heat = longer sustained loads
        abwizz 3y ago
        pardon my ingorance but i cannot quite see how cooling individual machines vs. the hole rack or row makes a difference in total heat production per machine
- ushakov 3y ago
  Efficiency. They get much more processing power per kw/h of energy than everybode else
- devjab 3y ago
  They run their own data centres and have for a while. There is a pretty big industry for that sort of thing as an alternative to “the cloud” here in Europe. We used to use nianet to house our hardware in Denmark. Basically these companies does hardware renting and they also do hardware renting with more steps which is where you rent rack space but own the hardware. They provide the place for the hardware and they also have multiple locations so that you have both backup and redundancy, and while it doesn’t scale globally in 20 years I’ve literally never worked on anything that needed to beyond having some buffer caches for clients logging in on their vacations or something like that. What Hetzner seems to be doing with the DO styled hosting, and this is just a guess, is that they are one or the many EU companies preparing for the big EU exodus from the non-EU cloud. Which is frankly a solid bet these days where both AWS and Azure are increasing prices and are becoming more and more unusable because of EU legislation. Part of this is privacy which Microsoft and Amazon are great with in terms of compliance, but part of it is also national security. I work in an investment bank that builds solar plants, since finance and energy are both critical sectors we risk being told that half of the finance/energy companies in the world can’t use Microsoft because the EU seems it as a single point of failure if our entire energy sector relies on Azure. Which is sort of reasonable right? But what this means for us is that we can’t vendor lock-in, not really, because we need to have up-to-date exit strategies for how we plan on being fully operation a month after leaving Azure. Which is easy when you just containerise everything and run it in VMs or similar, and really annoying if you go full in on things like AKS. Which doesn’t help our Azure costs. Anyway, right now we are planning on leaving Azure because of cost. Not today, not next week but sometime in the next 5-10 years and a lot of these EU cloud alternatives that actually operate the hardware instead of renting it are likely going to be a very realistic alternative. And that is the private sector, I spend time in the EU public sector which is a massive amount of money and I’m guessing it’ll leave both AWS and Azure by 2050. Some of these EU cloud initiatives is going to explode when that happens, and right now, hetzner is one of the best bets. To get back to your question, DO rents server space. I have no idea where they’d rent it in Germany but they could potentially be renting it from Hetzner.
  - abwizz 3y ago
    commendable to plan a few years ahead, but betting on the state of cloud business 26years from now seems a bit over the top
- fxtentacle 3y ago
  I've been with them for a long time and my guesses would be: 1. Strict rules and strict customer verification. Crypto mining that wastes SSDs is not allowed. Portscans, mass emails, etc. are not allowed. They also don't offer GPUs to the general public because it has been abused in the past. You usually need to send in ID documents just to open an account. My guess is this allows them to avoid most bad actors and, thereby, waste less money on fraud. 2. Extremely long-term investments. They typically build their own hardware and then use it over 10 years. They have their own flea market where you can rent older server models for a steep discount. That means they will have a long time where the hardware is fully paid off and still generating revenue. 3. Great service. With a mid-sized company, I can call their technicians in the middle of the night. The fact that we could call them in case of a crisis has generated A LOT of good will. But I would be truly surprised if they didn't make a profit off those phone calls, as they charge roughly 4x the salary cost. 4. High-margin managed services. In addition to just the cheap servers, they also offer a managed service where they will do OS and security upgrades for you. It's roughly 2x the price of the server and it appears to be almost fully automated. I know some freelance web designers who will insist on using Hetzner Managed for deployment for their clients, because it is just so convenient. You effectively pass off all recurring maintenance for €300 a month and your client is happy to have an emergency phone number (see #3) in case the box goes down.
- EspressoGPT 3y ago
  Overstaffed, overinflated and inefficient Silicon Valley startup vs. organically-grown, well-adjusted, efficient German company.
  - wongarsu 3y ago
    Not to mention a German company that has price sensitivity in their DNA. Their first servers were just regular consumer tower PCs to drastically cut hardware costs. Now many years later it's a highly optimized mix of consumer, server and inhouse parts (e.g. they use their own racking system instead of 19", and the datacenters are built to make use of convection for a lot of the cooling). They also offer regular Dell servers for those that want them, but at 2x-4x the price of their homegrown boxes.
mythz 3y ago
Same, been enjoying Hetzner's great value for 10 years, and now Hetzner Cloud for 2 years.
tacker2000 3y ago
I use both and am very satisfied, especially by Hetzner.
- hardwaresofton 3y ago
  Hey would you be into trying a manage service platform I'm building for Hetzner? It's called Nimbus[0]. I'd love some feedback, specifically: - Which services do you most want to use/have managed - What databases do you find yourself using the most - Concerning caches, do you use memcached or mostly Redis? [0]: https://nimbusws.com https://nimbusws.com
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  Only complaint with Hetzner is they don't have some kind of OAuth setup for machines or scoped API tokens, just read/write. I'd like to use the former for doing Vault authentication from instances, and the latter for writing a dynamic Vault secret provider.
  - victor106 3y ago
    Can’t you use a third party IAM solution for this? Like Okta or keycloak?
    - mffap 3y ago
      zitadel supports service users with rbac. maybe give it a look/try: https://github.com/zitadel/zitadel https://github.com/zitadel/zitadel
- throw382642 3y ago
  I remember someone complaining they had to send Hetzner a passport or some other type of ID to cancel their services. Does anyone know if that's still the case?
  - selectnull 3y ago
    They require passport or some sort of ID on registration, and it is weird when compared to others. I was not happy with that part, but I am happy customer since (almost a decade now). As far as I know, they do not require any ID when canceling the service.
kinduff 3y ago
Same, tried a bunch before moving completely to Hetzner. I'm super happy with their service.
dangoodmanUT 3y ago
Hetzner has a record for going silent with issues FYI, just hit their reddit to see all the horror stories

Same here

I'm enjoying the DO App Platform (Heroku alternative). Do you know if Hetzner has a similar service that I could compare?

hardwaresofton 3y ago
Hey I'm building a managed service platform (not quite an app store!) on top of Hetzner -- would you be interested in trying it out? Contact is in my profile but I'd love to have some more people kick the tires and tell me what they want built the most.
realusername 3y ago
Personally I just install Dokku onto the machine, it replaced all my Heroku (and competitors) uses. Additionally, you still keep the full ssh access to the machine if you ever need it.

YetAnotherNick 3y ago

Does anyone know how Hetzner pricing is half of DO yet is profitable, while DO is loss making with 6% operating margin?

stevefan1999 3y ago
Simple, Hetzner mainly operates on Germany, the people are mostly Germans, and they automate the stuff to a point a small team could manage it well even if not remotely, so they have less cost on human resources.
- rahkiin 3y ago
  They also build their own servers in their own datacenters
  - raybb 3y ago
    Does digital ocean not do this?
    - re-thc 3y ago
      They don’t.
      - cutemonster 3y ago
        Where do DO get their servers and data centers from? ... Apparently they run on AWS, I'm surprised
        re-thc 3y ago
        > Apparently they run on AWS, I'm surprised They don't run on AWS. Not sure what sort of rumors are running :( > data centers from? The major players e.g. Equinix, Coresite, etc. Varies per location. Even AWS don't build most of their data centers.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - stevefan1999 3y ago
      The competitor of DO, Vultr does this IIRC, yet it is not really cheaper
- KronisLV 3y ago
  > Simple, Hetzner mainly operates on Germany, the people are mostly Germans, and they automate the stuff to a point a small team could manage it well even if not remotely, so they have less cost on human resources. I feel like there might be more to it, especially considering the situation with electricity prices in some places in EU recently. I used (and still use) a Lithuanian platform called Time4VPS which was cheaper than Hetzner previously, yet had to increase their prices somewhat for that reason. Now only some of their plans are competitive with Hetzner, while Hetzner also provides some managed services as well. Hetzner docs also went into some of the details regarding the pricing: https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/pricing/hetzner-pricing https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/pricing/hetzner-prici... And yet, I can't help but to wonder why they don't give in to the desire to maximize profit margins, like happened to say Scaleway (good platform, but as expensive as DigitalOcean).
ushakov 3y ago
Me and my partner have paid a visit to their datacenter in Nüremberg. The answer is efficiency. They get more processing power than the other providers for the energy they have to put in
- arrowsmith 3y ago
  What do they do that makes them more efficient?
  - abwizz 3y ago
    i'll guess they pick optimized components for it. like the longtime workhorse was a high performance skylake desktop cpu w/o ecc ram
    - ushakov 3y ago
      The secret is in the cooling system. They have individual cooling systems for each server. Less heat = longer sustained loads
      - abwizz 3y ago
        pardon my ingorance but i cannot quite see how cooling individual machines vs. the hole rack or row makes a difference in total heat production per machine
ushakov 3y ago
Efficiency. They get much more processing power per kw/h of energy than everybode else
devjab 3y ago
They run their own data centres and have for a while. There is a pretty big industry for that sort of thing as an alternative to “the cloud” here in Europe. We used to use nianet to house our hardware in Denmark. Basically these companies does hardware renting and they also do hardware renting with more steps which is where you rent rack space but own the hardware. They provide the place for the hardware and they also have multiple locations so that you have both backup and redundancy, and while it doesn’t scale globally in 20 years I’ve literally never worked on anything that needed to beyond having some buffer caches for clients logging in on their vacations or something like that. What Hetzner seems to be doing with the DO styled hosting, and this is just a guess, is that they are one or the many EU companies preparing for the big EU exodus from the non-EU cloud. Which is frankly a solid bet these days where both AWS and Azure are increasing prices and are becoming more and more unusable because of EU legislation. Part of this is privacy which Microsoft and Amazon are great with in terms of compliance, but part of it is also national security. I work in an investment bank that builds solar plants, since finance and energy are both critical sectors we risk being told that half of the finance/energy companies in the world can’t use Microsoft because the EU seems it as a single point of failure if our entire energy sector relies on Azure. Which is sort of reasonable right? But what this means for us is that we can’t vendor lock-in, not really, because we need to have up-to-date exit strategies for how we plan on being fully operation a month after leaving Azure. Which is easy when you just containerise everything and run it in VMs or similar, and really annoying if you go full in on things like AKS. Which doesn’t help our Azure costs. Anyway, right now we are planning on leaving Azure because of cost. Not today, not next week but sometime in the next 5-10 years and a lot of these EU cloud alternatives that actually operate the hardware instead of renting it are likely going to be a very realistic alternative. And that is the private sector, I spend time in the EU public sector which is a massive amount of money and I’m guessing it’ll leave both AWS and Azure by 2050. Some of these EU cloud initiatives is going to explode when that happens, and right now, hetzner is one of the best bets. To get back to your question, DO rents server space. I have no idea where they’d rent it in Germany but they could potentially be renting it from Hetzner.
- abwizz 3y ago
  commendable to plan a few years ahead, but betting on the state of cloud business 26years from now seems a bit over the top
fxtentacle 3y ago
I've been with them for a long time and my guesses would be: 1. Strict rules and strict customer verification. Crypto mining that wastes SSDs is not allowed. Portscans, mass emails, etc. are not allowed. They also don't offer GPUs to the general public because it has been abused in the past. You usually need to send in ID documents just to open an account. My guess is this allows them to avoid most bad actors and, thereby, waste less money on fraud. 2. Extremely long-term investments. They typically build their own hardware and then use it over 10 years. They have their own flea market where you can rent older server models for a steep discount. That means they will have a long time where the hardware is fully paid off and still generating revenue. 3. Great service. With a mid-sized company, I can call their technicians in the middle of the night. The fact that we could call them in case of a crisis has generated A LOT of good will. But I would be truly surprised if they didn't make a profit off those phone calls, as they charge roughly 4x the salary cost. 4. High-margin managed services. In addition to just the cheap servers, they also offer a managed service where they will do OS and security upgrades for you. It's roughly 2x the price of the server and it appears to be almost fully automated. I know some freelance web designers who will insist on using Hetzner Managed for deployment for their clients, because it is just so convenient. You effectively pass off all recurring maintenance for €300 a month and your client is happy to have an emergency phone number (see #3) in case the box goes down.
EspressoGPT 3y ago
Overstaffed, overinflated and inefficient Silicon Valley startup vs. organically-grown, well-adjusted, efficient German company.
- wongarsu 3y ago
  Not to mention a German company that has price sensitivity in their DNA. Their first servers were just regular consumer tower PCs to drastically cut hardware costs. Now many years later it's a highly optimized mix of consumer, server and inhouse parts (e.g. they use their own racking system instead of 19", and the datacenters are built to make use of convection for a lot of the cooling). They also offer regular Dell servers for those that want them, but at 2x-4x the price of their homegrown boxes.

mythz 3y ago

Same, been enjoying Hetzner's great value for 10 years, and now Hetzner Cloud for 2 years.

tacker2000 3y ago

I use both and am very satisfied, especially by Hetzner.

hardwaresofton 3y ago
Hey would you be into trying a manage service platform I'm building for Hetzner? It's called Nimbus[0]. I'd love some feedback, specifically: - Which services do you most want to use/have managed - What databases do you find yourself using the most - Concerning caches, do you use memcached or mostly Redis? [0]: https://nimbusws.com https://nimbusws.com
candiddevmike 3y ago
Only complaint with Hetzner is they don't have some kind of OAuth setup for machines or scoped API tokens, just read/write. I'd like to use the former for doing Vault authentication from instances, and the latter for writing a dynamic Vault secret provider.
- victor106 3y ago
  Can’t you use a third party IAM solution for this? Like Okta or keycloak?
  - mffap 3y ago
    zitadel supports service users with rbac. maybe give it a look/try: https://github.com/zitadel/zitadel https://github.com/zitadel/zitadel
throw382642 3y ago
I remember someone complaining they had to send Hetzner a passport or some other type of ID to cancel their services. Does anyone know if that's still the case?
- selectnull 3y ago
  They require passport or some sort of ID on registration, and it is weird when compared to others. I was not happy with that part, but I am happy customer since (almost a decade now). As far as I know, they do not require any ID when canceling the service.

kinduff 3y ago

Same, tried a bunch before moving completely to Hetzner. I'm super happy with their service.

dangoodmanUT 3y ago

Hetzner has a record for going silent with issues FYI, just hit their reddit to see all the horror stories