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Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

• rixed 1y ago
  The title should have been "...from AWS and DigitalOcean". If it were only from AWS, they would probably also have mentionned a drastic reduction of API complexity.
• AmazingTurtle 1y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44038591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44038591
  • CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
    Less biased view of "Hetzner on HN": https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=Hetzner%20date%3C1760695221&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... (skipping all comments from this submission) In the end, Hetzner is a provider of "cheap but not 100% uptime" infrastructure, probably why it's so cheap in the first place. As every other provider, if you want 100% uptime (or getting close to it), you really need at least N+1 instances of everything, as every hosting provider end up fucking something up, sooner or later.
    • croes 1y ago
      Can you name a provider with 100% uptime? Or is it 100%¹?
      • CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
        No, which is why I wrote "As every other provider, if you want 100% uptime ..."
      • master_crab 1y ago
        No one provides 100% uptime for core compute. That’s their point. Also, good luck extracting anything out of those companies that offer 99.99% and don’t meet it. Sure they’ll throw you some service credits. But it’ll always be magnitudes less than the cost of their disruption to you.
    • esskay 1y ago
      You make it sound like they are in some way less reliable or you've got more downtime - neither of which is true. You've got just as much chance of having downtime there as you have with any other provider.
      • CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
        Yeah, that's not true in my experience, and I'm a very happy Hetzner customer and been using them for years, they are a step below in reliability, no matter how much I love them it's hard not to see that. I've used Vultr for about the same amount of time, and I never got an email that some network switch had a hardware failure and it'll take a couple of hours to restore connectivity, but I've had that happen with Hetzner more than once, in the same time-span. And again, I say this as a Hetzner-lover, and someone who prefers Hetzner over Vultry any day of the week.
• geenat 1y ago
  Yup. It's very good for the ecosystem for AWS to have good competition. Amazon gets far too greedy- particularly bad when you need egress. Also an "amazon core" is like 1/8th of a physical cpu core.
  • CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
    Using a dedicated server for the first time after using VPSes or similar since learning programming and infrastructure is like a whole new world. Suddenly, you feel like the application is running in molasses, and the whole idea of "We need 10 VPS instances" seems so stupid...
  • vidarh 1y ago
    My favorite Jeff Bezos quote is one that applies very much to AWS: "your margin is my opportunity". Clearly when Amazon realised the enormous potential in AWS, they scrapped that principle. But the idea behind it - that an organisation used to fat margins will not be able to adapt in the face of a competitor built from the ground to live of razor thing margins - still applies. AWS is ripe for the picking. They "can't" drop prices much, because their big competitors have similar margins, and a price war with them would devastate the earnings of all of them no matter how much extra market share they were to win. The challenge is the enormous mindshare they have, and how many people are emotionally invested even in believing AWS is actually cost effective.
    • master_crab 1y ago
      "your margin is my opportunity" Yup, that phrase was running through my head as I skimmed the comments. To that, an interesting observation I’ve made is that their frequency for service price cuts have dropped in the past several years. And the instances of price increases have started to trickle in (like the public IP cost). If core compute and network keep getting cheaper faster than inflation, and they never drop their prices (or drop them by less relatively) the margins are growing.
      • hylaride 1y ago
• CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
  Best feature of (some) the dedicated servers Hetzner offers is the unmetered bandwidth. I'm hosting a couple of image-heavy websites (mostly modding related) and since moving to Hetzner I sleep much better knowing I'll pay the same price every single month, and have been for the ~3 years I've been a happy Hetzner customer.
• CuriouslyC 1y ago
  I use Hetzner for this reason, but there are caveats. They're great but their uptime isn't as good as AWS and they don't have great region coverage. I strongly advise people to pair them with Cloudflare. Use Hetzner for your core with K8s, and use R2/D1/KV with Container Durable Objects to add edge coprocessing. I also like to shard customer data to individual DOs, this takes a ton of scaling pressure off your data layer, while being more secure/private.
  • CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
    I do this too. Hetzner dedicated servers for the "core" and data-storage basically, and thin/tiny edge-nodes hosted at OVH across the globe as my homebrew CDN.
    • BoredPositron 1y ago
      That's exactly how we do it we have Gcore in the mix for GPU compute though.
  • geenat 1y ago
    AWS has certainly had some pretty public facing downtime ;) I'd say its been roughly the same in my experience- the only way to avoid it IMHO is multi-region.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  • likium 1y ago
    If customer data is considered edge, then what’s core?
    • CuriouslyC 1y ago
      Everything that's shared between customers, internal system state and customer metadata. I use Postgres with FDWs + Steampipe + Debezium to integrate everything, it's more like a control plane than a database. This model lets you go web scale with one decently sized database and a read replica, since you're only hitting PG for fairly static shared data, Cloudflare Hyperdrive gives insane performance.
• LunaSea 1y ago
  This is also what we did at my company. We kept most smaller-scale, stateless services in AWS but migrated databases and high-scale / high-performance services to bare metal servers. Backups are stored in S3 so we still benefit from their availability. Performance is much higher thanks to physically attached SSDs and DDR5 on-die RAM. Costs are drastically lower and for much larger server sizes which means we are no getting stressed about eventually needing to scale up our RDS / EC2 costs.
• rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 1y ago
  You got me with the title and I was curious at first but then I got to the part where it shows the bill and realized this is just toy project.
  • CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
    You can tell if a project is a toy or not based on the bill? How about actually looking at what they do? https://digitalsociety.coop/ https://digitalsociety.coop/ It's literally a agency doing professional development for others, among other services. Clearly not "toys". HN dismissals are going down in quality, at least they used to be well researched some years ago. Now people just spew out the first thing that comes up in their mind, and zero validation before hitting that "reply" button.
  • endymion-light 1y ago
    It's really dismissive and frankly quite ignorant to have an attitude that just because a product doesn't have a massive AWS bill it's a toy project. It's a rotten attitude, and judging a projects worth by an AWS bill is a very poor comparator. I could spin up a massive aws bill doing some pointless machine learning workloads, is that suddenly a valid project in your eyes?
    • rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 1y ago
      >I could spin up a massive aws bill doing some pointless machine learning workloads, is that suddenly a valid project in your eyes? Can you spin it on a AWS competitor for a fraction of a cost? Absolutely yes I would be interested in reading about it!
      • endymion-light 1y ago
        I will do - but my latest ML model is attempting to create leylines of different mcdonalds across the country, i don't think it's worthy of being considered product
• lisperforlife 1y ago
  I think you can get much farther with dedicated servers. I run a couple of nodes on Hetzner. The performance you get from a dedicated machine even if it is a 3 year old machine that you can get on server auction is absolutely bonkers and cannot be compared to VMs. The thing is that most of the server hardware is focused towards high core count, low clock speed processors that optimize for I/O rather than compute. It is overprovisioned by all cloud providers. Even the I/O part of the disk is crazy. It uses all sorts of shenanigans to get a drive that sitting on a NAS and emulating a local disk. Most startups do not need the hyper virtualized, NAS based drive. You can go much farther and much more cost-effectively with dedicated server rentals from Hetzner. I would love to know if they are any north-american (particularly canadian) companies that can compete with price and the quality of service like Hetzner. I know of OVH but I would love to know others in the same space.
  • tonyhart7 1y ago
    Yeah this is what they do in "high perfomance" server, they just use gaming cpu
  • CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
    > . I know of OVH but I would love to know others in the same space. When I've needed dedicated servers in the US I've used Vultr in the past, relatively nice pricing, only missing unmetered bandwidth for it to be my go-to. But all those US-specific cases been others paying for it, so hasn't bothered me, compared to personal/community stuff I host at Hetzner and pay for myself.
    • rapind 1y ago
      I've been eying Vultr for dedicated metal in Canada (Toronto Datacenter). How do they measure up to Hertzner? I'm not looking to get the best possible deal, but just better value than EC2 (which costs me a fair amount of egress).
      • CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
        I'd go for Hetzner any day of the week, but if a client really screams "Servers MUST be in North America" I'd use Vultr before anything else, unless the client is bandwidth-sensitive.
• piokoch 1y ago
  Well, from what see the authors exchanged AWS managed Kubernetes cluster with self-hosted Kubernetes cluster on Talos Linux. Question is if $449.50/month paid for AWS will cover additional work needed for self-hosting.
  • mystifyingpoi 1y ago
    All the effort that previously wasn't required for operating EKS, but now is required to operate self-hosted Kubernetes, will be pushed to existing engineers as a bit of extra work, with no extra pay. In the best case scenario. In the worst, some cluster f-up will eat 10x that in engineering time.
  • vidarh 1y ago
    As someone who do consulting in this space, and has for a decade: Clients usually end up needing more help to run their AWS setup than to self-host.
• jokethrowaway 1y ago
  Having deployed servers well before AWS was a thing, AWS alwyas felt incredibly overpriced. The only benefit you get is reliability, temporary network issues on AWS are not a thing. On DigitalOcean they are fairly bad (I lose thousands of requests almost every month and I get pennies in credit back when I complain - while my users churning cost way more), on Hetzner I've heard mixed reviews. Some people complains, some say it's extremely reliable. I'm looking forward to try Hetzner out!
  • CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
    > Having deployed servers well before AWS was a thing, AWS alwyas felt incredibly overpriced. Yeah, I remember when AWS first appeared, and the value proposition was basically "It's expensive but you can press a button and a minute later you have a new instance, so we can scale really quickly". For the companies that know more or less the workload they have during a week don't really get any benefits, just more expensive monthly bills. But somewhere along the line, people started thinking it was easier to use AWS than the alternatives, and I even heard people saying it's cheaper...
    • vidarh 1y ago
      You'll even see people in a lot of the HN threads on the subject refusing to believe AWS is expensive, even in the face of a lot of us with expensive (EDIT: meant "extensive". but will leave it there as the tpo is also apt...) experience running systems on both AWS and alternatives. The biggest innovation AWS delivered was to convince engineers they are cheap, while wresting control of provisioning away from the people with actual visibility into the costs.
• breadislove 1y ago
  Hetzner is really great until you try to scale with them. We started building our service on top of Hetzner and had couple 100s of VMs running and during peak time we had to scale them to over 1000 VMs. And here couple of problems started, you get pretty often IPs which are black listed, so if you try to connect to services hosted by Google, AWS like S3 etc. you can't reach them. Also at one point there were no VMs available anymore in our region, which caused a lot of issues. But in general if you don't need to scale crazy Hetzner is amazing, we still have a lot of stuff running on Hetzner but fan out to other services when we need to scale.
  • croes 1y ago
    Blacklisted by whom?
    • Hikikomori 1y ago
      AWS at least maintains IP lists of bots, active exploiters, ddos attackers, etc, that you can use to filter/rate limit traffic in WAF. Not so much AWS that blocks you but customers that decide to use these lists.
      • drcongo 1y ago
        Ironic, given how often the attacks I spend time fending off are coming from AWS.
      • croes 1y ago
        So AWS could list some IPs of competitors, just enough to make them look unreliable.
      • IshKebab 1y ago
        Nice IPs you've got there Hetzner, shame if...
    • netdevphoenix 1y ago
      The big cloud providers I am assuming
• spinningslate 1y ago
  Related: Michael Kennedy moved TalkPython [0] hosting to Hetner in 2024. There's a blog about the move here [1] and a follow up after Hetzner changed some pricing policy [2]. He's also just released a book on hosting scale production Python apps [3]. Haven't read yet though would assume it'll get covered there in more detail too. -- [0] https://talkpython.fm/ https://talkpython.fm/ [1] https://talkpython.fm/blog/posts/we-have-moved-to-hetzner/ https://talkpython.fm/blog/posts/we-have-moved-to-hetzner/ [2] https://talkpython.fm/blog/posts/update-on-hetzner-changes-pricing-and-limits/ https://talkpython.fm/blog/posts/update-on-hetzner-changes-p... [3] https://talkpython.fm/books/python-in-production https://talkpython.fm/books/python-in-production
  • mikeckennedy 1y ago
    Thanks for the shoutout @spinningslate. :)
• eyk19 1y ago
  We've experienced something similar: for compute-heavy rendering tasks, AWS just wasn't good enough. EC2 machines with the same spec perform much worse than Hetzner machines
  • andersmurphy 1y ago
    Yeah shared vCPU can be really bad.
  • CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
    > EC2 machines with the same spec perform much worse than Hetzner machines Yeah, even when you move to "EC2 Dedicated Instances" you end up sharing the hardware with other instances, unless you go for "EC2 Dedicated Hosts", and even then the performance seems worse than other providers. Not sure how they managed to do so for even the dedicated stuff, would require some dedicated effort.
• drcongo 1y ago
  Hetzner's ARM servers are the best kept secret in tech. Unbelievably capable and mindbogglingly cheap.
  • dizhn 1y ago
    Have you encountered any software that wasn't compatible ?
    • drcongo 1y ago
      Only a couple of times, but nothing that I use on production servers, only things that were very much hobby projects. For the sort of things we build an 8 core Hetzner ARM server outperforms an 8 core Digital Ocean x86 server by 10-20% for about a tenth of the cost.
  • GordonS 1y ago
    They really are great, I just wish they'd make them available in the US regions too.
• axus 1y ago
  I'm going to be that guy and ask which service is the cheapest for AI to bring up new infrastructure and deploy to it?
• cisophrene 1y ago
  Dedicated servers on a host like Hetzer and OVH surely beats any virtualization based cloud offering on price and performance. The tradeoff is availability. It's a great choice for entities that are optimizing on cost, but not a great choice if your business cannot tolerate downtime. A good example is a the big lichess outage from last year [1]. Lichess is a non-profit, and also must serve a huge user base. Given their financials, they have to go the cheap dedicated server route (they host on OVH). They publish an Excel sheet somewhere with every resources they use to run the services and last year, I had fun calculating how much it would cost them if they were using an hyperscaler cloud offering instead. I don't remember exactly but it was 5 or 6x the price they currently pay OVH. The downside, is that when you have an outage, your stuff is tied to physical servers and they can't easily be migrated, when cloud provider on the opposite can easily move around your workload. In the case of Lichess outage, it was some network device they had no control of that went bad, and lichess was down until OVH could fix it, that is many hours. So, yes you get a great deal, but for a lot of businesses, uptime is more important than cost optimization and the physicality of dedicated servers is actually a serious liability. [1]: https://lichess.org/@/Lichess/blog/post-mortem-of-our-longest-downtime/XAgG7jbd https://lichess.org/@/Lichess/blog/post-mortem-of-our-longes...
  • CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
    > It's a great choice for entities that are optimizing on cost, but not a great choice if your business cannot tolerate downtime. Even hosting double of everything when you're doing dedicated servers will let you have cheaper monthly bills, compared to the same performance/$ you could get with AWS or whatever. But Hetzner does seem a bit worse than other providers in that they have random failures in their own infrastructure, so you do need to take care if you wanna avoid downtime. I'm guessing that's how they can keep the prices so low. > is that when you have an outage, your stuff is tied to physical servers and they can't easily be migrated I think that's a problem in your design/architecture, if you don't have backups that live outside the actual servers you wanna migrate away from, or at least replicate the data to some network drive you can easily attach to a new instance in an instant.
  • yomismoaqui 1y ago
    You can have reliability with physical servers. When you pay 1/4 for 3X the performance you can duplicate your servers and then be paying 1/2 for 3X the performance. I find baffling that people forget about how things were done before the cloud.
• roschdal 1y ago
  Hetzner is the best.
• eric_khun 1y ago
  AWS won't raise the limits on our new account (we're stuck at 1GB RAM in Lightsail after 2 months, even though we need to launch this month). Looking at Hetzner or Vultr as alternatives. A few folks mentioned me Infomaniak has great service and uptime, but I haven't heard much about them otherwise. Anyone used Infomaniak in production? How do they compare to Hetzner/Vultr?
  • CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
    Just curious, what are you building/launching that requires more than 1GB of RAM at launch? 1GB is a lot of memory for most use cases, guessing something involving graphics or maybe simulations? In those cases, dedicated instances with proper hardware will give you enormous performance benefits, FYI. Both Vultr and Hetzner are solid options, I'd go for Hetzner if I know the users are around Europe or close to it, and I want to run tiny CDN-like nodes myself across the globe. Also, Hetzner if you don't wanna worry about bandwidth costs. Otherwise go for Vultr, they have a lot more locations.
    • eric_khun 1y ago
      appreciate the advice! Launching a 2D game generator with an editor, and expecting those people to share the games . Not multiplayer yet. The lightsail instance sometimes just hangs and we have to reboot it when people performing simple action like login or queryng API (we have a simple express / nextjs app)
    • Macha 1y ago
      A Wordpress install that makes it to the top of HN can use 1GB of RAM
  • slyall 1y ago
    Are you using Lightsail rather than normal EC2 and other AWS services? Just wondering if your limits just apply to lightsail or normal stuff too.
  • Terretta 1y ago
    I haven't checked recently, but previously a Lightsail account was a full AWS account. Tie route 53, app or API gateway, and some instances. That said, for your use case, you might want the predictability and guarantee of having no "noisy neighbors" on an instance. While most VM providers don't offer that (you have to go to fully dedicated machine), AWS does, so keep that in mind as well. For BYOL (bring your own hosting labor), Vultr is a lesser known but great choice.
• pwmtr 1y ago
  We’ve been seeing the same trend. Lots of teams moving to Hetzner for the price/performance, but then realizing they have to rebuild all the Postgres ops pieces (backups, failover, monitoring, etc.). We ended up building a managed Postgres that runs directly on Hetzner. Same setup, but with HA, backups, and PITR handled for you. It’s open-source, runs close to the metal, and avoids the egress/I/O gotchas you get on AWS. If anyone’s curious, I added here are some notes about our take [1], [2]. Always happy to talk about it if you have any questions. [1] https://www.ubicloud.com/blog/difference-between-running-postgres-for-yourself-and-for-others https://www.ubicloud.com/blog/difference-between-running-pos... [2] https://www.ubicloud.com/use-cases/postgresql https://www.ubicloud.com/use-cases/postgresql
  • normie3000 1y ago
    This is one key draw to Big Cloud and especially PaaS and managed SQL for me (and dev teams I advise). Not having an ops background I am nervous about: * database backup+restore * applying security patches on time (at OS and runtime levels) * other security issues like making sure access to prod machines is restricted correctly, access is logged, ports are locked down, abnormal access patterns are detected * DoS and similar protections are not my responsibility It feels like picking a popular cloud provider gives a lot of cover for these things - sometimes technically, and otherwise at least politically...
    • ksajadi 1y ago
      I can attest to that. At Cloud 66 a lot of customers tell us that while the PaaS experience on Hetzner is great, they benefit from our managed DBs the most.
      • gizzlon 1y ago
        What's the "the PaaS experience on Hetzner" ? Link?
    • ozim 1y ago
      Applying security patches on time is not much problem. Ones that you need to apply ASAP are rare and for DB engine you never put it on public access, most of the time exploit is not disclosed publicly and PoC code is not available for patched RCE right on day of patch release. Most of the time you are good if you follow version updates for major releases as they come you do regression testing and put it on prod in your planned time. Most problems come from not updating at all and having 2 or 3 year old versions because that’s what automated scanners will be looking for and after that much time someone much more likely wrote exploit code and shared it.
• buyucu 1y ago
  aws and azure are massively overpriced. there is no reason to use them.
• OutOfHere 1y ago
  The part they never tell you is how Hetzner has a substantially higher unfair risk of account termination without warning. If you are okay with your account being terminated like that with zero notice or reason, then Hetzner is cheap.
  • PeterStuer 1y ago
    Do you have a substantiated source for the "12x the unfair risk of account termination without warning". I tried looking for it but all I could find were unsubstantiated grapevine (I heard they ...) posts with lots of people stating the opposite.
    • OutOfHere 1y ago
      Edited. Not only have I read numerous reports of it both on this site and on Reddit, but it personally happened to me around 2022. The number of such reports that I have read is easily 12x that of AWS. In contrast, AWS or any other cloud never did anything like this to me. This is risked if the CPU or another resource is using close to 100% for a couple of months. Hetzner likes customers that pay for what they don't use.
      • gdulli 1y ago
        Reddit anecdotes are not a good way to sell a given argument lol.
        • OutOfHere 1y ago
          Reddit is a prime platform for users to report problems with pretty much any service. Reports from moderate to high karma users who're not newly registered will carry more weight. If you haven't used it for this purpose, then you're absolutely in the minority. Typically people don't pay attention until they themselves become a victim, and then they learn the hard way. To label it an "anecdote" is to gaslight it. It is lived experience.
    • vidarh 1y ago
• ed_mercer 1y ago
  Great! Now if you go full homelab, you can get 1/30th of the price ;)
• Havoc 1y ago
  Makes sense. If you don't need the redundancy, certification/legals or the big cloud 100s of integrated other lego blocks then big cloud vps prices just are a rip off.
• Havoc 1y ago
  Their Storage box offerings are great too. Think like a big ftp drive except supports lots of transfer protocols
• nodesocket 1y ago
  Saving $426/mo for a business seems like a waste of time and resources. The excessive frugal developer complex. How many hours did it take to do the migration?
  • CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
    > Saving $426/mo for a business seems like a waste of time and resources How come? The baseline for that comparison will also stay static, regardless of how many TPS or whatever is going on, meanwhile the AWS price they're comparing to would only increase the more people use whatever they deploy.
  • Propelloni 1y ago
    A quick background check on digitalsociety.coop reveals that 5000 US$/year was a significant sum for them in 2024 and that opportunity costs were probably negligible. Not everybody has money to burn.
  • fauigerzigerk 1y ago
    Self-funded startups need to be frugal. And self-funded startups serving the not-for-profit sector in Europe need to be extra frugal. The hours they put into not wasting money on AWS today could pay off many times if it makes their SaaS economically viable for their target audience.
  • gdulli 1y ago
    As the business grows so will that inefficiency and migrating now is much less work than migrating later.
• jwr 1y ago
  I've been running my SaaS on Hetzner servers for over 10 years now. Dedicated hardware, clusters in DE and FI, managed through ansible. I use vpncloud to set up a private VPN between the servers (excellent software, btw). My hosting bill is a fraction of what people pay at AWS or other similar providers, and my servers are much faster. This lets me use a simpler architecture and fewer servers. When I need to scale, I can always add servers. The only difference is that with physical servers you don't scale up/down on demand within minutes, you have to plan for hours/days. But that's perfectly fine. I use a distributed database (RethinkDB, switching to FoundationDB) for fault tolerance.
  • withinboredom 1y ago
    Similar setup to me (including rethinkdb). Why choose FoundationDB? RethinkDb is still maintained and features added occasionally (I'm on the rethinkdb slack and maintain an async php driver). It just is one guy though, working on it part time.
    • jwr 1y ago
      RethinkDB is somewhat maintained, and while it is a very good database and works quite well, it is not future-proof. But the bigger reason is that I need better performance, and by now (after 10 years) I know my data access patterns well, so I can make really good use of FoundationDB. The reason for FoundationDB specifically is mostly correctness, it is pretty much the only distributed database out there that gives you strict serializability and delivers on that promise. Performance is #2 on the list.
      • vjerancrnjak 1y ago
        How will you deal with lack of 3 AZ or FI to DE latency?
  • da02 1y ago
    You use vpncloud to connect across different Hetzner data centers (DE + FI)? I thought/assumed Hetzner provided services to do this at little-to-no cost.
• DoctorOW 1y ago
  I use Hetzner for personal projects and love it, the one thing stopping me from pushing it up the chain at work, is that we're based out of the US exclusively and AZs are pretty sparse.
• naiv 1y ago
  Just yesterday they released a new 'Shared regular performance' offering https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/ https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/
  • littlecranky67 1y ago
    Thanks for that link. It seems with that introduction, they also lowered prices on the dedicated-core on their vservers - at least I was paying 15€/month and now they seem to offer it for 12€/month. I will try to see if shared performance is an option for the future.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• kachapopopow 1y ago
  This is pretty bad still, with colocation you can get the costs down to 1/100th with good deals at datacenters especially ones that are struggling to attract customers. Most of your bill is power so if you rack efficiency optimized servers you can have a lot of compute for very cheap. In terms of networking many offer no-headache solutions with some kind of transit blend. <rant>I recently had to switch away from hetzner due to random dhclient failures causing connectivity loss once ip's expired, complete failure of the loadbalancer - stopped forwarding traffic for around 6 hours and the worst part is that there was no acknoledgement from hetzner about any of these issues so at some point I was going insane over trying to find what is the issue when in the end it was hetzner. (US VA region)
  • tom1337 1y ago
    But when you are Colocating you have higher upfront costs as you need to acquire hardware and also need to have somebody nearby the datacenter for hardware swaps in case of a failure, no?
    • hyperionplays 1y ago
      There's tonnes of companies out there who have smart remote hands in the major cities who can respond in sub 1hour to an outage at your choosen DC. Refurb servers will still blast AWS, and spares are easy to source. I know HE.net does a rack for like $500/mo intro price and that comes with a 1G internet feed as well.
    • dboreham 1y ago
      You need to buy the hardware. However, you don't really need a dude on-hand to swap stuff on a daily basis, unless you're trying to host backblaze. The approach we take (with our data center 1000 miles away) is to provision excess machines. So if we need 6 machines we'll provision, say 8. Failure modes are always assumed to be "the whole machine" -- so a machine is either in service or not. Over time (years) one or two machines might fail in one way or another. Every couple of years we mount a rescue mission to repair/replace the bad machines, do some upgrades etc. We have redundant switches and routers and would make a special trip to replace one of those if there were a failure. The entire deployment has a "scaled to zero" cloud hot standby in place for the eventuality that the whole setup gets nuked somehow.
• jedisct1 1y ago
  Of course. A dedicated server or VPS from OVH, Hetzner, Scaleway, etc., or even Docker containers on Koyeb, will give you way more bang for your buck. Call me a dinosaur, but I’ve never used any of the big cloud providers like AWS. They’re super expensive, and it’s hard to know what you’ll actually end up paying at the end of the month.
• e12e 1y ago
  Very interesting and detailed article! I'd love to hear more about how you use terraform and helm together. Currently our major friction in ops is using tofu (terraform) to manage K8s resources. Avoiding yaml is great - but both terraform and K8s maintaining state makes the deployment of helm from terraform feel fragile; and vice-versa depending on helm directly in a mostly terraform setup also feels fragile.
  • baobun 1y ago
    Not OP but I've lived through this too and my conclusion from that is that if you're doing tofu/terraform you're better off not introducing helm at all. Just tf the k8s.
    • e12e 1y ago
      Yes, this is what we do for example for the tailscale operator - but it's tedious to convert yaml to tf - and more importantly: error prone to correctly adapt upstream changes to update deployments as upstream refine their helm/k8s yaml files.
      • MaKey 1y ago
        Terraform/OpenTofu is good for infrastructure but it becomes a pain if you use it for k8s deployments. I suggest using GitOps (ArgoCD / flux) for everything inside the cluster and OpenTofu for the cluster itself.
        • e12e 1y ago
          Downside with that is having DNS, managed databases, cloud storage (s3) outside K8s - When deployments are also managed with tf, it's easy to connect a deployment in K8s to resources outside K8s (via tf state).
          • MaKey 1y ago
            You can still do that by reading the values you need directly from the state file. I suggest that you define outputs and access them through the state file from other projects, otherwise the external dependency will be hidden.
• sergioisidoro 1y ago
  I really liked Hetzner but I got burned by one issue. I had some personal projects running there and the payment method failed. Automated email communications also failed among so much spam and email notifications I receive, and when I noticed the problem they had wiped all my data without possibility of recovery. It was a wake up moment for me about keeping billing in shape, but also made me understand that a cloud provider is as good as their support and communications when things go south. Like an automated SMS would be great before you destroy my entire work. But because they are so cheap, they probably can't do that for every 100$/month account. I've had similar issues with AWS, but they will have much friendlier grace periods.
  • roflmaostc 1y ago
    Sorry to hear that. But if you do not pay and you do not check your e-mails, it's basically your fault. Who is using SMS these days even?
    • sergioisidoro 1y ago
      Yes, absolutely my fault. But these problems happen. Credit cards expire, people change companies or go on leaves, off boarding processes are not always perfect, spam filters exist. Add to that the declining experience of email with so much marketing and trash landing in the inbox (and sometimes Gmail categorizing important emails as "Updates") That's why grace periods for these situations are important. Who uses SMS? This might be a cultural difference, but in Europe they are still used a lot. And would you be ok if your utility company cut your electricity bill just with an email warning? Or being asked to appear to court by email?
      • amelius 1y ago
        How long after shutting you down did they delete your data? That period should definitely be longer than a few days.
        • debazel 1y ago
• futurecat 1y ago
  Questions for people who migrate off-cloud: 1. How many nodes do you have? 2. Did you install anything to monitor your node(s) and the app deployed on these nodes? If so, which software?
  • CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
    1. In total, maybe 10-15, but managing a lot of it for others, my own stuff is hosted across two. 2. Yes, TLDR: Prometheus + Grafana + AlertManager + ELK. I think it's a fairly common setup.
  • GordonS 1y ago
    1. Around 30, a mix of both x64 and ARM. But planning on switching heavy workloads to physical machines at some point, which would take total node count down to around 16. 2. OpenTelemetry Collector installed on all nodes, sending data to a self-hosted OpenObserve instance. UI is a little clunky, but it's been an invaluable tool, and it handles everything in one place - logs, traces, metrics, alerts.
• tmdetect 1y ago
  +1 to running services on physical servers, OVH in my case. I'm really enjoying CI pushing to servers and having managed database provided by a 3rd party like Mongo Atlas.
  • cyberpunk 1y ago
    Isn’t there quite a significant latency problem if you’re going across the internet for db instead of say, the same switch?
    • baobun 1y ago
      No experience with Mongo Atlas but other managed DB providers will IME be transparent about where they host and you can often request resources in an appropriate DC, sometimes even the same. Businesses providing this in Hetzner, OVH etc too. If you plan accordingly you can eat your cake and have it too.
• dvfjsdhgfv 1y ago
  3x seems quite low, I routinely get 7-11x higher performance on Hetzner when compared to AWS. Also the conclusion of this old benchmark is still partially true: https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-comparison-2019-12-12 https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-...
• krowek 1y ago
  I tried my best to start using Hetzner, but they wouldn't let me. I got my account validation rejected despite having everything "in norm" and tried 3 times, they wouldn't give me a reason why it ended up rejected. I think it's better that way, I wouldn't like to get the surprise my account was terminated at some point after that.
  • MaKey 1y ago
    They are pretty strict with account sign-ups because they are so cheap, which attracts abuse. Unfortunately this prevents some regular sign-ups too. You could try Netcup, I've also had a good experience with them.
• silexia 1y ago
  At my home, I have the PUD fiber Internet with Starlink as the backup WAN. I have two non mission critical servers we were using on AWS for and I set up two old laptops locally to run. Saving $1,000 a month now. I am looking at my $4,000 a month of mission critical servers now.
  • dboreham 1y ago
    I began years ago hosting at home (because the business grew unexpectedly and initially the test server had been in my home). I wouldn't recommend it. Better to rent colocation space. The problem apart from having to provision reliable internet is you also need to provision reliable power, and cooling. And it gets noisy.
• webprofusion 1y ago
  Context is important for stuff like this, I've served 350M requests (with db interaction) for $49 via cloudflare before, but it all depends what you're trying to do. Abstracted infrastructure like Kubernetes is expensive by default, so design has an impact.
  • da02 1y ago
    $49 via Cloudflare? Is this via Workers? Were you using Cloudflare's database systems or their Hyperdrive service?
• Qasaur 1y ago
  Hetzner is great for dedicated servers, but for those of us who need smaller-scale secure/confidential VMs I'm afraid that there isn't really any other choice than hyperscalers. Does anyone know if there is a VM vendor that sits somewhere in between a dedicated server host like Hetzner in terms of performance + cost-effectiveness and AWS/GCP in terms of security? Basically TPM/vTPM + AMD SEV/SEV-SNP + UEFI Secure Boot support. I've scoured the internet and can't seem to find anyone who provides virtualised trusted computing other than AWS/GCP. Hetzner does not provide a TPM for their VMs, they do not mention any data-in-use encryption, and they explicitly state that they do not support UEFI secure boot - all of these are critical requirements for high-assurance use cases.
  • dboreham 1y ago
    Interested to hear more about your use case and threat model, if you are willing to share. I ask because although I've looked into (and done some prototyping) with secure cloud hosting, I/we came to the conclusion that there's no current technology that is "actually secure" and so abandoned the approach. Curious if things have improved now, or if you're operating in some security theater context where it's ok.
    • manawyrm 1y ago
      +1, if your threat model is actually this severe, use physical hardware with physical interlocks and physical security mechanisms. Software/virtualization is just helpless against such a threat model.
    • Qasaur 1y ago
      The basic principle is to ensure that any machine/workload which joins the network (and processes customer data, in this case extremely sensitive PII) has a cryptographically verified chain of trust from boot to the application-layer to guarantee workload integrity. NixOS is used for declarative and more importantly deterministic OS state and runtime environment, layered with dm-verity to prevent tampering of the Nix store. The root partition, aside from whatever is explicitly configured in the nix store, is wiped on every reboot. The ephemerality prevents persistence of any potential attacker, and the state of the machine is completely identical to whatever you have configured in your NixOS configuration, which is great for audibility. This OS image + boot loader is signed with organisation-private keys, and deployed to machines preloaded with UEFI keys to guarantee boot integrity and preventing firmware-level attacks (UEFI secure boot). At this point you need to trust the cloud provider to not tamper with the UEFI keys or otherwise compromise memory confidentiality through a malicious or insecure hypervisor, unless the provider supports memory encryption through something like AMD SEV-SNP. The processor provides an AMD-signed attestation that is provided to the guest OS that states "Yes, this guest is running in a trusted execution environment, and here are the TPM measurements for the boot" and you can use this attestation to determine whether or not the machine should join your network and that it is running the firmware, kernel, and initramfs that you expect AND on hardware that you expect. I think I'll put together a write-up on this architecture once I launch the service. There is no such thing as perfect security, of course, but I think this security architecture prevents many classes of attacks. Bootkits and firmware-level attacks are exceedingly difficult or even impossible with this model, combine this with an ephemeral root filesystem and any attacker would be effectively unable to gain persistence in the system.
• slig 1y ago
  Anyone here using https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s Or https://github.com/kube-hetzner/terraform-hcloud-kube-hetzner https://github.com/kube-hetzner/terraform-hcloud-kube-hetzne... For a K3S cluster? Would love to hear any experience. Thanks!
  • ctm92 1y ago
    We are using hetzner-k3s, super solid and easy to use. I love that it also utilizes the Hetzner Cloud Controllers to utilize the native Hetzner load balancers, volumes, network
    • slig 1y ago
      Great, thanks!
• JCM9 1y ago
  As competition heats up, the relative “enshitifcation” of AWS is real. There just isn’t a compelling story to go “all in on AWS” anymore. For anything beyond raw storage and compute the experience elsewhere is consistently better, faster, cheaper. It seems AWS leadership got caught up trying to have an answer for every possible computing use case and broadly ended up with a bloated mess of expensive below-bar products. The recent panicked flood of meh AI slop products as AWS tries to make up for its big miss on AI is one such example. Would like to see AWS just focus on doing core infrastructure and doing it well. Others are simply better at everything that then layers on top of that.
• YetAnotherNick 1y ago
  You are doing calculations all wrong if you think saving $500/month is 75% of your cost. Also first three lines of new stack is a sure shot way to get PTSD. You shouldn't manage database in your plane, unless you really know the internals of the tools you are using. Once you get off AWS then you really start to see the value of things like documentation.
• adamcharnock 1y ago
  I cannot overstate the performance improvement of deploying onto bare metal. We typically see a doubling of performance, as well as extremely predictable baseline performance. This is down to several things: - Latency - having your own local network, rather than sharing some larger datacenter network fabric, gives around of order of magnitude reduced latency - Caches – right-sizing a deployment for the underlying hardware, and so actually allowing a modern CPU to do its job, makes a huge difference - Disk IO – Dedicated NVMe access is _fast_. And with it comes a whole bunch of other benefits: - Auto-scalers becomes less important, partly because you have 10x the hardware for the same price, partly because everything runs 2x the speed anyway, and partly because you have a fixed pool of hardware. This makes the whole system more stable and easier to reason about. - No more sweating the S3 costs. Put a 15TB NVMe drive in each server and run your own MinIO/Garage cluster (alongside your other workloads). We're doing about 20GiB/s sustained on a 10 node cluster, 50k API calls per second (on S3 that is $20-$250 _per second_ on API calls!). - You get the same bill every month. - UPDATE: more benefits - cheap fast storage, run huge Postgresql instances at minimal cost, less engineering time spend working around hardware limitations and cloud vagaries. And, if chose to invest in the above, it all costs 10x less than AWS. Pitch: If you don't want to do this yourself, then we'll do it for you for half the price of AWS (and we'll be your DevOps team too): https://lithus.eu https://lithus.eu Email: adam@ above domain
  • jnsaff2 1y ago
    There is a graph database which does disk IO for database startup, backup and restore as single threaded, sequential, 8kb operations. On EBS it does at most 200MB/s disk IO just because the EBS operation latency even on io2 is about 0.5 ms. Even though the disk can go much faster, disk benchmarks can easily do multi-GB/s on nodes that have enough EBS throughput. On instance local SSD on the same EC2 instance it will happily saturate the whatever instance can do (~2GB/s in my case).
    • anonzzzies 1y ago
      What graph db is that?
• liendolucas 1y ago
  What is an actual and solid reason to choose or stay AWS these days? The topic of paying hefty amounts of money to AWS when other options are available has been discussed many times before. My view of AWS is that you have bazillions of things that you might never use, need to learn about it, you are tied to a company across the Atlantic that can basically shut you down anytime they want for whatever reason and finally the cost.
• andybak 1y ago
  I love how few comments on this and similar posts give much context along with their advice. Are you hosting a church newsletter in your spare time or a resource intensive web app with millions of paying enterprise customers and a dedicated dev ops team in 3 continents? Any advice on price / performance / availability is meaningless unless you explain where you're coming from. The reason we see people overcomplicating everything to do with the web is that they follow advice from people with radically different requirements.
  • DarkNova6 1y ago
    Tech industry in a nutshell
  • Terretta 1y ago
    Strong agree. I hadn't seen your comment when I wrote this, below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45616366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45616366 TL;DR: Think of hosting providers like a pricing grid (DIY, Get Started, Pro, Team, Enterprise) and if YAGNI, don't choose it.
  • casparvitch 1y ago
    IDK mate, my personal pastebin needs to run on bare metal or it can't keep up
  • Hasz 1y ago
    Different requirements, different skillsets, different costs, different challenges. AWS is only topically the same product as Hetzner, coming from someone who has used both quite a bit.
  • cube00 1y ago
    > The reason we see people overcomplicating everything to do with the web is that they follow advice from people with radically different requirements. Or they've had cloud account managers sneaking into your C-suite's lunchtime meetings. Other comments in this thread say they get directives to use AWS from the top. Strangely that directive often comes with AWS's own architects embedded into your team and even more strangely they seem to recommend the most expensive server-less options available. What they don't tell is you you'll be rebuilding and redeploying your containerised app daily with new Docker OS base images to keep up with the security scanners just like patching an OS on a bare metal server.
• faizshah 1y ago
  Can anyone recommend a good cloud for GPU instances? Was trying to find a good one for 30B quants but there’s so many now and the pricing is all over the place.
  • dboreham 1y ago
    What kind of GPU are you looking for?
  • matt-p 1y ago
    Depends on the gpu you need honestly. Maybe worth checking out https://www.serversearcher.com/servers/gpu https://www.serversearcher.com/servers/gpu and other comparison sites?
  • jedisct1 1y ago
    Koyeb is really great and has affordable GPU instances https://www.koyeb.com https://www.koyeb.com
• ants_everywhere 1y ago
  The public cloud is priced as if availability, reliability, durability, and latency matter to your business. If they don't, you can get far with just a single machine. A great deal of the work in cloud engineering is ensuring the abstractions meet the service guarantees. Similarly you can make a car much cheaper if you don't need to guarantee the driver will survive a collision. The cost of providing a safety guarantee is much higher than providing a hand-wavy "good enough" feeling. If your business isn't critical then "good enough" vibes may be all you need, and you can save some money.
  • sealeck 1y ago
    You do know you can have high availability without using cloud providers? E.g. you run a second server in a different database as a standby that can take over, etc.
    • Terretta 1y ago
      just, and, and, and ... IF you need it, soon you wish the lego blocks pulled IAM all the way through and worked with a common API
    • ants_everywhere 1y ago
      I mean the (virtual) machine itself has these guarantees. You can set the entire rack on fire and your VM will continue to operate or else you're owed compensation for the SLA violation. You can add redundant machines with a failover. You then need to calculate how likely the failover is to fail, how likely the machines are to fail, etc. How likely is the switch to fail. You need engineers with pager rotations to give 24 hour coverage, etc. What I'm saying is that the cloud providers give you strong guarantees and this is reflected in their pricing. The guarantees apply to every service you consume because with independent failures, the probability of not failing is multiplicative. If you want to build a reliable system out of N components then you need to have bounds on the reliability of each of the components. Your business may not need this. Your side project almost certainly doesn't. But the money you save isn't free, it's compensation for taking on the increased risk of downtime, losing customer data, etc. I would be interested to see a comparison of the costs of running a service on Hetzner with the same reliability guarantees as a corresponding cloud service. On the one hand we expect some cloud service markup for convenience. On the other hand they have economies of scale. So it's not obvious to me which is cheaper.
• stego-tech 1y ago
  Really digging these post-mortems on major public cloud migrations of late, either to smaller providers like Hetzner or privately-owned solutions in data centers. It gives me more ammo when an organization tasks me with saving them money, by showing that these are, in fact, perfectly viable options whose tradeoffs may be worthwhile for specific organizational needs.
• dboreham 1y ago
  Quick note that while I hear nothing but good things about Hetzner, the approach is generic -- applies to the many other bare metal "SmallCo" providers. For example we use Hivelocity and have been very happy. Perhaps also worth mentioning that you can literally buy computers and rent space to plug them in and hook up to the internet in a place we call a data center. That's even cheaper when you know your workload long term and have access to capital.
• natnat 1y ago
  Are there decent US based alternatives to Hetzner? I'd like to have my servers located in the US for a variety of reasons, but most of the alternatives I've seen to Hetzner seem to be pretty fly-by-night shops.
  • NoiseBert69 1y ago
    Hetzner has 2 DCs in the US with solid peerings and transit.
    • CodesInChaos 1y ago
      Which do not offer Hetzner's biggest selling point: Cheap dedicated servers
  • matt-p 1y ago
    clouvider and latitude look like decent pricing on https://www.serversearcher.com/ https://www.serversearcher.com/ I know phoenixnap exists as well.
  • brikym 1y ago
    Maybe digital ocean.
• whstl 1y ago
  After being immersed in cloud-native hell for a few years, I'll say it: This setup is probably also easier to reason about and easier to make secure than the messy garbage pushed by Amazon and other cloud providers. People see Cloud providers with rose-colored glasses, but even something like RDS requires VPCs, subnets, route tables, security groups, Internet/NAT gateways, lots of IAM roles, and CloudWatch to be usable. And to make it properly secure (meaning: not just sharing the main DB password with the team) you need way more as well, and it's hard to orchestrate, it's not just an option in a CloudFormation script. Sure securing a server is hard too, but people 1. actually share this info and 2. don't have illusions about it.
  • Terretta 1y ago
    > This setup is probably also easier to reason about and easier to make secure than the messy garbage pushed by Amazon and other cloud providers. Ability to do anything doesn't mean do everything. It's straightforward to be simple on AWS, but if you have trouble denying yourself, consider Lightsail to start: https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/ https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/
• lunias 1y ago
  The world is healing.
• alberth 1y ago
  There's a value curve for infrastructure, I'll use an analogy... Low Cost High Cost ============================================================== FARM WHOLESALER GROCERY RESTAURANT DOORDASH BUILD CO-LOCATION HETZNER AWS VERCEL While it's not a perfect analogy, in principle it holds true. As such, it should come as no surprise that eating at a restaurant every day is going to be way more expensive.
  • whstl 1y ago
    AWS is more of high-scale cook-your-own pizza restaurant where you can't see the bill until the end, and you often have to mop the floor and wash the latrines yourself too. And washing the latrine costs money too of course, but you don’t wanna get salmonella, right?
    • alberth 1y ago
      That's were my analogy isn't perfect. There's different tiers of restaurants. There's the luxury premium restaurants (Michelin star rated, like AWS), but there is also local dinners that arguably have phenomenal food too (maybe someone like DigitalOcean/Linode).
  • Terretta 1y ago
    Exactly. I hadn't seen your comment when I wrote this, below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45616366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45616366 I love your farm-to-table grid: works for everyone not just HN commenters. And putting DOORDASH on the right is truer from cost perspective than the metaphor I'd used. For HN, I'd compared to a pricing grid (DIY, Get Started, Pro, Team, Enterprise) with the bottom line that if YAGNI, don't choose it. Your grid emphasizes my other point, it's about your own labor.
  • hunvreus 1y ago
    I love that, I may steal it.
• 1a527dd5 1y ago
  Love it! We are unfortunately moving away from self-hosted bare metal. I disagree with the transition to AWS. But it's been made several global layers above me. It's funny our previous AWS spend was $800 per month and has been for almost 6 years. We've just migrated some of our things to AWS and the spend is around $4,500 per month. I've been told the company doesn't care until our monthly is in excessive of five figures. None of this makes sense to me. The only thing that makes sense is our parent company is _huge_ and we have some really awesome TAMs and our entire AWS spend is probably in the region of a few million a month, so it really is pennies behind the sofa when global org is concerned.
  • Sammi 1y ago
    I read some many stories like this and every time I think of the "your margins are my opportunity" quote, and think there must be so many inefficient enterprises that are ripe for disruption by a small efficient team.
  • Terretta 1y ago
    There are many other costs besides that AWS bill. Naming two it's hard to put a number on, but get discussed at board room or senior exec level: - client confidence - labor pool
    • aunty_helen 1y ago
      And to add to that second one, ability to bring in a third party contractor to reduce headcount when needed.
  • cube00 1y ago
    > None of this makes sense to me. OpEx good, CapEx bad.
    • marcosdumay 1y ago
      What could make sense if the OP was talking about a less than 30% difference. What country is it that applies a 400% income tax to companies? (Well, seriously, it makes sense in a larger than 80% tax rate. Not that impossibly high, but I doubt any country ever had it.)
• mythz 1y ago
  We've moved most of our Apps off AWS to Hetzner years ago by switching to SQLite/Litestream > Cloudflare R2 replication to avoid needing to using a managed RDBMS and saved a bunch of $$$ [1]. Although for our latest App we've switched to using local PostgreSQL (i.e. app/RDBMS on same server) with R2 backups for its better featureset, same cost as we only pay for the 1x Hetzner VM and Cloudflare R2 storage is pretty cheap. [1] https://docs.servicestack.net/ormlite/litestream https://docs.servicestack.net/ormlite/litestream
• nibab 1y ago
  It was never about price or performance. Price and performance may be things you care about as a hobbyist, but as a business you have a lot of other considerations.
  • abujazar 1y ago
    In my case, availability is crucial as well, and AWS simply doesn't offer good enough SLAs.
• drchaim 1y ago
  I dream of the day when I can have my servers at home with solar power and batteries. I still have a ways to go, but it will come.
  • Tepix 1y ago
    For many projects, this is already possible. 50MBit/s of upstream bandwidth is not that uncommon if you have something better than DSL and that's probably the bottleneck.
• Terretta 1y ago
  AWS and DigitalOcean*: $559.36, Hetzner: $132.96 Perspective: this difference is one hour of US fintech engineer time a month. If you have to self-build a single thing on Hetzner you get as "built-in" on AWS, are you ahead? If this is your price range, and you're spending time thinking about how to save that $400/month (three Starbucks a day) instead of drive revenue or deliver client joy, you likely shouldn't be on AWS in the first place. AWS is for when you need the most battle tested business continuity through automations driving distributed resilience, or if you have external requirements for security built into all infra, identity and access controls built into all infra at all layers, compliance and governance controls across all infra at all layers, interop with others using AWS (private links, direct connects, sure, but also permission-based data sharing instead of data movement, etc.). If your plans have those in your future, you should start on AWS and learn as you grow so you never have a "digital transformation" in your future. Whether you're building a SaaS for others or a platform for yourself, “Enterprise” means more than just SSO tax and a call us button. There can be real requirements that you are not going to be able to meet reasonably without AWS's foundational building blocks that have this built in at the lego brick level. Combine that with "cost of delay" to your product and "opportunity cost" for your engineering (devs, SREs, users spending time doing undifferentiated heavy lifting) and those lego blocks can quickly turn out less expensive. Any blog comparing pricing not mentioning these things means someone didn't align their infra with their business model and engineering patterns. Put another way, think of the enterprise column in the longest pricing grid you've ever seen – the AWS blocks have everything on the right-most column built in. If you don't want those, don't pick that column. Google and Azure are in the Team column second from right. Digital Ocean, CloudFlare, the Pro column third from right. Various Heroku-likes in the Getting Started column at the left, and SuperMicro and Hetzner in the Self-Host column, as in, you're buying or leasing the hardware either way, it's just whose smart hands you're using. ALL of these have their place, with the Getting Started and Pro columns serving most folks on HN, Team best for most SMB, and Enterprise best for actual enterprise but also Pro and Team that need to serve enterprise or intend to grow to that. Note that if you don't yet need an enterprise column on your own pricing grid, K8s on whoever is a great way to Get Started and go Pro yourself while learning things needed for continuous delivery and system resilience engineering. Those same patterns then can be shifted onto on the Team and Enterprise column offerings from the big three (Google, Azure, AWS). Here's my TL;DR blog post distilling all this: If YAGNI, don't choose it.
• mustaphah 1y ago
  You've saved $426/mo but inherited a $10k/mo full-time DevOps job.
  • NDizzle 1y ago
    Do you think Devops is not required when you use cloud providers or something? Of course it is...
    • mustaphah 1y ago
      I meant +1 DevOps engineer dedicated to managing the added operational complexity.
      • NDizzle 1y ago
        Why would it be +1? The Devops duties that were performed on AWS are no longer being performed... wouldn't it simply shift to the new stack?
        • mustaphah 1y ago
          Self-managed Talos K8s, self-managed CloudNativePG, and the operational overhead of networking, DNS, etc. All of these were used to be fully managed by AWS for them; zero operational cost. I'd guesstimate a 2× increase in their operational complexity. So, if they previously required 0.5 DevOps of a full-timer, they'll now need one more DevOps full-timer just to handle the added complexity. Does that make sense to you?
• matesz 1y ago
  Second hand hardware for the win
• sharpfuryz 1y ago
  AWS/GCP/Azure Cloud turns the audit beast into a house-cat: one IAM rule, one log stream, one firewall and etc. Otherwise, you need to fill out a lot of documents to prove that your bare metal is safe to host, for example, cardholder data.
  • ripped_britches 1y ago
    Who could have guessed that servicing compliance requirements at scale would create such a good business model
• iamleppert 1y ago
  $500 a month for two environments with 4 CPUs and 8 GB of memory is diabolical. The only thing more expensive and with worse performance than AWS is Azure.
• objektif 1y ago
  Startup founders and employees are you really paying insane bills to AWS? How? We are really paying peanuts compared to other expenses.
  • ripped_britches 1y ago
    Probably depends on what your business is and the LTV of your customers
    • objektif 1y ago
      May be but not sure. How many Figma type startups out there paying $500k a day? As opposed to just traditional SaaS/OpenAi wrapper. I just don’t see it.
  • tstrimple 1y ago
    In a lot of cases it's because they don't know how to build using cloud services effectively so they just spin up a lot of VMs because that's the only tool they know how to use. Running VMs 24/7 is just about the most expensive thing you can do in the "cloud". But doing anything else is "too complicated".
• ukd1 1y ago
  My last co runs hundreds of servers with Hetzner for a semi-stateless workload. With AWS, the pricing let alone the performance wouldn't be viable. At some point we also used Heroku for the application (more recently EKS); the combo drove folks nuts as, it was "weird".
  • da02 1y ago
    Are these dedicated servers or VPS?
    • ukd1 11mo ago
      dedicated
• dielll 1y ago
  Only problem with Hetzner is that they don't seem to accept Accounts created from African countries. Tried creating an account with them twice from Kenya, and in both instances my account got blocked 5 minutes after creation with zero explanation. tried reaching out to support and got zero reply. I get it's their business and they can do as they please with it, however, maybe tell me before I create an account that you don't accept accounts from my continent
  • esskay 1y ago
    Hetzner is very cautious who they accept as a customer these days as the downside of being a low-cost hosting provider is you get a ton of signups from people looking to use it for seed boxes and other illegal activities. It sucks for legitimate customers, but you can sometimes plead your case directly as long as you are willing to provide id and such, but ultimately like you say, it's their business.
• whalesalad 1y ago
  The struggle is real. A lot of people think cloud lock-in is due to using cloud-specific services like SQS... but its the data. Try and exfil 300TB out of S3 without paying an enormous transfer cost =( I want to move our infra out of AWS but at the end of the day we have too much data there and it is a non starter.
• tinyspacewizard 1y ago
  > Why two cloud providers? Initially we used only DigitalOcean, but a data intensive SaaS like tap needs a lot of cloud resources and AWS have a generous $1,000 credit package for self-funded startups. So some Kubernetes experts migrated to AWS for $1k in credits. This is madness. That's weeks of migration work to save the equivalent of a day of contracting.
• mentalgear 1y ago
  No mention of SST.dev running on Hetzner ?
• oneplane 1y ago
  Gee, another "we did not need cloud, so by not using cloud, we stopped spending on something we did not need"-story. Duh. The real story is why someone who doesn't need cloud services starts using them anyway. If you need it, use it, if you don't need it, don't use it. It's not the big revelation people seem to think it is.
• vivzkestrel 1y ago
  i ll immediately do the switch but please tell me how do I use CDK on hetzner
• throwaway984393 1y ago
  [dead]
• jerf 1y ago
  Saving $400/month covers about 3-5 hours of engineering time per month. In a year, call it 30-50 hours. Did this project take more than 30-50 person-hours? (The obvious argument about how it might pay off more in the future are dependent on the startup surviving long enough for that future to arrive.)
  • bearjaws 1y ago
    I feel like this is left out of the story too often - people tend to compare the most optimistic "self-hosted", usually just one or two servers at best, to a less than ideal cloud installation. My parent company (Healthcare) uses all on prem solutions, has 3 data centers and 10 sys admins just for the data centers. You still need DevOps too. I don't know how much it would cost to migrate their infra to AWS, but ~ $1.3M (salary) in annual spend buys you a ton of reserved compute on AWS. $1.3M is 6000 CPU cores, 10TiB of RAM 24/7 with 100TB of storage. I know for a fact due to redundancy they have no where near that, AND they have to pay for Avamar, VMWare, (~$500k) etc. There's no way its cheaper than AWS, not even close. So sure someones self hosted PHP BB forum doesn't need to be on AWS, but I challenge someone to run a 99.99% uptime infra significantly cheaper than the cloud.
    • jerf 1y ago
      I didn't try to hit that because that's harder to call, especially at a small startup. If what is probably "the guy doing all this" happens to be more comfortable with k8s than the AWS stack you can end up winning by going with a nominally more complicated k8s stack that doesn't force you to spend dozens of hours learning more new things and instead just using what you already know. For a small startup those training costs are proportionally huge compared to a more established larger going concern already making money. Startups should generally always go with whatever their engineers already know unless there is a damned good reason not to. (And "I just wanted to learn it" is not a good reason for the startup.) But monetarily, even for a startup, $400/month savings is something you shouldn't be pouring the equivalent of $5000 (or more, just picking a reasonable concrete number to anchor the point) into. You really need to solve a $400/month problem by putting your time into something, anything that will promote revenue growth sooner and faster rather than optimizing that particular cost.
• createaccount99 1y ago
  Frankly the idea of managing the db myself seems like a horrible idea and a lot of work. But perhaps I've been indoctrinated by the big cloud.
• liampulles 1y ago
  There are footguns to be found with a self operated k8s cluster, and definitely (costly) ones with cloud native database orchestration. Not to mention all the risks which come with migrating to "new things" in general. I know for me that when I moved away from those things to managed AWS versions, I could definitely see the value of a cloud solution. But that cost difference is huge... It is a interesting tradeoff to consider I think (I'm not criticizing either Hetzner or AWS or any team's decision, provided they've thought the tradeoffs through).
• Pxtl 1y ago
  I've always thought these services seemed overpriced, like users were subsidizing a ferocious amount of R&D and speculative expansion off their fees. I mean, it's just hosting webservices - this feels like it should be a commodity at this point.
• dwrowe 1y ago
  In my experience, there has been an interesting ebb and flow on the use of 'dedicated' hardware and auto-scaling power of AWS/cloud instances. When first starting out, super cost-conscious, you're getting ideal performance. As soon as you start experiencing interesting traffic patterns, auto-scaling makes sense. Then, your bill grows to such a point as it makes economical sense to pull back to more powerful dedicated services, then lean a little into auto-scaling, etc. A pendulum of underlying services and people to support it. A balancing act of finding efficiencies during wild growth periods, and reaching some sense of stability.
• js4ever 1y ago
  We've helped quite a few teams move from AWS to Hetzner (and Netcup) lately, and I think the biggest surprise for people isn't the cost or the raw performance, it’s how simple things become when you remove 15 layers of managed abstractions. You stop worrying about S3 vs EFS vs FSx, or Lambda cold starts, or EBS burst credits. You just deploy a Docker stacks on a fast NVMe box and it flies. The trade-off is you need a bit more DevOps discipline: monitoring, backups, patching, etc. But that's the kind of stuff that's easy to automate and doesn't really change week to week. At Elestio we leaned into that simplicity, we provide fully managed open-source stacks for nearly 400 software and also cover CI/CD (from Git push to production) on any provider, including Hetzner. More info here if you're curious: https://elest.io https://elest.io (Disclosure: I work at Elestio, where we run managed open-source services on any cloud provider including your own infra.)
  • pqdbr 1y ago
    Would like to know more about your postgres offering: does it offer streaming replicas and streaming backup? Or just dump stored to s3?
    • js4ever 1y ago
      Yes we offer clusters with auto failover and replicas can be in multiple regions and even in multiple providers. We support postgres but also MySQL, redis, opensearch, Clickhouse and many more. About backups we offer differential snapshots and regular dumps that you can send to your own S3 bucket https://docs.elest.io/books/databases/page/deploy-a-new-cluster https://docs.elest.io/books/databases/page/deploy-a-new-clus...
• wahnfrieden 1y ago
  Is anyone using Yugabyte self host? It looks like maybe the best solution these days for HA Postgres on bare metal or VPS. (And very friendly open source license.)
• redbell 1y ago
  Nice writeup, I like it and would definitely bookmark for future reference. One weak take however in the article that I felt not quite right is the pricing saving part. By saying 1/4 of the price. I was expecting to see the AWS bill in the range of $10k/month, or more but it turned out to be just around ~$550 or, a total saving of $420. Whith the above said, it does really make me questioning whether it worth the hassle of migration because, probably, one of the main reasons to move away from AWS is to save the cost. Finally, let me conclude with this comment from /r/programminghumor: You're not a real engineer until you've accidentally sponsored Amazon's quarterly earnings
• warrenmiller 1y ago
  its also very easy to run windows on their linux cloud VPS's...if you need to run windows.
• czhu12 1y ago
  We discovered a similar cost saving and I ended up building an internal PaaS that i ended up open sourcing, that works well on hetzner. The biggest downside to hetzner only is that it’s really annoying to wrangle shell scripts and GitHub actions to drive all the automations to deploy code. The portainer team recently started sponsoring the project so Ive been able to dedicate a lot more time to it, close to full time. https://canine.sh https://canine.sh
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• groestl 1y ago
  Deploying to bare metal Hetzner for years, very happy with the service. Smart hands work fast and reliable. As soon as you got your stack worked out (which admittedly takes a while), maintaining bare metal is not much different from maintaining cloud, apart from swapping disks sometimes. And the cost is so low, in comparison, it's ridiculous.
• negendev 1y ago
  Shhhh don't talk too loud about Hetzner!
• jasonthorsness 1y ago
  With AWS you are paying for the ancillary things; pretty good network, reliable portal, reliable management APIs, nearly perfectly commoditized products (one VM like any other, though in practice I observe minor exceptions to this all the time predominantly with worse connectivity to other services or disk). But the performance bare metal is good (AWS offers bare metal too but at insane price point because they only buy enormous servers).
• bzmrgonz 1y ago
  OP Can you expand a little on kustomize? I think it could use a little more real estate on your article!!
• time4tea 1y ago
  Hetzner are great. Cloud was a reaction to overlong procurement timeline in company managed DC. This is still a thing, it still takes half a year to get a server into a DC!! However probably 99% of use cases dont need servers in your own DC, they work just fine on a rented server. One thing though, a rented server can still have hardware failure, and it needs to be fixed, so deployment plans need to take that into account - fargate will do that for you.
• heavyset_go 1y ago
  The cloud makes sense when you have someone else's money to burn, and don't care about being held hostage with lock-in if you aren't careful.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• 999900000999 1y ago
  Long long ago, at the start of my career I was at a great company. We were using a Postgres DB version not supported by RDS. So I had to manually set up postgres over and over again on EC2 instances. This was before Docker was reliable/standard. I wasted hours on this, and the moment RDS starts to support the postgres version we need it everything was much easier. I still remember staying up till 3:00 a.m. installing postgres, repeatedly. While this article is nice, they only save a few hundred dollars a month. If a single engineer has to spend even an hour a month maintaining this, it's probably going to be a wash. And that's assuming everything goes right, the moment something goes wrong you can easily wipe out a year saving in a single day ( if not an hour depending on your use case). This is probably best for situations where your time just isn't worth a whole lot. For example let's say you have a hobbyist project, and for some reason you need a very large capacity server. This can easily cost hundreds of dollars a month on AWS, and since it's coming out of your own pocket it might be worth it to spend that extra time on bare metal. But, at a certain point you're going to think how much is my time really worth. For example, and forgive me for mixing up terms and situations, ghost blog is about $10 a month via their hosted solution. You can probably run multiple ghost blogs on a single Hetzner instance. But, and maybe it was just my luck, eventually it's just going to stop working. Do you feel like spending two or three hours fixing something over just spending the $20 a month to host your two blogs ?
  • SamDc73 1y ago
    It seems most (not all) of the comments here are relatively small projects and ads ...
• lkrubner 1y ago
  They went from $559.36 to $132 a month on Hetzner, and they seem happy about the performance. This matches my own experience as well, I have been stunned regarding Hetzner and how cheap it can be.
• sytse 1y ago
  The cost improvements are great. If you miss the automation that AWS does for database servers consider using something like https://www.ubicloud.com/ https://www.ubicloud.com/ that is great for PostgreSQL servers. On bare metal these typically also support 5x the number of IOPS without paying through the nose.
• moomoo11 1y ago
  Cloud was never about performance. It was about offloading costs involved in admin stuff like backups and stuff.
• jurschreuder 1y ago
  Woooowww we literally today switched Object Storage prod from AWS S3 to Hetzner. Now #1 on HN. Destiny.
• lazystar 1y ago
  > In reality, there is significant latency between Hetzner locations that make running multi-location workloads challenging, and potentially harmful to performance as we discovered through our post-deployment monitoring. found this little bit buried near the end. all that glitters is not gold, i guess
• desireco42 1y ago
  This doesn't make sense to me. Businesses don't switch to save from $500 to $150. It just doesn't make sense. I think they did it because of political reasons, but they should just say so. I am in US, I would use Hetzner just the same, but not to save few bucks here and there.
• 0xbadcafebee 1y ago
  > We saved 76% on our cloud bills while tripling our capacity The claim here is that their cloud bills lowered. Nowhere is mentioned the cost of engineering and support. This will increase their overall cost, which is not mentioned here at all. When you are a startup, you don't have a lot of headcount. You should be using your headcount to focus on your product. The more things you do that eat up your headcount's time, the less time you have to develop your product. You need a balance between "dirt-cheap cost" and labor-conserving. This means it's a good idea to pay a little bit of a premium, to give you back time and headcount. > How much does a 2x CPU, 4 GiB RAM container cost on AWS Fargate? Just over $70/month. We run two worker instances, which need these higher resources, along with smaller web instances and all the other infrastructure needed to host an application on AWS (load balancer, relational DB, NAT gateway, ...). All together, our total costs for two environments of tap grew to $449.50/month. The classic AWS mistake: they're talking retail prices. AWS gives every customer multiple opportunities to lower costs below this retail price. You don't have to be an enterprise. In fact, you can ask them directly how to save money, and they'll tell you. $70/month is the retail price of Fargate on-demand (for that configuration). Using a Compute Savings Plan[1], you can save 50% of this cost. Additionally, if you switch from x86 to ARM for your Fargate tasks, the cost lowers an additional 25%. So with Graviton and a Compute Savings Plan, their Fargate price would have been $26.25/month, a 62.5% savings. And there's more to save. Spot instances are discounted at 70%. NAT Instances save you money over NAT Gateways. Scaling your tasks to zero when they're not needed cuts costs more. Choose the cheapest region to pay the least. [1] https://repost.aws/questions/QUVKyRJcFPStiXYRVPq-KU9Q/savings-plan-on-fargate https://repost.aws/questions/QUVKyRJcFPStiXYRVPq-KU9Q/saving...
• Lorin 1y ago
  I'd like to thank everyone moving their hosting away from shared hosts to VPS. Been on the same shared hosting platform for 15+ years and the hardware's load average dropped to ~16% on a 64-core Epyc /w 512gb RAM. Easily handles half million unique bursts without breaking a sweat.
  • da02 1y ago
    What do you run on your shared hosts? PHP? PGsql?
• AntonCTO 1y ago
  How do you get rid of AWS SES?
• byebyetech 1y ago
  If people stop using AWS,Azure and GCP the economy would improve by 10%. Using cloud services is a massive waste of money.
  • abenga 1y ago
    But people spending money is the economy.
• fcpk 1y ago
  In my opinion, this is not always a true thing because size of the needed maintenance team can mean a lot. I find that for small-medium deployments cloud can be a lot more efficient despite being more expensive because it can - take away a lot of the expensive maintenance and management of things like databases, backup, storage, that would otherwise requiring at least a couple more people. So if your bill is <10k/month it certainly isn't worth hiring more people - allow you spin up systems with almost 0 cost(think cloud run / container systems) for very low usage systems. - give you global coverage & distributed reliability that can be otherwise hard to get.
• qwertyuiop_ 1y ago
  The executives at <bigcorp> will not allow bare metal or other alternatives anytime soon because either most of them have drunk the AWS/Azure koolaid or AWS/Azure has already bought out the Rolodex of most of these companies by the 1) promise of hiring senior tech leadership if they drink the koolaid 2) influence of previous executives who accepted roles at Amazon. You've gotta hand it to Amazon for their strategy.
• byyll 1y ago
  I get the point. But those are incomparable. Hyperscalers don't compete on price, they compete on scale and services offered. The compliance, the security, the support, the integrations, the backups. Can you host your own object storage open source software, key vault OSS, VPN, queue service, container registry, logging, host your own Postgres/MySQL? Sure, but you will need to research what is best, what is supported, keep it maintained, make sure to update it and that those updates don't break anything, wake up in the middle of the night when it breaks, make sure it's secure. And you would still need to handle access control across those services. And you would still need a 3rd party service for DDoS protection, likely CDN too. And you would likely need some identity provider.
• itsthecourier 1y ago
  also if you need spikes of gpus vast.ai
• ilaksh 1y ago
  Maybe we should stop talking about Hetzner before they raise their prices guys.
• theturtlemoves 1y ago
  Estimating the cost and performance up front is impossible unless you've deployed something similar before. I'm probably wrong but it seems to me like AWS (Azure / Google Cloud) is a good enough place to start, get a feel for what you need and then move on to bare metal only if needed.
• bradgessler 1y ago
  I keep sending links like this to AWS when their sales reps reach out, then I ask for a discount, and they never get back.
• lonelyprograMer 1y ago
  I tried to register a Hetzner account multiple times but didn't get approval. I chose Netcup as a better alternative.
• masterj 1y ago
  > tap is a data-intensive SaaS that needs to be able to execute complex queries over gigabytes of data in seconds. > minimum resource requirements for good performance to be around 2x CPUs and 4 GiB RAM This is less compute than I regularly carry in my pocket? And significantly less than a Raspberry Pi? Why is Fargate that expensive?
• grebc 1y ago
  It’s amusing the outages of hyper scalers are posted here on HN regularly enough but there’s plenty of turkeys in this thread mentioning you have to use hyper scalers if you need 100% uptime. Newsflash - no one has 100% and your over equitied startup is just burning other people’s money with no clue as per usual.
• domlebo70 1y ago
  How do people deploy docker containers on a machine like this? We currently use Cloud Run, which is very hands off. How is a deploy done?
• kakoni 1y ago
  Any k8s self-hosters here? How is that going?
  • mlnj 1y ago
    Have been running a couple of machines on Hetzner cloud with https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-ks https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-ks for about 2 years now. Have been very happy with the setup. Also hosts a StackGres cluster that's backs up to GCS. Plenty of compute foe the price.
    • artdigital 1y ago
      Your link 404s
      • mlnj 1y ago
        https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s
• greenbeans12 1y ago
  Is this a shocker? In the cloud, you pay for convenience. This is basically running your own Kubernetes cluster. Right for the right teams (highly technical infra engineers).
• artdigital 1y ago
  Been thinking about fully self hosting my small stuff for a bit but a mini managed k8s ($10) is just so convenient. I build a new docker image for some thing, add a manifest file to my k8s repo and apply it - my “cluster” spins up a new pod, I can easily hook it up to tailscale or Cloudflare warp to make it accessible, and it’s available Been using this approach for the past years and if something gets bigger, I move the container to fly or a different k8s cluster in a couple hours max On my bigger k8s I can then easily add more nodes or scale up pods depending on need, and scale them back down when idle. Still the main issue with any setup I see is the database. No matter what I use I’d either have a managed Postgres somewhere, or something like litestream, and if that’s not in the same data center it’s gonna add latency sadly
• nine_k 1y ago
  I see the allure of dedicated servers. All is great when everything works. What I miss in this picture is failure scenarios. How many dedicated servers do you need to run to afford losing one of them to a hardware failure? What is the cost and lead time for a replacement? How much overprovisioning do you need to do, and how well ahead, in anticipation of seasonal spikes, or a wave of signups from a marketing campaign?
• PeterZaitsev 1y ago
  There is no one size fits all. On the small scale "managed" cloud which takes care of as many things as possible is effective. As you scale though it will cost proportional to environment size, except some discount. With solutions like Hetzner you get a lot more of hardware for the price but have to invest more labor into managing it, with automation however this labor does not grow nearly as much as your environment size.
• figers 1y ago
  I love azure app service because I can focus on our code and code security and leave server management, OS security and physical security to Microsoft. No servers, no VMs, no containers, just our code to focus on.
• earthnail 1y ago
  I finally started migrating our app from Heroku to Hetzner. Started by moving Postgres, and boy, what a difference in performance. I pay 1/5th of what I previously paid, and performance is through the roof. Like, as if we had rewritten our Rails app in Rust (metaphorically speaking). I know that in theory you get much more from managed postgres than a simple self-managed server, but I have pgbouncer and Wal-G set up, and it really seems like it's not that hard to manage that instance. Most of all, we were really hitting performance limits on Heroku, not theoretical "what if the server goes down" but real ones that users could tell every day. Will move the app server itself next (basic Rails). Really wish I had done the move earlier. Hetzner is like cheating for indie devs.
  • Ylpertnodi 1y ago
    >. I pay 1/5th of what I previousl,,, For now?
    • earthnail 11mo ago
      Why for now? I see zero reason why that should change. It's not like Heroku was zero maintenance. I often ran into resource limits. I did a fair amount of optimisation on jemalloc to make sure Rails didn't run into Heroku's ridiculously low RAM limits because of loading too many ActiveRecord objects. Yeah, sure, I should probably paginate better, but now I have so much RAM it literally doesn't matter. Heroku also regularly asked me to schedule DB maintenance. Before I paid for the expensive DB, that meant the connection string could also change, which meant I had to redeploy my AI workers (i.e. background jobs that need a GPU) that were hosted outside of Heroku. Now it still warns me that the connection string would change, but it somehow didn't anymore. Ah well. All problems of the past. The solution in Heroku was always to throw more money at it, and the increments were quite serious. With Hetzner, I now have massively overprovisioned servers that cost a fraction.
• lylo 1y ago
  I'm at a small scale with https://pagecord.com https://pagecord.com but I did the same earlier this year. Couldn't be happier! https://olly.pagecord.com/migrating-the-pagecord-rails-app-from-aws-to-hetzner-373cf4cc https://olly.pagecord.com/migrating-the-pagecord-rails-app-f...
• canto 1y ago
  OVH sells bare metal servers with 6 cores 32 gb ram and 512 nvme disks in raid 1 (!) with *unmetered* 1gbps line, for 70 bucks. 70 united states dollars. How much of AWS EC2 you can get out for 70 bucks? Now, this OVH still makes money on it. They make money, despite these servers require actual human being to put them into datacenter, plug network, power, etc. You are literally getting the OG RAW POWER and a slice of a datacenter for 70 bucks and they still make money. How much amazon makes on every single silly vm that they charge for compute, storage, network, ip, network again, oh and credits, cpu credits, startup credits, whatever credits, oh an api calls ;]
• derfabianpeter 1y ago
  We at ayedo[0] are specialized for this kind of migration away from inflated hyperscalers onto European cloud providers like Hetzner, IONOS, Plusserver etc. we provide the missing cloud-native services like databases, storage, loadbalancing, etc so teams don’t need to adjust that much. [0] https://ayedo.de https://ayedo.de
• fduran 1y ago
  This is similar to our experience migrating a SadServers k8s service; basically Hetzner is way cheaper and more performant than the big cloud providers BUT you have to take into account man-hours for the migration and be careful with missing services or ancillary tooling: https://docs.sadservers.com/blog/migrating-k8s-out-of-cloud-providers/ https://docs.sadservers.com/blog/migrating-k8s-out-of-cloud-...
• mleonhard 1y ago
  When I used AWS startup credits in 2019, the AWS console made it very difficult to estimate the bill after the credits ran out. I lost a lot of trust in AWS. Also, there were buried mines in the APIs, like the risk of bad logging running up a $70,000/day bill with CloudWatch Logs. If I could go back and do it again, I would rent a single machine and deploy with ssh (git pull & docker-compose up) and backup to my laptop.
• mx7zysuj4xew 1y ago
  DO NOT USE HETZNER they actively seem to hate their customers and will delete all your data at some junior interns whim
• lazylizard 1y ago
  hardware always goes faster. software often goes slower.
• reiz 11mo ago
  First of all, thx for documenting the mogration. That is very interesting. Your monthly bill is smaller now. But how many hours did you invest into the migration? And how many hours more per month do you put in maintenance? I mean you have to take care of security patches now and many more things. You used AWS in the most expensive way. Of course its expensive if you use on demand offering. You can cut costs by using Spot instances for ECS. Another way is by using reserved instances for ECS. If you pay 3 years upfront, you can get discounts up to 75%. That works for ECS and RDS. I'm running ZEIT.IO on AWS and I had similar problems. But I don't want to manage VMs. As soon I have to SSH into something, I have a ton of problems I don't want to deal with.