13 ms·

Hetzner switches to new billing model

325 points by throwaway220033 3y ago

lionkor 3y ago
For anyone else who may be confused - this is already the case in Cloud (obviously), but now will apply for Robot as well. > This structure will be similar to our Cloud billing. It says it here, but I glanced over it :)
- the_common_man 3y ago
  What is the difference between cloud and robot?
  - sunbum 3y ago
    Cloud is VM's Robot is bare metal
    - koolba 3y ago
      s/‘s/s,/ Otherwise the VM possessive reads like: Cloud = VM’s Robot = bare metal
      - jeanlucas 3y ago
        Thank you
      - MonkeyClub 3y ago
        Consequently cloud = bare metal; which agrees with the axiom that "it's not a cloud, it's just someone else's computer".
        randomdata 3y ago
        Traditionally, cloud referred to an abstraction above "someone else's computer", keeping the specific details of those computers hidden from the user, allowing the operator to do things like swap out the hardware, move the data to another datacenter, etc. without the end user ever noticing. But tech people love to come up with new definitions for the same terms all the time, so anything goes.
  - aaronmdjones 3y ago
    Hetzner's cloud console (https://console.hetzner.cloud/ https://console.hetzner.cloud/) was introduced for their vServer migration (competing with the likes of Linode). Robot (https://robot.your-server.de/ https://robot.your-server.de/) was used for their vServers previously and is still used for their dedicated servers and domain names and such.
pointlessone 3y ago
> We will always use the hourly price when it saves you money, meaning when you have used a product for less than a month, and the total hourly price is less than the monthly price. That’s nice, I guess. > we have decided to no longer send invoices to all of our customers on the same day. Instead, we will spread them out throughout the month. You will always receive your invoice on the same day of the month. But this day will be different from customer to customer. It’s not clear to me when the billing moth starts. Is it the day the invoice is sent or is it a regular calendar month? Either way it might be confusing.
- throwbadubadu 3y ago
  You certainly will read that in the invoice?
- nilsb 3y ago
  I'd hope that it's based on calendar months. Wouldn't invoices that span multiple years make things a lot more complicated in terms of accounting in general?
  - everfrustrated 3y ago
    According to the doc everyone will be getting a new random billing date to help rebalance customer support load over the month.
- flexd 3y ago
  The email I got said this: >What is important after the changeover? • We want to be able to offer you even better customer service in the future. For that reason, we want to change the date of your invoice. This will make it easier for us to quickly answer questions about your invoices. Starting in April, your new permanent billing day will be the 12. of the month. I think they have just spread the billing day out across the month for all customers
voytec 3y ago
If monthly price won't increase than this appears to be a good change. But their dedicated servers have an "installation fee", so it won't be cost-effective to rent them for short periods, and VMs are billed on hourly basis already, to my knowledge. Not sure which products this change covers.
- aaronmdjones 3y ago
  Not all of their dedicated servers have a setup fee; for example, the lowest spec AX model does not. https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax/ https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax/
  - trollied 3y ago
    Server auctions don't have a setup fee either. https://www.hetzner.com/sb/ https://www.hetzner.com/sb/
willcodeforfoo 3y ago
Last time I checked, Hetzner doesn’t have any dedicated offerings in the US, only cloud, is this still the case?
- CoolCold 3y ago
  Still the case, right
  - shortlived 3y ago
    Any recommendation for a provider with dedicated servers in the US? I’m with a provider now who is phasing them out.
    - TheNorthman 3y ago
      OVH have some in the US. I've only had good experiences with them. I like Server Hunter to get a general overview: https://www.serverhunter.com/#query=product_type%3Adedicated+region%3A%22United+States%22 https://www.serverhunter.com/#query=product_type%3Adedicated...
    - manishsharan 3y ago
      There are several dedicated server providers in US but not much is known about their track review. OVH has a datacenter in Toronto which may close enough to the US for many people. They provide dedicated servers.
      - heffer 3y ago
        OVH's Toronto datacentre is not operational yet. But you can pre-order. It's going to be interesting to see what this does to pricing for the Toronto hosting and compute market, as that location has always been more expensive compared to other North American locations. Right now it looks like OVH will not be offering their lower tier offers out of the Toronto DC.
      - betaby 3y ago
        OVH operates data-center close to Montreal (BHS), 8ms latency to NYC. Also it's 100% green hydro electricity powered.
roschdal 3y ago
Hetzner ist best, kein protest.
- Citizen_Lame 3y ago
  Lol. For kebab production, maybe.
mikkom 3y ago
I have a dedicated server in Hetzner and I don't understand what this means. How do they decide when the server is "used"? Based on CPU allocation? SSH sessions? HTTP traffic? Power? It's easy to shut down virtual servers and continue from the same position. It's not that easy to do the same for servers. The linked page is very unclear about this.
- boredpudding 3y ago
  If you have a dedicated server, you'll just be paying the monthly price. It's always in use. If you decide to stop completely with the server halfway through the month, you'll pay for the hours. Of course, a shut down server that's yours is still yours and you'll be billed for it.
  - dmw_ng 3y ago
    I'm not so sure about this, their description specifically calls out one-time-only costs like domain registrations as being the only things excluded. Cautiously optimistic in addition to the recent reappearance of new GPU models being offered to existing customers, Hetzner may be prepping an hourly-billed bare metal GPU product at a great price Hetzner bare metal already deploys in a couple of minutes when renting existing hardware, and there is plenty of precedent for hourly-billed bare metal services around. I think they're intending to move all their bare metal over to hourly billing.
    - sdwr 3y ago
      On the cloud product listing they make it pretty clear that "in use" means "allocated" and not "consuming electricity". Pretty sure their fees are staying the same, and we are still paying for every hour a server exists.
- pretext-1 3y ago
  „Used“ means as long as you rent them / as long as they’re assigned to your account / as long as you have access. Dedicated servers are physical objects in the real world, contrary to virtual servers they don’t stop „to exist“ just because they’re no longer yours. Previously you could only rent physical servers for an entire month. If you’re doing this the price is still the same. But going forward it will be possible to rent for a portion of the month only (x amount of hours).
nottorp 3y ago
So basically some large customers wanted to rent physical servers by the hour so now everyone gets to rent physical servers by the hour?
lovegrenoble 3y ago
I've heard that Hetzner is a good provider, so I want to buy a cheap unmanaged VPS server in the USA. But can not find any mention about VPS. Any help, please? Just need to replace this one (the same bad story $$$ as Netlify recently): https://www.leaseweb.com/fr/cloud/virtual-server https://www.leaseweb.com/fr/cloud/virtual-server
- mglz 3y ago
  Managed virtual servers are available here: https://www.hetzner.com/managed-server/ https://www.hetzner.com/managed-server/
  - account42 3y ago
    VPS = you get a virtual manchine which you administer yourself. Managed servers are something different entirely.
- edm0nd 3y ago
  Just use DigitalOcean. Easy setup and very cheap VPS options.
  - lovegrenoble 3y ago
    Thank you, Sir.
    - stefs 3y ago
      that said, while digital ocean is great, as far as i know hetzner is somewhat cheaper. compare! at digital ocean, 12$: 2GB RAM, 1vCPU, 20GB SSD, 2TB transfer at hetzner, 10,50$: 8GB RAM, 2vCPU, 80GB SSD, 20TB transfer
      - Citizen_Lame 3y ago
        Yes, but Hetzner costumer service is from another planet. So in case of issues they won't be able to help, and you will have issues.
MathiasPius 3y ago
This is actually great. I maintain a library[1] for interacting with the Robot interface using Rust, but testing is heavily gated because of the potential costs it might incur, which is why a lot of the purchasing/cancellation APIs haven't been thoroughly tested. With this billing, I'll be able to do thorough integration testing without breaking the bank. And of course with hourly billing, horizontal scaling becomes much more feasible. [1] https://github.com/MathiasPius/hrobot-rs https://github.com/MathiasPius/hrobot-rs
- joeig 3y ago
  At the moment there is still a one-time order fee for dedicated servers and the docs don’t clarify if it will remain.
  - diggan 3y ago
    > At the moment there is still a one-time order fee for dedicated servers For (some) dedicated servers, I think. Last time I checked the lowest tiered dedicated servers didn't have any setup fees. If it's not mentioned, assumed it'll remain.
  - MathiasPius 3y ago
    As diggan said, there's usually at least one of their dedicated server offerings for which setup fees are waived, so I figure my tests would use the API to find out which one and use it :)
- jupp0r 3y ago
  Have you reached out to Hetzner? Feels like they should waive those bills in exchange for the free dev work you do for them.
  - MathiasPius 3y ago
    I haven't actually. I believe they do offer modest amounts of credit for creating useful libraries, documentation and such targeting their platform, but I never really looked into it.
severino 3y ago
It would be nice if cloud offerings like Hetzner would allow one to set the contract duration and pay in advance, for example, one year. And once that year passes, you could tell them to extend it for another year, or do nothing and get your server deleted. This way you have a control over your spending and avoid surprises. I guess some providers (OVH?) allow you to do that, but of course it requires that all costs be fixed and have no "extras" for bandwidth consumption or things like that.
- janus24 3y ago
  Scalingo (a European PaaS) allows you to do this by buying credit, a simple solution. I wonder why other providers don't offer this.
- V__ 3y ago
  You can buy credits using a bank transfer [1]. You can also set E-Mail alerts in case your monthly invoice is higher then expected (more traffic etc.) [2]. However, there is no auto-delete as far as I can tell. [1] https://docs.hetzner.com/accounts-panel/accounts/payment-faq/#can-i-add-credit-to-my-hetzner-account https://docs.hetzner.com/accounts-panel/accounts/payment-faq... [2] https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/billing/faq/#how-do-i-keep-my-costs-under-control https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/billing/faq/#how-do-i-keep-my...
  - severino 3y ago
    Didn't know you could buy credits, but well, for me the key is that no debt is generated when your credit goes to zero. In this case, if you exhaust your credit but your server keeps running, Hetzner will not stop it and will send you the bill next month. Yes, you may have received an email warning but it does not give the same peace of mind.
  - AnonHP 3y ago
    I’ve been waiting for Hetzner to allow adding credits into one’s account using credit cards or debit cards (or other modes like PayPal). Being outside Germany (and the EU), a bank transfer is not possible or is difficult and prohibitively expensive. Hetzner also didn’t seem to support credits across all its services when I checked a few years ago.
ta8903 3y ago
When are they allowing sign ups for third world countries?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- tomas789 3y ago
  There is no such thing as third world country anymore. That is a relic or yesteryear. [1] [1] https://youtu.be/hVimVzgtD6w?si=g0aCYsjo15RAyx-e https://youtu.be/hVimVzgtD6w?si=g0aCYsjo15RAyx-e
- slig 3y ago
  Yes, signed up from a 3rd World Country late last year.
- thijsvandien 3y ago
  Or any country for that matter? I was rejected from right next door (NL).
  - reddalo 3y ago
    It's very strange that they rejected your account from another EU country. Are you sure you created your account with real data?
    - thijsvandien 3y ago
      One doesn't accidentally make things up, and for invoices to be booked, my accountant wouldn't have it any other way.
- gowthamgts12 3y ago
  I signed up after lot of failed attempts. I think now they have fixed their verification process. Please give it a try
sixhobbits 3y ago
This overall sounds like it makes sense and brings their billing into line with other providers. But it's super confusingly written and presented. Why is this an essay with CAPITAL LETTERS to try to simplify things. It looks like they put in a ton of effort to make sure people aren't confused, but this doesn't seem like the thing to give people to ensure that they aren't confused.
- iforgotpassword 3y ago
  Huh, to me it feels they just tried to emphasize the most important things, like your bill never being higher than the monthly price would be. Like, the opposite of what tech companies usually do.
boplicity 3y ago
I don't seem capable of actually setting up an account with Heztner and logging in. Their security is so tight, it seems to constantly lock me out. What if I were an actual customer? Yikes. Does anyone else have this issue?
- david_allison 3y ago
  Yep: Dear Mr David Allison After reviewing your updated customer information, we have decided to deactivate your account because of some concerns we have regarding this information. Therefore, we have cancelled all your existing products and orders with us. Best regards Your Hetzner Online Team
  - slig 3y ago
    That's terrifying. Did they at least give you time to backup your data?
    - amar0c 3y ago
      Please note that Hetzner does this only in couple cases: a) fake account data ; b) previous strikes (unpaid invoices, abuse etc..) with them ; c) in some cases customer is from country they do not do business with. I bet gazzilion OP above is within a or b
      - thijsvandien 3y ago
        A) No B) No C) No
      - e145bc455f1 3y ago
        I got the same thing. My account was neither fake or had any previous strikes, it was a new account.
      - Joe_Cool 3y ago
        Their ToS also classifies Crypto-Mining, farming or plotting (whatever that is) as grounds for cancellation. Also everything forbidden by German law results in a cancellation. So if you would have for example posted something before 2017 about a state leader that might seem like an insult your server might be gone. ( https://www.loc.gov/item/global-legal-monitor/2017-07-26/germany-law-on-insulting-foreign-leaders-abolished/ https://www.loc.gov/item/global-legal-monitor/2017-07-26/ger... ) https://cdn.hetzner.com/assets/Uploads/downloads/AGB-en.pdf https://cdn.hetzner.com/assets/Uploads/downloads/AGB-en.pdf Section 8.3
tiffanyh 3y ago
Will this cost more for existing customers? What they should have made more clear is, for existing customers - will this be cost neutral or cost more. Ideally, this is cost neutral for existing customer and gives the flexibility of paying partial month for partial usage.
- kobalsky 3y ago
  the post says: "Just to make it clear, the montly price you will pay will NOT change, even if you see some short-term changes in monthly totals on your invoices during the transition period."
  - naiv 3y ago
    This is for existing customers. If they offer servers for an hourly rate I would expect prices to up with a priced in setup fee
unixhero 3y ago
I just started a hosting gig myself. I got tired of the costs.
BilalBudhani 3y ago
Hetzner is one of those "just take my money" services, so more power to them. Besides, for some reason I always thought they charge hourly but show pricing in monthly format for easier pricing.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bcye 3y ago
  That was only for cloud products until now I think
- reddalo 3y ago
  Way better than DigitalOcean, I hope they keep being that way
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    Can you share some specific reasons?
  - ratg13 3y ago
    Hopefully the people that are running it now are better than the people that started it, however I will never use Hetzner's services for anything again as long as I live.
    - softskunk 3y ago
      What is it about the people that started it that puts you off?
      - ratg13 3y ago
        In their early days they "accidentally" deleted my servers and backups, and their engineers had the gall to attempt to blame me for their process failures. I had posted about it on HN awhile ago and had to provide proof to Dan to be able to be allowed to share my story. They responded to my HN comment apologizing and trying to claim that those people shouldn't have been interacting with customers, don't work for the company anymore and blah blah, but there is no way I could trust a company a second time after losing a month's worth of work. It was the not apologizing and doubling down on their mistakes that put me off.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
DonnyV 3y ago
Does anyone know if Hetzner is looking to open up a datacenter in Australia or in Southeast Asia?
- rmbyrro 3y ago
  South America would be great as well
  - diggan 3y ago
    South Africa sounds like a good compromise between Australia and South America :) Wonder what's the shortest possible latency between those points? Alternative, more interesting question: Assuming Hetzner have a data center in Germany and one in Finland, where should their next data center be in order to reduce latency as much as possible, in the most countries?
    - Tomte 3y ago
      They also have one in the US. So probably East Asia?
      - diggan 3y ago
        That's just for cloud I think, and also not their own data centers.
yaseer 3y ago
If anybody has migrated from AWS to Hetzner what was your experience? What kind of cost savings did you see? I know it's not a like-for-like comparison, I am particularly curious about the price differentials though, AWS is often a premium.
- diggan 3y ago
  I helped some smaller companies move from AWS EC2 to Hetzner dedicated servers. One example: Biggest cost saving was in the bandwidth bills. They also realized they don't really need to be able to scale up/down in minutes or having 6 instances online, but having two beefy machines lead to better performance, less latency and cheaper monthly bills. Originally they just went with AWS because the developer who did infrastructure stuff was most (only?) used to it and had some certification or similar, without really thinking about why AWS. Reached out to me when they started to wonder why things were so expensive for what they were doing.
  - CoolCold 3y ago
    I do see a lot of cases when infra stuff is delegated to developer - usually in small companies. You've pointed on very good point on scaling up/down vs cheap overprovisioning.
- fillest 3y ago
  Got an order of magnitude saving, mainly due to absurd AWS network traffic costs.
- CoolCold 3y ago
  around one year ago I've evaluated how much it will cost me to run DB (MYSQL) server on RDS, taking current server (one of) as example. If my memory serves me well, for medium sized DB of 2TB/160GB RAM/20+ cores, it was something like 2000$/month on RDS and around 230$ on Hetzner (with AX161, actually having 2x3.5TB NVMe disks and high iops capacity and 32c/64t EPYC CPU). That project was never been in AWS/"cloud" though, so savings are made in upfront. I have not done any traffic calculations, though - I actually forgot that AWS can charge you for that as well.
DonnyV 3y ago
Why isn't their US Data Centers not listed in the table of Data Centers they run? https://docs.hetzner.com/general/others/data-centers-and-connection https://docs.hetzner.com/general/others/data-centers-and-con...
- diggan 3y ago
  Maybe they don't operate those data centers themselves? Outsourced perhaps. > Which data centers does Hetzner operate?
  - ffsm8 3y ago
    Yes, they state as much when you order anything and talked about it at length when they introduced the US offering. They're shipping their specialized server systems to select providers for housing, essentially. Most maintenance is done remotely... aside from replacing faulty hardware etc
  - JonathonW 3y ago
    Hetzner's US cloud zones are colocated in someone else's facility (AFAICT they don't specify where): https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/general/locations/#are-the-servers-in-hetzner-owned-dcs https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/general/locations/#are-the-se...
CamelCaseName 3y ago
I've only ever heard fantastic things about Hetzner. I'm shocked PE hasn't bought them yet and raised prices.
- thijsvandien 3y ago
  So had I, until I actually tried to sign up. Have a look at the way they treat you when they have (unfounded) suspicions. It's beyond ridiculous.
  - rsync 3y ago
    So many problems just disappear when your prices are (relatively) expensive…
    - AnonHP 3y ago
      Maybe. But price is still one of the larger concerns for many people. When I checked this a couple of years ago, it seemed like Hetzner’s Storage Box (the one sorta competes with your rsync.net) had a much lower price, a much larger capacity per dollar/euro and more storage tiers.
  - AnonHP 3y ago
    They ask for a government ID in some cases. I was able to provide one with some details masked, and they wanted the name on my account to match the name on the government ID. This is a commercial transaction, not Facebook. So I was kinda ok with that. But it is weird and ridiculous.
    - thijsvandien 3y ago
      Whether to provide proof is at least a choice you get to make, but in my case even that wasn't on the (empty) table.
- cyberpunk 3y ago
  Meh, ymmv. I migrated a bunch of stuff from OVH->Hetzner a few years ago and the support experience was absolutely, insanely, beyond-belief bad. P1 call having to explain "what's an ip address" to their 'engineers'. About 6 hours after we moved prod over, they brought down my EIPs for like 4 hours because of a route they didn't understand and flagged as spam, and in the end we rolled back the migration and cancelled the contracts. Bummer for them; we ended up scaling out to several hundred thousand euro a year in OVH, which has been absolutely fucking exemplar. So while some people really do rave about them, I was so annoyed by that experience that I will almost certainly never use them again. Being a German myself, I'm 90% sure it's because the support is based in Germany, where technology goes to die.
ayi 3y ago
If we can get over the fact that they ban accounts out of nowhere, that can be good news. But not for me. Because I couldn't even sign up.
- pquki4 3y ago
  Same here. I provided an authentic US drivers license for their verification (which I normally wouldn't do) yet that didn't pass the verification, no reason given. Well, if they don't my money, fine, I'll do it elsewhere.
degun 3y ago
What a beautiful company.
antman 3y ago
Nice but illegal in some European countries. If you have a cost with a fixed deal (aka bare metal server per month) law has it that its upfront. If its a monthly cost it should be invoiced be the first 5 days of the following month. I guess I can tell the IRS that Hetzner has a problem with their cron jobs or with the uniform distribution of their accounting people workload.
pknerd 3y ago
Only if Hetzner enters in LLM hosting for masses, it'd be fun

For anyone else who may be confused - this is already the case in Cloud (obviously), but now will apply for Robot as well. > This structure will be similar to our Cloud billing. It says it here, but I glanced over it :)

the_common_man 3y ago
What is the difference between cloud and robot?
- sunbum 3y ago
  Cloud is VM's Robot is bare metal
  - koolba 3y ago
    s/‘s/s,/ Otherwise the VM possessive reads like: Cloud = VM’s Robot = bare metal
    - jeanlucas 3y ago
      Thank you
    - MonkeyClub 3y ago
      Consequently cloud = bare metal; which agrees with the axiom that "it's not a cloud, it's just someone else's computer".
      - randomdata 3y ago
        Traditionally, cloud referred to an abstraction above "someone else's computer", keeping the specific details of those computers hidden from the user, allowing the operator to do things like swap out the hardware, move the data to another datacenter, etc. without the end user ever noticing. But tech people love to come up with new definitions for the same terms all the time, so anything goes.
- aaronmdjones 3y ago
  Hetzner's cloud console (https://console.hetzner.cloud/ https://console.hetzner.cloud/) was introduced for their vServer migration (competing with the likes of Linode). Robot (https://robot.your-server.de/ https://robot.your-server.de/) was used for their vServers previously and is still used for their dedicated servers and domain names and such.

pointlessone 3y ago

> We will always use the hourly price when it saves you money, meaning when you have used a product for less than a month, and the total hourly price is less than the monthly price. That’s nice, I guess. > we have decided to no longer send invoices to all of our customers on the same day. Instead, we will spread them out throughout the month. You will always receive your invoice on the same day of the month. But this day will be different from customer to customer. It’s not clear to me when the billing moth starts. Is it the day the invoice is sent or is it a regular calendar month? Either way it might be confusing.

throwbadubadu 3y ago
You certainly will read that in the invoice?
nilsb 3y ago
I'd hope that it's based on calendar months. Wouldn't invoices that span multiple years make things a lot more complicated in terms of accounting in general?
- everfrustrated 3y ago
  According to the doc everyone will be getting a new random billing date to help rebalance customer support load over the month.
flexd 3y ago
The email I got said this: >What is important after the changeover? • We want to be able to offer you even better customer service in the future. For that reason, we want to change the date of your invoice. This will make it easier for us to quickly answer questions about your invoices. Starting in April, your new permanent billing day will be the 12. of the month. I think they have just spread the billing day out across the month for all customers

voytec 3y ago

If monthly price won't increase than this appears to be a good change. But their dedicated servers have an "installation fee", so it won't be cost-effective to rent them for short periods, and VMs are billed on hourly basis already, to my knowledge. Not sure which products this change covers.

aaronmdjones 3y ago
Not all of their dedicated servers have a setup fee; for example, the lowest spec AX model does not. https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax/ https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax/
- trollied 3y ago
  Server auctions don't have a setup fee either. https://www.hetzner.com/sb/ https://www.hetzner.com/sb/

willcodeforfoo 3y ago

Last time I checked, Hetzner doesn’t have any dedicated offerings in the US, only cloud, is this still the case?

CoolCold 3y ago
Still the case, right
- shortlived 3y ago
  Any recommendation for a provider with dedicated servers in the US? I’m with a provider now who is phasing them out.
  - TheNorthman 3y ago
    OVH have some in the US. I've only had good experiences with them. I like Server Hunter to get a general overview: https://www.serverhunter.com/#query=product_type%3Adedicated+region%3A%22United+States%22 https://www.serverhunter.com/#query=product_type%3Adedicated...
  - manishsharan 3y ago
    There are several dedicated server providers in US but not much is known about their track review. OVH has a datacenter in Toronto which may close enough to the US for many people. They provide dedicated servers.
    - heffer 3y ago
      OVH's Toronto datacentre is not operational yet. But you can pre-order. It's going to be interesting to see what this does to pricing for the Toronto hosting and compute market, as that location has always been more expensive compared to other North American locations. Right now it looks like OVH will not be offering their lower tier offers out of the Toronto DC.
    - betaby 3y ago
      OVH operates data-center close to Montreal (BHS), 8ms latency to NYC. Also it's 100% green hydro electricity powered.

roschdal 3y ago

Hetzner ist best, kein protest.

Citizen_Lame 3y ago
Lol. For kebab production, maybe.

mikkom 3y ago

I have a dedicated server in Hetzner and I don't understand what this means. How do they decide when the server is "used"? Based on CPU allocation? SSH sessions? HTTP traffic? Power? It's easy to shut down virtual servers and continue from the same position. It's not that easy to do the same for servers. The linked page is very unclear about this.

boredpudding 3y ago
If you have a dedicated server, you'll just be paying the monthly price. It's always in use. If you decide to stop completely with the server halfway through the month, you'll pay for the hours. Of course, a shut down server that's yours is still yours and you'll be billed for it.
- dmw_ng 3y ago
  I'm not so sure about this, their description specifically calls out one-time-only costs like domain registrations as being the only things excluded. Cautiously optimistic in addition to the recent reappearance of new GPU models being offered to existing customers, Hetzner may be prepping an hourly-billed bare metal GPU product at a great price Hetzner bare metal already deploys in a couple of minutes when renting existing hardware, and there is plenty of precedent for hourly-billed bare metal services around. I think they're intending to move all their bare metal over to hourly billing.
  - sdwr 3y ago
    On the cloud product listing they make it pretty clear that "in use" means "allocated" and not "consuming electricity". Pretty sure their fees are staying the same, and we are still paying for every hour a server exists.
pretext-1 3y ago
„Used“ means as long as you rent them / as long as they’re assigned to your account / as long as you have access. Dedicated servers are physical objects in the real world, contrary to virtual servers they don’t stop „to exist“ just because they’re no longer yours. Previously you could only rent physical servers for an entire month. If you’re doing this the price is still the same. But going forward it will be possible to rent for a portion of the month only (x amount of hours).

nottorp 3y ago

So basically some large customers wanted to rent physical servers by the hour so now everyone gets to rent physical servers by the hour?

lovegrenoble 3y ago

I've heard that Hetzner is a good provider, so I want to buy a cheap unmanaged VPS server in the USA. But can not find any mention about VPS. Any help, please? Just need to replace this one (the same bad story $$$ as Netlify recently): https://www.leaseweb.com/fr/cloud/virtual-server https://www.leaseweb.com/fr/cloud/virtual-server

mglz 3y ago
Managed virtual servers are available here: https://www.hetzner.com/managed-server/ https://www.hetzner.com/managed-server/
- account42 3y ago
  VPS = you get a virtual manchine which you administer yourself. Managed servers are something different entirely.
edm0nd 3y ago
Just use DigitalOcean. Easy setup and very cheap VPS options.
- lovegrenoble 3y ago
  Thank you, Sir.
  - stefs 3y ago
    that said, while digital ocean is great, as far as i know hetzner is somewhat cheaper. compare! at digital ocean, 12$: 2GB RAM, 1vCPU, 20GB SSD, 2TB transfer at hetzner, 10,50$: 8GB RAM, 2vCPU, 80GB SSD, 20TB transfer
    - Citizen_Lame 3y ago
      Yes, but Hetzner costumer service is from another planet. So in case of issues they won't be able to help, and you will have issues.

MathiasPius 3y ago

This is actually great. I maintain a library[1] for interacting with the Robot interface using Rust, but testing is heavily gated because of the potential costs it might incur, which is why a lot of the purchasing/cancellation APIs haven't been thoroughly tested. With this billing, I'll be able to do thorough integration testing without breaking the bank. And of course with hourly billing, horizontal scaling becomes much more feasible. [1] https://github.com/MathiasPius/hrobot-rs https://github.com/MathiasPius/hrobot-rs

joeig 3y ago
At the moment there is still a one-time order fee for dedicated servers and the docs don’t clarify if it will remain.
- diggan 3y ago
  > At the moment there is still a one-time order fee for dedicated servers For (some) dedicated servers, I think. Last time I checked the lowest tiered dedicated servers didn't have any setup fees. If it's not mentioned, assumed it'll remain.
- MathiasPius 3y ago
  As diggan said, there's usually at least one of their dedicated server offerings for which setup fees are waived, so I figure my tests would use the API to find out which one and use it :)
jupp0r 3y ago
Have you reached out to Hetzner? Feels like they should waive those bills in exchange for the free dev work you do for them.
- MathiasPius 3y ago
  I haven't actually. I believe they do offer modest amounts of credit for creating useful libraries, documentation and such targeting their platform, but I never really looked into it.

severino 3y ago

It would be nice if cloud offerings like Hetzner would allow one to set the contract duration and pay in advance, for example, one year. And once that year passes, you could tell them to extend it for another year, or do nothing and get your server deleted. This way you have a control over your spending and avoid surprises. I guess some providers (OVH?) allow you to do that, but of course it requires that all costs be fixed and have no "extras" for bandwidth consumption or things like that.

janus24 3y ago
Scalingo (a European PaaS) allows you to do this by buying credit, a simple solution. I wonder why other providers don't offer this.
V__ 3y ago
You can buy credits using a bank transfer [1]. You can also set E-Mail alerts in case your monthly invoice is higher then expected (more traffic etc.) [2]. However, there is no auto-delete as far as I can tell. [1] https://docs.hetzner.com/accounts-panel/accounts/payment-faq/#can-i-add-credit-to-my-hetzner-account https://docs.hetzner.com/accounts-panel/accounts/payment-faq... [2] https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/billing/faq/#how-do-i-keep-my-costs-under-control https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/billing/faq/#how-do-i-keep-my...
- severino 3y ago
  Didn't know you could buy credits, but well, for me the key is that no debt is generated when your credit goes to zero. In this case, if you exhaust your credit but your server keeps running, Hetzner will not stop it and will send you the bill next month. Yes, you may have received an email warning but it does not give the same peace of mind.
- AnonHP 3y ago
  I’ve been waiting for Hetzner to allow adding credits into one’s account using credit cards or debit cards (or other modes like PayPal). Being outside Germany (and the EU), a bank transfer is not possible or is difficult and prohibitively expensive. Hetzner also didn’t seem to support credits across all its services when I checked a few years ago.

ta8903 3y ago

When are they allowing sign ups for third world countries?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tomas789 3y ago
There is no such thing as third world country anymore. That is a relic or yesteryear. [1] [1] https://youtu.be/hVimVzgtD6w?si=g0aCYsjo15RAyx-e https://youtu.be/hVimVzgtD6w?si=g0aCYsjo15RAyx-e
slig 3y ago
Yes, signed up from a 3rd World Country late last year.
thijsvandien 3y ago
Or any country for that matter? I was rejected from right next door (NL).
- reddalo 3y ago
  It's very strange that they rejected your account from another EU country. Are you sure you created your account with real data?
  - thijsvandien 3y ago
    One doesn't accidentally make things up, and for invoices to be booked, my accountant wouldn't have it any other way.
gowthamgts12 3y ago
I signed up after lot of failed attempts. I think now they have fixed their verification process. Please give it a try

sixhobbits 3y ago

This overall sounds like it makes sense and brings their billing into line with other providers. But it's super confusingly written and presented. Why is this an essay with CAPITAL LETTERS to try to simplify things. It looks like they put in a ton of effort to make sure people aren't confused, but this doesn't seem like the thing to give people to ensure that they aren't confused.

iforgotpassword 3y ago
Huh, to me it feels they just tried to emphasize the most important things, like your bill never being higher than the monthly price would be. Like, the opposite of what tech companies usually do.

boplicity 3y ago

I don't seem capable of actually setting up an account with Heztner and logging in. Their security is so tight, it seems to constantly lock me out. What if I were an actual customer? Yikes. Does anyone else have this issue?

david_allison 3y ago
Yep: Dear Mr David Allison After reviewing your updated customer information, we have decided to deactivate your account because of some concerns we have regarding this information. Therefore, we have cancelled all your existing products and orders with us. Best regards Your Hetzner Online Team
- slig 3y ago
  That's terrifying. Did they at least give you time to backup your data?
  - amar0c 3y ago
    Please note that Hetzner does this only in couple cases: a) fake account data ; b) previous strikes (unpaid invoices, abuse etc..) with them ; c) in some cases customer is from country they do not do business with. I bet gazzilion OP above is within a or b
    - thijsvandien 3y ago
      A) No B) No C) No
    - e145bc455f1 3y ago
      I got the same thing. My account was neither fake or had any previous strikes, it was a new account.
    - Joe_Cool 3y ago
      Their ToS also classifies Crypto-Mining, farming or plotting (whatever that is) as grounds for cancellation. Also everything forbidden by German law results in a cancellation. So if you would have for example posted something before 2017 about a state leader that might seem like an insult your server might be gone. ( https://www.loc.gov/item/global-legal-monitor/2017-07-26/germany-law-on-insulting-foreign-leaders-abolished/ https://www.loc.gov/item/global-legal-monitor/2017-07-26/ger... ) https://cdn.hetzner.com/assets/Uploads/downloads/AGB-en.pdf https://cdn.hetzner.com/assets/Uploads/downloads/AGB-en.pdf Section 8.3

tiffanyh 3y ago

Will this cost more for existing customers? What they should have made more clear is, for existing customers - will this be cost neutral or cost more. Ideally, this is cost neutral for existing customer and gives the flexibility of paying partial month for partial usage.

kobalsky 3y ago
the post says: "Just to make it clear, the montly price you will pay will NOT change, even if you see some short-term changes in monthly totals on your invoices during the transition period."
- naiv 3y ago
  This is for existing customers. If they offer servers for an hourly rate I would expect prices to up with a priced in setup fee

unixhero 3y ago

I just started a hosting gig myself. I got tired of the costs.

BilalBudhani 3y ago

Hetzner is one of those "just take my money" services, so more power to them. Besides, for some reason I always thought they charge hourly but show pricing in monthly format for easier pricing.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bcye 3y ago
That was only for cloud products until now I think
reddalo 3y ago
Way better than DigitalOcean, I hope they keep being that way
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  Can you share some specific reasons?
- ratg13 3y ago
  Hopefully the people that are running it now are better than the people that started it, however I will never use Hetzner's services for anything again as long as I live.
  - softskunk 3y ago
    What is it about the people that started it that puts you off?
    - ratg13 3y ago
      In their early days they "accidentally" deleted my servers and backups, and their engineers had the gall to attempt to blame me for their process failures. I had posted about it on HN awhile ago and had to provide proof to Dan to be able to be allowed to share my story. They responded to my HN comment apologizing and trying to claim that those people shouldn't have been interacting with customers, don't work for the company anymore and blah blah, but there is no way I could trust a company a second time after losing a month's worth of work. It was the not apologizing and doubling down on their mistakes that put me off.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

DonnyV 3y ago

Does anyone know if Hetzner is looking to open up a datacenter in Australia or in Southeast Asia?

rmbyrro 3y ago
South America would be great as well
- diggan 3y ago
  South Africa sounds like a good compromise between Australia and South America :) Wonder what's the shortest possible latency between those points? Alternative, more interesting question: Assuming Hetzner have a data center in Germany and one in Finland, where should their next data center be in order to reduce latency as much as possible, in the most countries?
  - Tomte 3y ago
    They also have one in the US. So probably East Asia?
    - diggan 3y ago
      That's just for cloud I think, and also not their own data centers.

yaseer 3y ago

If anybody has migrated from AWS to Hetzner what was your experience? What kind of cost savings did you see? I know it's not a like-for-like comparison, I am particularly curious about the price differentials though, AWS is often a premium.

diggan 3y ago
I helped some smaller companies move from AWS EC2 to Hetzner dedicated servers. One example: Biggest cost saving was in the bandwidth bills. They also realized they don't really need to be able to scale up/down in minutes or having 6 instances online, but having two beefy machines lead to better performance, less latency and cheaper monthly bills. Originally they just went with AWS because the developer who did infrastructure stuff was most (only?) used to it and had some certification or similar, without really thinking about why AWS. Reached out to me when they started to wonder why things were so expensive for what they were doing.
- CoolCold 3y ago
  I do see a lot of cases when infra stuff is delegated to developer - usually in small companies. You've pointed on very good point on scaling up/down vs cheap overprovisioning.
fillest 3y ago
Got an order of magnitude saving, mainly due to absurd AWS network traffic costs.
CoolCold 3y ago
around one year ago I've evaluated how much it will cost me to run DB (MYSQL) server on RDS, taking current server (one of) as example. If my memory serves me well, for medium sized DB of 2TB/160GB RAM/20+ cores, it was something like 2000$/month on RDS and around 230$ on Hetzner (with AX161, actually having 2x3.5TB NVMe disks and high iops capacity and 32c/64t EPYC CPU). That project was never been in AWS/"cloud" though, so savings are made in upfront. I have not done any traffic calculations, though - I actually forgot that AWS can charge you for that as well.

DonnyV 3y ago

Why isn't their US Data Centers not listed in the table of Data Centers they run? https://docs.hetzner.com/general/others/data-centers-and-connection https://docs.hetzner.com/general/others/data-centers-and-con...

diggan 3y ago
Maybe they don't operate those data centers themselves? Outsourced perhaps. > Which data centers does Hetzner operate?
- ffsm8 3y ago
  Yes, they state as much when you order anything and talked about it at length when they introduced the US offering. They're shipping their specialized server systems to select providers for housing, essentially. Most maintenance is done remotely... aside from replacing faulty hardware etc
- JonathonW 3y ago
  Hetzner's US cloud zones are colocated in someone else's facility (AFAICT they don't specify where): https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/general/locations/#are-the-servers-in-hetzner-owned-dcs https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/general/locations/#are-the-se...

CamelCaseName 3y ago

I've only ever heard fantastic things about Hetzner. I'm shocked PE hasn't bought them yet and raised prices.

thijsvandien 3y ago
So had I, until I actually tried to sign up. Have a look at the way they treat you when they have (unfounded) suspicions. It's beyond ridiculous.
- rsync 3y ago
  So many problems just disappear when your prices are (relatively) expensive…
  - AnonHP 3y ago
    Maybe. But price is still one of the larger concerns for many people. When I checked this a couple of years ago, it seemed like Hetzner’s Storage Box (the one sorta competes with your rsync.net) had a much lower price, a much larger capacity per dollar/euro and more storage tiers.
- AnonHP 3y ago
  They ask for a government ID in some cases. I was able to provide one with some details masked, and they wanted the name on my account to match the name on the government ID. This is a commercial transaction, not Facebook. So I was kinda ok with that. But it is weird and ridiculous.
  - thijsvandien 3y ago
    Whether to provide proof is at least a choice you get to make, but in my case even that wasn't on the (empty) table.
cyberpunk 3y ago
Meh, ymmv. I migrated a bunch of stuff from OVH->Hetzner a few years ago and the support experience was absolutely, insanely, beyond-belief bad. P1 call having to explain "what's an ip address" to their 'engineers'. About 6 hours after we moved prod over, they brought down my EIPs for like 4 hours because of a route they didn't understand and flagged as spam, and in the end we rolled back the migration and cancelled the contracts. Bummer for them; we ended up scaling out to several hundred thousand euro a year in OVH, which has been absolutely fucking exemplar. So while some people really do rave about them, I was so annoyed by that experience that I will almost certainly never use them again. Being a German myself, I'm 90% sure it's because the support is based in Germany, where technology goes to die.

ayi 3y ago

If we can get over the fact that they ban accounts out of nowhere, that can be good news. But not for me. Because I couldn't even sign up.

pquki4 3y ago
Same here. I provided an authentic US drivers license for their verification (which I normally wouldn't do) yet that didn't pass the verification, no reason given. Well, if they don't my money, fine, I'll do it elsewhere.

degun 3y ago

What a beautiful company.

antman 3y ago

Nice but illegal in some European countries. If you have a cost with a fixed deal (aka bare metal server per month) law has it that its upfront. If its a monthly cost it should be invoiced be the first 5 days of the following month. I guess I can tell the IRS that Hetzner has a problem with their cron jobs or with the uniform distribution of their accounting people workload.

pknerd 3y ago

Only if Hetzner enters in LLM hosting for masses, it'd be fun