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Hetzner certainly has this cult-like following mostly because of their low cost. I assume it is a recent push toward these kind of open frame, super minimalist
by tcdent 11mo ago
Hetzner certainly has this cult-like following mostly because of their low cost.
I assume it is a recent push toward these kind of open frame, super minimalist, consumer hardware based systems (I don't speak german and didn't translate the video).
It looks like they're using lots of consumer hardware and very little redundancy; you'll notice that the power supplies are generic ATX units and they're not doubled up. And then they're also running the onboard networking with a second connection which looks like it's for just a management system. Might not even be 10 gigabit networking.
It's interesting that in an era where almost all of the major players are moving toward cable-free arrangements i.e. backplanes with fully integrated power and networking, etc., they're instead opting for the rat's nest of cabling. It must have something to do with lower labor costs vs hardware costs. The amount of density that they are achieving with those systems is also incredibly low relatively speaking.
- radiator 11mo ago25 Gigabit networking is mentioned in the video. As for the low density, it might have something to do with their mentioned freecooling concept, which does not use cooling machines, but a controlled stream of air coming from outside.
- lifty 11mo agoThis summer their Amsterdam DC went down because of the record breaking temperature in Amsterdam. Wondering if they use the same cooling technique there. They did mention it was because of cooling.
- arend321 11mo agoHetzner does not have a datacenter in Amsterdam https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/general/locations/ https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/general/locations/
- lifty 11mo agoUps, my bad. Confused the incident, it was Scaleway.
- Hetzner_OL 11mo agoYep, this! Thanks for posting our locations. --Katie
- g-mork 11mo agoSame old world thinking.. Google use single PSUs too, real redundancy came from having multiple machines, and Hetzner certainly makes that cheap enough to accomplish on a budget. You can also pay for 10 Gbit as an option with Hetzner, and a bunch of other custom upgrades, but the further you move outside their sweet spot the more it's going to cost.
- showerst 11mo agoI think a lot of the following comes the old-fashioned nature. In an age of hyperscalers that want to sell you a private cloud and full stack certification to make it your job to use their software and want to charge you $500/mo for a server with 64GB of ram and decent bandwidth, Hetzner will just rent you a server, relatively cheap. Amazon has _95 pages_ of EC2 instance types. They have so many products that I literally had to google the name to know what product type to put into the estimator to get a boring server. What's all that data center best practice get you[1], the customer, if it doesn't provide lower prices and higher availability? [1] -- I'm assuming you are not Netflix. After some scale all those crazy AWS services are pretty great to have.
- TiredOfLife 11mo ago> I assume it is a recent push toward these kind of open frame, super minimalist, consumer hardware based systems If by recent you mean that was how Hetzner has been since start (20+ years ago) then yes
- tcdent 11mo agoAgain, I don't speak German, so I'm just watching the video; they have a mix of commodity 1u servers in there as well, so maybe that's their newer stuff?
- littlecranky67 11mo agoThey no longer use consumer grade off-the-shelf hardware. They use their own mainboards (yes, custom layouts due to their unique cooling solution). Checkout the video from Der8auer on youtube.
- zelphirkalt 11mo agoTheir technical support is also quite good, at least in my experience. Any questions I had they easily answered in a way that was easy to understand for me as a technical person. Not sure how it is for a non-technical person. But they might not rent Hetzner.