5 ms·

The price of a brand new Dell precision PC with a core i9 13900 CPU (24 cores), 64 GB RAM and 2X2TB NVMe is probably around 2.5k$. It costs tens of Euros per mo

by aborsy 3y ago

The price of a brand new Dell precision PC with a core i9 13900 CPU (24 cores), 64 GB RAM and 2X2TB NVMe is probably around 2.5k$. It costs tens of Euros per month in electricity to run this PC. The hardware is good to go for some 3 years, before running into various issues (newer CPUs becoming much more power efficient, firmware updates getting less and less frequent etc). Consider also the cost of components failure, time wasted in dealing with hardware, etc. On hetzner it all costs less than 100$ per month. Doesn’t this imply that it’s better to rent than to buy?

throwaway11460 3y ago
Yes, the volume discounts and economies of scale they can get (while you can't) are insane.
- singhrac 3y ago
  One of the simplest is that data center energy pricing is just simply different from residential energy, because they often get wholesale (plus small markup) rather than residential rates.
  - formerly_proven 3y ago
    The majority of residential rates (about 40 ct/kWh) are taxes and levies, not the actual price of the electricity. That's why industrial rates can be less than half of residential rates.
    - throwaway11460 3y ago
      Can you be more specific? What kind of taxes? VAT is paid by the end consumer so you're not getting out of that one. Are there special consumption taxes on electricity in Germany? In my experience the largest difference is distribution cost. The mandated distribution monopoly charges a lot (regulated price) to small customers.
      - hnbad 3y ago
        A friend of mine is an electrician in Germany who had a lengthy discussion about this with another friend of mine who was drunkenly complaining about how large corporations pay less for electricity. I'll try my best to reconstruct what he said in response. Residential customers use highly variable amounts of electricity and typically pay a base rate in addition to usage which can have different tiers so additional use may get cheaper if you exceed a certain threshold. Often these contracts also offer month-by-month cancellation or may include a certain period for which the price is guaranteed not to change. Industrial customers instead often buy bulk volume commitments. Instead of paying per use, they commit to using a certain amount and pay for that exactly. They also generally have much longer running contracts. There are also contracts that directly tie the price to the daily (or in some cases even hourly) market rate, which is usually not an option for residential customers. Their energy use is also generally more predictable than the load required for residential areas with the equivalent consumption so the cost for running and maintaining the grid is lower. Additionally there is a recent trend towards DC power delivery, further cutting costs. Rooftop solar panels and domestic EV charging actually contribute to the cost of maintaining residential grids because they add to the peak load and variance, both of which have to be compensated for. In other words, per unit of energy sold, residential customers simply have more overhead than large scale business customers.
    - Propelloni 3y ago
      You need to compare prices again. Residential electricity costs are significantly below your quoted rate for quite some time now. I've just checked and the lowest rate I saw was 21 ct/kWh. Most vendors are somewhere in the 25 to 30 ct/kWh bracket.
      - lelandbatey 3y ago
        Average USA energy prices are (according the Bureau of Labor Statistics) ~$0.18/kWh at the moment, with some folks at $0.40+ (San Francisco, San Diego, Hawaii) while others are as low as $0.13/kWh (Seattle, Saint Lewis) https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices_selectedareas_table.htm https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...
      - formerly_proven 3y ago
        > The average electricity price for households fell by almost 8 percent at the beginning of 2024 compared to the annual average for 2023 and now amounts to an average of 42.22 ct/kWh (2023: 45.73 ct/kWh; base price included pro rata for a consumption of 3,500 kWh/a ). https://www.bdew.de/service/daten-und-grafiken/bdew-strompreisanalyse/ https://www.bdew.de/service/daten-und-grafiken/bdew-strompre...
        noAnswer 3y ago
        I'm at a small local energy provider. I have their most expensive 100% renewable tariff. Even after the invasion the price only went up to 28,36 €ct/kWh. Yet, my parents pay above 45 to RWE. (That's what cheap nuclear power stations get you I guess.) My father finally changed providers but thanks to the super fair contract has to wait now over a year for it to happen. And thanks to the "Strompreisbremse" I have to subsidise those ass companies. sorry for being of topic
      - callalex 3y ago
        There’s no point in having this discussion, it is extremely specific to different locations.
      - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
    - singhrac 3y ago
      I think "taxes and levies" is a bit true, but also you pay for distribution. If your power line goes down in your neighborhood, you basically just grumble but it gets fixed. In wholesale connections you pay for the distribution power line (+ maintenance) basically up front, but it doesn't get put in the final wholesale bill. This isn't to say your local utility isn't wasteful with its ratepayer money; it totally can be. There isn't enough pressure to lower rates. It's just worth saying that these specific "taxes" do have an intended destination, not just general govt.
      - mratsim 3y ago
        Or for some there is a national base price.
  - xhkkffbf 3y ago
    In the winter time, I get free heat from my server. In the summer, I have to pay to run an AC to get it out of the envelope.
    - teaearlgraycold 3y ago
      Gotta run some ducting for that server!
schroeding 3y ago
If you pay European (German) energy prices, this very well may be the case, in my experience. For some Hetzner servers (especially from their "Server Auctions"), for domestic customers the cost of electricity alone, disregarding the hardware cost, would sometimes be higher than the rent Hetzner wants.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
elric 3y ago
They build their own servers using some custom components. Economies of scale probably don't really factor into the pricing of their GPU stuff (unless I'm seriously underestimating their GPU customer base), but they do factor into the peripheral stuff like PSUs, fans, hard drives, etc.
- jsheard 3y ago
  There's some videos out there showing off their custom motherboards, it's an odd mixture of standard-ish consumer ATX but stripped down to the absolute bare essentials and with some components rearranged for better airflow in racks chassis they also build themselves: https://youtube.com/watch?v=V2P8mjWRqpk https://youtube.com/watch?v=V2P8mjWRqpk Another video showing the custom racks and other infrastructure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM
wongarsu 3y ago
Hetzner is not only able to get better volume discounts, they also spend a lot of engineering time bringing down costs, and have decades of experience doing so. They offer some Dell Servers for those that really want them, but most of their servers have a custom mix of consumer hardware, server hardware and in-house hardware (for example they use their own racking system), optimized to minimize lifetime cost in a datacenter. For example most servers use datacenter SSDs, but consumer CPUs.
- dist-epoch 3y ago
  Hetzner is buying ASUS consumer AM5 motherboards, but with the whole CPU + memory block rotated so that the memory sticks are horizontal instead of vertical for better airflow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2P8mjWRqpk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2P8mjWRqpk
  - justinclift 3y ago
    They also buy (at least) ASRock Rack motherboards as well. Saying that from looking at the dmidecode output from some of our dedicated server currently with them: Handle 0x0002, DMI type 2, 15 bytes Base Board Information Manufacturer: ASRockRack Product Name: B565D4-V1L
  - ofrzeta 3y ago
    They have lots of different boards, among others ASRock. Even within the same range of models you can buy, for instance AX52 you can get different manufacturers. It's not really transparent to the customers when they order. Source: dmidecode
- cobertos 3y ago
  Do you have more details on their own racking system? I couldn't find anything on this.
  - wongarsu 3y ago
    The best resource I know is a tour of one of their data centers. Around minute 6 you get some nice views on their current-gen racks, and later in the video you see the back side, followed by the assembly of the servers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM
YetAnotherNick 3y ago
It's definitely weird that cloud costs which is supposed to be commoditized is differing by 2 orders of magnitude. Hetzner/OVH seemed to have solved the hard part of making the service cheaper but just can't solve the easier task of making the platform usable. Why do I need to upload documents for verification. Why can't I try server for 2 hours right after signing up for the service.
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  Those are part of making it cheaper. ID verification is an anti-fraud measure and ensures that bans stick, which in turn means they don't have to invest so heavily in heuristic anti-fraud and "spam filtering" type work. A delay on provisioning means they are provisioning hardware JIT in some cases, meaning they need less idle float capacity, which in turn drives down costs.
- Scotrix 3y ago
  Have been in deep contact with data centre and rental server offerings in the past, there is a crazy large amount of fraud going on, e.g. 2 hours for free means 2 hours free resource to DDOS.
  - YetAnotherNick 3y ago
    I don't want it free. I want to put $2 on the account. Try the server and decide after using the server.
    - Scotrix 3y ago
      same problem, credit card fraud/chargebacks happening anyway, that’s why you have an intense verification process to reduce the fraud going on.
    - albert180 3y ago
      And they want a customer who will rent the dedicated box for a long time and not wipe it after every 2$/2h Trialcustomer
    - deleted 3y ago
brudgers 3y ago
Doesn’t this imply that it’s better to rent than to buy? TANSTAAFL 1. Physical hardware is a useful abstraction. 2. At the end of a three year cycle, you can sell something you own. (This has associated costs of course). 3. Rents can go up. Terms and Conditions can change. Credit cards can expire or be cancelled. In other words, renting introduces a significant dependency. 4. You are your own most important customer. Statistically, you are not The Clouds's most important customer. When The Clouds has a fault, it gets resolved based on its business model. Engineering decisions are specific to a specific problem and all of them come with tradeoffs.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  >2. At the end of a three year cycle, you can sell something you own. (This has associated costs of course). This is huge and often overlooked or undervalued. Renting means you have nothing when the contract ends, buying means you have something for your money spent.
  - alphabeta2023 3y ago
    [dead]
  - cduzz 3y ago
    A 3 year depreciation cycle may be reasonable for some spaces but not others. I'm not going to lose sleep over not getting firmware updates; when they've got all the bugs on my stuff ironed out I don't want more firmware updates. I haven't done the spreadsheet work to identify the cross-over point for where old systems become uneconomical but when I've done it in the past for my heavily clustered workloads it's typically better to buy an off-lease server that's 3 years old and run it for another 8 years, than it is to forklift all my infrastructure every 3 years chasing the newest generation thing. Certainly the cloud's got some advantages, but running equipment until it's really old is also pretty good too. I'd bet that AWS doesn't throw older systems out just because they're old.
    - CapeTheory 3y ago
tiffanyh 3y ago
Yes. This is what you expect prices to be when a vendor is buying in bulk. Cloud vendors should be like "Costco" (buy servers in bulk and can pass along those savings & this is what Hetzner does) The trick AWS (and other cloud vendors have done), is charge "Uber Eats" pricing for Costco items.
- fragmede 3y ago
  That's a really clever analogy, but is it really a trick? UberEats delivers the food to my door but if I go to Costco I have to make my dinner myself. Sometimes life happens and UberEats isn't just a convenience thing, it's the only way I'll manage to feed me and my crew. I could run a pubsub queuing system and a database myself, but if I don't have to do that, it frees me up to focus on the tasks I'm really trying to accomplish instead.
  - sph 3y ago
    That's fine, but I think it is a bit reckless to tell everybody that grocery shopping is useless and we might as well order from Uber Eats three times a day. Which is basically what happens with everyone terribly afraid of managing VPS that these days it's only AWS, Azure and GCP. First the excuse is "it's too small to bother doing it myself", then it becomes "it's too large to run it ourselves". Some can afford 3x daily Uber Eats, but we should stop discouraging home cooking. It is not that scary.
whizzter 3y ago
It seems a bit like car leasing, providers gets a bit of discounts for their volume purchases and customers pays a premium (that is still affordable) compared to just taking the entire deprecation cost themselves. The provider then still has something worth a fair bit of cash that can still generate income (through resale). So if you look at a 2 year horizon and want to keep cutting edge (or prefer operating expenditures to capital expenditures) then it's cheaper whereas looking at a 5 year horizon the capital expenditure will pay off. Hetzner is very bare-bones compared to regular clouds (a friend who was after performance but wasn't prepared for this ran into some issues when a disk died), so you need some procedures for backup/replication in place but if your procedures are in place then you can save big compared to the regular clouds.
- chpatrick 3y ago
  There's definitely a tradeoff when it comes to maintenance effort. You need to make sure your RAID and monitoring works and if a disk fails you need to message support to replace it. In general I've had a great experience with them.
treffer 3y ago
Last time I checked the GCP prices vs. hetzner servers there was a factor of 10 in monthly cost. So I cant say this is a general rule of thumb. It is true though that hetzner can provide superb performance per $. Potentially below what you can do (unless you buy racks of hardware). Also keep in mind that hetzner is mostly a beowulf cluster. See e.g. this press picture from their newsroom page: https://cdn.hetzner.com/assets/Uploads/IMG-0546-91.jpg https://cdn.hetzner.com/assets/Uploads/IMG-0546-91.jpg They do have dell servers, too. But don't expect to run on one of these nodes unless the machine type has Dell / PowerEdge in their name. This means the management capabilities are minimal (but usually enough). A fully licensed management card can do way more. Their renting pricing is ridiculously cheap though. Hardware failure is more common than on cloud providers (see cluster hardware), support has been helpful in the past. Overall IMHO a good choice if you are price sensitive. But even then consider development vs. deployment vs. running (server) costs. Servers might make up less of the total cost of a service than you expect.
- rthnbgrredf 3y ago
  To be fair, companies that merely launch VMs on GCP constitute a small fraction. GCP truly excels when you leverage its object storage, BigQuery, managed postgres database (which starts at 7$/month), and serverless solutions for cloud-native applications. Our company operates around 500 services, with billing per second, and a significant number of them are scaled down to zero when not in use. If you need a GPU for a batch processing task involving 10,000 images, you can simply activate a VM equipped with a high-performance GPU for an hour, pay for that duration, and then shut it down. At Hetzner, you're required to pay for a whole month upfront, regardless of whether you need the GPU for just an hour each day. Therefore, I'd argue that if you require continuous, raw computing power, Hetzner is indeed cost-effective. However, the cost-effectiveness elsewhere really hinges on your usage patterns.
  - qeternity 3y ago
    > To be fair, companies that merely launch VMs on GCP constitute a small fraction. I think you would be surprised.
rstuart4133 3y ago
On purchase price alone you are usually better off not renting. Given a server generally comes with 5 years warranty, you are about 50% better off on those figures. However, the killer isn't the purchase price. You have to put it somewhere with a lot of bandwidth, UPS, generators and cooling. To use your Hetzner example, you can't get co-lo for less than $119. That's 14U, which is more than you need for one server of course, but then there are usually charges on top of that. So yes, for small installations it's hard to beat renting. You need to be using several racks for the equation to tilt towards purchase.

by aborsy 3y ago

throwaway11460 3y ago

Yes, the volume discounts and economies of scale they can get (while you can't) are insane.

singhrac 3y ago
One of the simplest is that data center energy pricing is just simply different from residential energy, because they often get wholesale (plus small markup) rather than residential rates.
- formerly_proven 3y ago
  The majority of residential rates (about 40 ct/kWh) are taxes and levies, not the actual price of the electricity. That's why industrial rates can be less than half of residential rates.
  - throwaway11460 3y ago
    Can you be more specific? What kind of taxes? VAT is paid by the end consumer so you're not getting out of that one. Are there special consumption taxes on electricity in Germany? In my experience the largest difference is distribution cost. The mandated distribution monopoly charges a lot (regulated price) to small customers.
    - hnbad 3y ago
      A friend of mine is an electrician in Germany who had a lengthy discussion about this with another friend of mine who was drunkenly complaining about how large corporations pay less for electricity. I'll try my best to reconstruct what he said in response. Residential customers use highly variable amounts of electricity and typically pay a base rate in addition to usage which can have different tiers so additional use may get cheaper if you exceed a certain threshold. Often these contracts also offer month-by-month cancellation or may include a certain period for which the price is guaranteed not to change. Industrial customers instead often buy bulk volume commitments. Instead of paying per use, they commit to using a certain amount and pay for that exactly. They also generally have much longer running contracts. There are also contracts that directly tie the price to the daily (or in some cases even hourly) market rate, which is usually not an option for residential customers. Their energy use is also generally more predictable than the load required for residential areas with the equivalent consumption so the cost for running and maintaining the grid is lower. Additionally there is a recent trend towards DC power delivery, further cutting costs. Rooftop solar panels and domestic EV charging actually contribute to the cost of maintaining residential grids because they add to the peak load and variance, both of which have to be compensated for. In other words, per unit of energy sold, residential customers simply have more overhead than large scale business customers.
  - Propelloni 3y ago
    You need to compare prices again. Residential electricity costs are significantly below your quoted rate for quite some time now. I've just checked and the lowest rate I saw was 21 ct/kWh. Most vendors are somewhere in the 25 to 30 ct/kWh bracket.
    - lelandbatey 3y ago
      Average USA energy prices are (according the Bureau of Labor Statistics) ~$0.18/kWh at the moment, with some folks at $0.40+ (San Francisco, San Diego, Hawaii) while others are as low as $0.13/kWh (Seattle, Saint Lewis) https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices_selectedareas_table.htm https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...
    - formerly_proven 3y ago
      > The average electricity price for households fell by almost 8 percent at the beginning of 2024 compared to the annual average for 2023 and now amounts to an average of 42.22 ct/kWh (2023: 45.73 ct/kWh; base price included pro rata for a consumption of 3,500 kWh/a ). https://www.bdew.de/service/daten-und-grafiken/bdew-strompreisanalyse/ https://www.bdew.de/service/daten-und-grafiken/bdew-strompre...
      - noAnswer 3y ago
        I'm at a small local energy provider. I have their most expensive 100% renewable tariff. Even after the invasion the price only went up to 28,36 €ct/kWh. Yet, my parents pay above 45 to RWE. (That's what cheap nuclear power stations get you I guess.) My father finally changed providers but thanks to the super fair contract has to wait now over a year for it to happen. And thanks to the "Strompreisbremse" I have to subsidise those ass companies. sorry for being of topic
    - callalex 3y ago
      There’s no point in having this discussion, it is extremely specific to different locations.
    - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
  - singhrac 3y ago
    I think "taxes and levies" is a bit true, but also you pay for distribution. If your power line goes down in your neighborhood, you basically just grumble but it gets fixed. In wholesale connections you pay for the distribution power line (+ maintenance) basically up front, but it doesn't get put in the final wholesale bill. This isn't to say your local utility isn't wasteful with its ratepayer money; it totally can be. There isn't enough pressure to lower rates. It's just worth saying that these specific "taxes" do have an intended destination, not just general govt.
    - mratsim 3y ago
      Or for some there is a national base price.
- xhkkffbf 3y ago
  In the winter time, I get free heat from my server. In the summer, I have to pay to run an AC to get it out of the envelope.
  - teaearlgraycold 3y ago
    Gotta run some ducting for that server!

schroeding 3y ago

If you pay European (German) energy prices, this very well may be the case, in my experience. For some Hetzner servers (especially from their "Server Auctions"), for domestic customers the cost of electricity alone, disregarding the hardware cost, would sometimes be higher than the rent Hetzner wants.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

elric 3y ago

They build their own servers using some custom components. Economies of scale probably don't really factor into the pricing of their GPU stuff (unless I'm seriously underestimating their GPU customer base), but they do factor into the peripheral stuff like PSUs, fans, hard drives, etc.

jsheard 3y ago
There's some videos out there showing off their custom motherboards, it's an odd mixture of standard-ish consumer ATX but stripped down to the absolute bare essentials and with some components rearranged for better airflow in racks chassis they also build themselves: https://youtube.com/watch?v=V2P8mjWRqpk https://youtube.com/watch?v=V2P8mjWRqpk Another video showing the custom racks and other infrastructure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM

wongarsu 3y ago

Hetzner is not only able to get better volume discounts, they also spend a lot of engineering time bringing down costs, and have decades of experience doing so. They offer some Dell Servers for those that really want them, but most of their servers have a custom mix of consumer hardware, server hardware and in-house hardware (for example they use their own racking system), optimized to minimize lifetime cost in a datacenter. For example most servers use datacenter SSDs, but consumer CPUs.

dist-epoch 3y ago
Hetzner is buying ASUS consumer AM5 motherboards, but with the whole CPU + memory block rotated so that the memory sticks are horizontal instead of vertical for better airflow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2P8mjWRqpk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2P8mjWRqpk
- justinclift 3y ago
  They also buy (at least) ASRock Rack motherboards as well. Saying that from looking at the dmidecode output from some of our dedicated server currently with them: Handle 0x0002, DMI type 2, 15 bytes Base Board Information Manufacturer: ASRockRack Product Name: B565D4-V1L
- ofrzeta 3y ago
  They have lots of different boards, among others ASRock. Even within the same range of models you can buy, for instance AX52 you can get different manufacturers. It's not really transparent to the customers when they order. Source: dmidecode
cobertos 3y ago
Do you have more details on their own racking system? I couldn't find anything on this.
- wongarsu 3y ago
  The best resource I know is a tour of one of their data centers. Around minute 6 you get some nice views on their current-gen racks, and later in the video you see the back side, followed by the assembly of the servers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM

YetAnotherNick 3y ago

It's definitely weird that cloud costs which is supposed to be commoditized is differing by 2 orders of magnitude. Hetzner/OVH seemed to have solved the hard part of making the service cheaper but just can't solve the easier task of making the platform usable. Why do I need to upload documents for verification. Why can't I try server for 2 hours right after signing up for the service.

mike_hearn 3y ago
Those are part of making it cheaper. ID verification is an anti-fraud measure and ensures that bans stick, which in turn means they don't have to invest so heavily in heuristic anti-fraud and "spam filtering" type work. A delay on provisioning means they are provisioning hardware JIT in some cases, meaning they need less idle float capacity, which in turn drives down costs.
Scotrix 3y ago
Have been in deep contact with data centre and rental server offerings in the past, there is a crazy large amount of fraud going on, e.g. 2 hours for free means 2 hours free resource to DDOS.
- YetAnotherNick 3y ago
  I don't want it free. I want to put $2 on the account. Try the server and decide after using the server.
  - Scotrix 3y ago
    same problem, credit card fraud/chargebacks happening anyway, that’s why you have an intense verification process to reduce the fraud going on.
  - albert180 3y ago
    And they want a customer who will rent the dedicated box for a long time and not wipe it after every 2$/2h Trialcustomer
  - deleted 3y ago

brudgers 3y ago

Doesn’t this imply that it’s better to rent than to buy? TANSTAAFL 1. Physical hardware is a useful abstraction. 2. At the end of a three year cycle, you can sell something you own. (This has associated costs of course). 3. Rents can go up. Terms and Conditions can change. Credit cards can expire or be cancelled. In other words, renting introduces a significant dependency. 4. You are your own most important customer. Statistically, you are not The Clouds's most important customer. When The Clouds has a fault, it gets resolved based on its business model. Engineering decisions are specific to a specific problem and all of them come with tradeoffs.

Dalewyn 3y ago
>2. At the end of a three year cycle, you can sell something you own. (This has associated costs of course). This is huge and often overlooked or undervalued. Renting means you have nothing when the contract ends, buying means you have something for your money spent.
- alphabeta2023 3y ago
  [dead]
- cduzz 3y ago
  A 3 year depreciation cycle may be reasonable for some spaces but not others. I'm not going to lose sleep over not getting firmware updates; when they've got all the bugs on my stuff ironed out I don't want more firmware updates. I haven't done the spreadsheet work to identify the cross-over point for where old systems become uneconomical but when I've done it in the past for my heavily clustered workloads it's typically better to buy an off-lease server that's 3 years old and run it for another 8 years, than it is to forklift all my infrastructure every 3 years chasing the newest generation thing. Certainly the cloud's got some advantages, but running equipment until it's really old is also pretty good too. I'd bet that AWS doesn't throw older systems out just because they're old.
  - CapeTheory 3y ago

tiffanyh 3y ago

Yes. This is what you expect prices to be when a vendor is buying in bulk. Cloud vendors should be like "Costco" (buy servers in bulk and can pass along those savings & this is what Hetzner does) The trick AWS (and other cloud vendors have done), is charge "Uber Eats" pricing for Costco items.

fragmede 3y ago
That's a really clever analogy, but is it really a trick? UberEats delivers the food to my door but if I go to Costco I have to make my dinner myself. Sometimes life happens and UberEats isn't just a convenience thing, it's the only way I'll manage to feed me and my crew. I could run a pubsub queuing system and a database myself, but if I don't have to do that, it frees me up to focus on the tasks I'm really trying to accomplish instead.
- sph 3y ago
  That's fine, but I think it is a bit reckless to tell everybody that grocery shopping is useless and we might as well order from Uber Eats three times a day. Which is basically what happens with everyone terribly afraid of managing VPS that these days it's only AWS, Azure and GCP. First the excuse is "it's too small to bother doing it myself", then it becomes "it's too large to run it ourselves". Some can afford 3x daily Uber Eats, but we should stop discouraging home cooking. It is not that scary.

whizzter 3y ago

It seems a bit like car leasing, providers gets a bit of discounts for their volume purchases and customers pays a premium (that is still affordable) compared to just taking the entire deprecation cost themselves. The provider then still has something worth a fair bit of cash that can still generate income (through resale). So if you look at a 2 year horizon and want to keep cutting edge (or prefer operating expenditures to capital expenditures) then it's cheaper whereas looking at a 5 year horizon the capital expenditure will pay off. Hetzner is very bare-bones compared to regular clouds (a friend who was after performance but wasn't prepared for this ran into some issues when a disk died), so you need some procedures for backup/replication in place but if your procedures are in place then you can save big compared to the regular clouds.

chpatrick 3y ago
There's definitely a tradeoff when it comes to maintenance effort. You need to make sure your RAID and monitoring works and if a disk fails you need to message support to replace it. In general I've had a great experience with them.

treffer 3y ago

Last time I checked the GCP prices vs. hetzner servers there was a factor of 10 in monthly cost. So I cant say this is a general rule of thumb. It is true though that hetzner can provide superb performance per $. Potentially below what you can do (unless you buy racks of hardware). Also keep in mind that hetzner is mostly a beowulf cluster. See e.g. this press picture from their newsroom page: https://cdn.hetzner.com/assets/Uploads/IMG-0546-91.jpg https://cdn.hetzner.com/assets/Uploads/IMG-0546-91.jpg They do have dell servers, too. But don't expect to run on one of these nodes unless the machine type has Dell / PowerEdge in their name. This means the management capabilities are minimal (but usually enough). A fully licensed management card can do way more. Their renting pricing is ridiculously cheap though. Hardware failure is more common than on cloud providers (see cluster hardware), support has been helpful in the past. Overall IMHO a good choice if you are price sensitive. But even then consider development vs. deployment vs. running (server) costs. Servers might make up less of the total cost of a service than you expect.

rthnbgrredf 3y ago
To be fair, companies that merely launch VMs on GCP constitute a small fraction. GCP truly excels when you leverage its object storage, BigQuery, managed postgres database (which starts at 7$/month), and serverless solutions for cloud-native applications. Our company operates around 500 services, with billing per second, and a significant number of them are scaled down to zero when not in use. If you need a GPU for a batch processing task involving 10,000 images, you can simply activate a VM equipped with a high-performance GPU for an hour, pay for that duration, and then shut it down. At Hetzner, you're required to pay for a whole month upfront, regardless of whether you need the GPU for just an hour each day. Therefore, I'd argue that if you require continuous, raw computing power, Hetzner is indeed cost-effective. However, the cost-effectiveness elsewhere really hinges on your usage patterns.
- qeternity 3y ago
  > To be fair, companies that merely launch VMs on GCP constitute a small fraction. I think you would be surprised.

rstuart4133 3y ago

On purchase price alone you are usually better off not renting. Given a server generally comes with 5 years warranty, you are about 50% better off on those figures. However, the killer isn't the purchase price. You have to put it somewhere with a lot of bandwidth, UPS, generators and cooling. To use your Hetzner example, you can't get co-lo for less than $119. That's 14U, which is more than you need for one server of course, but then there are usually charges on top of that. So yes, for small installations it's hard to beat renting. You need to be using several racks for the equation to tilt towards purchase.