9 ms·

German discount host Hetzner launches new servers

90 points by oellegaard 13y ago

adventured 13y ago
The i7-920 is almost five years old at this point and only clocks a 5k on passmark. Very strange offering. That being said, I'm sure the 4770 is great for Minecraft or as a testing server (lack of ECC ram makes them a bad idea for serious use).
- sspiff 13y ago
  I'm not sure, but isn't the 920 also a lot more power hungry? That could explain the higher price. Or they just quickly whipped up some consumer-grade Haswell servers to offer while working on more reliable offerings of the higher end segments. Hetzner usually discards their old servers on their server bidding robot [1], I'm surprised these 920's haven't been moved there yet. [1] https://robot.your-server.de/order/market https://robot.your-server.de/order/market
- grk 13y ago
  This is most likely a mistake on their site. The i7-920 doesn't even support this much RAM. For >32GB it has to be some kind of xeon, maybe sandy bridge E.
  - oddx 13y ago
    i7-920 works with 48GB http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/313665-30-48gb#4425619 http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/313665-30-48gb#4425619
- hannibal5 13y ago
  Is Amazon using EEC ram in their servers? Has anyone ever asked if they do?
  - theatrus2 13y ago
    Amazon runs nothing but Xeons and Opterons, which require the use of ECC memory.
    - hannibal5 13y ago
      Xeons support both EEC and non-EEC ram. It' depends on the north bridge chipset on the motherboard if you must use EEC. Some Opterons require EEC, some don't.
      - buryat 13y ago
        It doesn't depend on the north bridge, since Xeons and Opterons have memory controller inside itself.
    - hannibal5 13y ago
      I became interested of finding the answer. It seems that answer is no. http://serverfault.com/questions/433221/does-amazon-ec2-and-rds-have-ecc-memory http://serverfault.com/questions/433221/does-amazon-ec2-and-... >AWS does not comment on this question. The general consensus (based on seeing this question asked on SO, HackerNews, Reddit and so on) is that, unless AWS specifically tells you the instance type is running ECC memory, you should assume it is not. >Although unscientific and inconclusive I suppose this makes sense - ECC is a selling point, and the fact that AWS does not plaster "all our instances run ECC" on their info pages certainly suggests that they are not.
      - bbgm 13y ago
        (My team owns product management for the Amazon EC2 instance platform) I wanted to clear up all the confusion on this topic and am cross-posting on other threads where this has come up recently. All the hardware underlying Amazon EC2 uses ECC memory. In our experience ECC is a necessary requirement for server infrastructure. We will be updating our detail pages/FAQs with that information.
antirez 13y ago
Be prepared to incredibly unreliable disks. Or better, ask for new disks for your box, even if this will require some additional cost. Clarification: I had bad experiences with disk reliability, I told different friends, that in turn had very bad experiences including multiple disks in RAID breaking in the same time range.
- sspiff 13y ago
  What makes you say this? I've been running on Hetzner for about half a year now, no issues so far.
  - carlio 13y ago
    Presumably his bad experiences make him say this.
    - sspiff 13y ago
      He only added this clarification after I asked, so my question is not as redundant as it would seem.
  - gmac 13y ago
    My 2¢: I've been on Hetzner for a few months, experimentally, and the sporadic 'offline uncorrectable sector' emails I'm getting from smartd are making me nervous.
  - FooBarWidget 13y ago
    Maybe you're not stressing your disks enough. I recently setup a database server and a disk broke (as in becoming unaccessible, not just bad sectors) within a day.
    - annnnd 13y ago
      I seem to recall a research by Google which concluded that stress is not really an important factor in disk reliability... Can't find a link now though. Of course, that doesn't make parent's claim any more true; just pointing out that this is probably not the reason.
runarb 13y ago
That is some impressive pricing. 32 GB ram, 20 TB Traffic at 49€ / month is cheap. Is there any way of getting VMware or Xen on thus? I have a project ( http://www.opentestsearch.com/ http://www.opentestsearch.com/ ) that currently uses 9 small virtual machines, running some different operating systems and software that can't easily run on the same server. Currently colo has been the only viable option. Cloud servers would be too expensive and no cheap dedicated host I know about support virtualizations systems like VMware or Xen.
- sspiff 13y ago
  Not sure about Xen or VMWare, but I use their auto-installer for getting Ubuntu on their servers, after which you can just install KVM.
  - runarb 13y ago
    Unfortunately I also need some Windows servers :( But running the Linux ones on one server, and the two Windows ones somewhere else is of course an option.
    - sspiff 13y ago
      You could probably install Ubuntu, install xen-hypervisor on it and use that Ubuntu as your Dom0. Haven't tried though.
- tiernano 13y ago
  You can install anything you want on them. Ask them to attach Lara (their KMVoIP system) and give them the ISO to boot the machine... I had VMWare on one of these boxes previously, and they had the installer up and running for me within an hour or so of asking...
- oellegaard 13y ago
  I successfully ran ESXi on it, without any issues. I had burn the image and insert it into the server, had to pay a small fee for that, but nothing noteworthy. I think I had to get a different NIC as well, an Intel one, costed like 30 eur or something like that.
WA 13y ago
Currently, I rent a managed server from Hetzner for my SaaS business. However, it has some limitations and I'm thinking about switching to a root server. Thing is, I don't want to deal with security and updates and administration and that stuff. Can anyone recommend a solution? Is there a good software that works as good as their managed version, e. g. keeps itself updated and has a more or less tight security package out of the box? Or do I need to hire a system administrator? I do have some Linux/command line skills, but I don't want to put a lot of time in it.
- sgift 13y ago
  If you want a root server hire an admin. Especially if you want a root server from Hetzner. We had two incidents where our machine either lost power because of a problem in the datacenter or was shut down outside of a predefined service window. Hetzners reaction to the resulting problems* was that they won't do anything because it is a root server. They didn't care that they were the source of the problem. We changed the hoster afterwards. * First time was only a hanging connection to the server, because the machine was still performing disk checks (they didn't tell us that, we had to request local access), second time the hdd crashed and we learned the hard way that they are unable to configure a software raid properly (but tell you that the root servers are preconfigured with raid), which resulted in a complete data loss. External backups saved us here.
  - kbar13 13y ago
    three thing you need to always expect when dealing with a provider who hosts your stuff: 1) offsite backups 2) potential that things go sideways during maintenance 3) offsite backups Them external backups are always worth the cost!
    - annnnd 13y ago
      I think you forgot another one: 4) offsite backups
ksec 13y ago
Ok, i am going to ask, any reason to go with Hetzner when your have OVH's DC in Canada offering similar if not better Server for more or less the same price?
- babuskov 13y ago
  If your customers are in Europe and you want everything to be fast.
- gaadd33 13y ago
  I've seen a lot of posts on various hosting forums that OVH's Canadian offering is pretty subpar as far as reliability of the network goes. One report (admittedly I think it was a bit old) showed a traceroute that went from Canada to Europe then back to where the user was. Perhaps that's all been fixed now though.
  - comatose_kid 13y ago
    happy OVH (Canada) customer here - good price, good h/w, no problems so far (just one box so definitely on the anecdotal side)
- tokyovapr 13y ago
  I don't see anything from OVH that comes close to an i7 with 32GB RAM for the price of Hetzner. Am I missing something?
rmoriz 13y ago
duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6042442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6042442
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
hackerboos 13y ago
Pity Hetzner's policy on user submitted content is really strict. A single malicious user can get all of your servers take offline for 'breach of terms'.
- nodata 13y ago
  cite?
  - hackerboos 13y ago
    http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/legal/agb http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/legal/agb Sections 6 and 7
  - dsl 13y ago
    If any abuse complaint goes 24 hours without a response your server will be powered down. If you are hosting user generated content that will generate a lot of complaints, you need to be responsive.
- codesuela 13y ago
  they usally give you 24hrs to fix it
DCoder 13y ago
Be careful and ask support to confirm all the software in your stack will be runnable. We tried to launch an SQL Server (MSSQL) -backed system on one of their root servers and their support said "the Windows licenses we use do not allow installing MSSQL - you will have to buy your own licenses for Windows and SQL Server".
- gaadd33 13y ago
  You need a special version of windows to run MSSQL? In any case, isn't it normally the customer's responsibility to provide licenses for software they install and run?
  - DCoder 13y ago
    It appears I misremembered this a little bit - the issue was with license ownership, not license type. The answer we got from Hetzner support was: " we don't offer MSSQL licenses, if you want it you need your own license for MSSQL and also for Windows server 2008 R2, because you can't use your own licenses with our Windows license. " And yes, it is reasonable to expect the customer to provide the licenses for the software, but hosting companies can also sell monthly software usage to their customers - we ended up choosing a host that did exactly this. The monthly cost we pay for Windows + MSSQL will not reach the total cost of a full MSSQL license for three years.
    - gaadd33 13y ago
      Oh I didn't know that Microsoft changed their licensing to allow that, I was under the impression that only select partners (Amazon, et al) were large enough and Microsoft cared enough about to permit that.
moreentropy 13y ago
As today seems to be advertising day, I'll plug HostEurope, http://www.hosteurope.de/ http://www.hosteurope.de/, another large german datacenter operator from Cologne. I've got a virtual server running there flawlessly for the last five years. Customer service is amazing (all communication is english and german), and I can only remeber one single downtime for a few hours in all the years.
thejosh 13y ago
This was on the frontpage just 13 hours ago... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6042442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6042442
- runarb 13y ago
  Looks like hn do distinguish between http and https in submissions. This thread is about the same Hetzner page as the other thread, only the old thread was about the https url. This: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ex http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr... Old: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ex http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr...
  - LogicX 13y ago
    FTFY: This: https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ex https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-p... Old: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ex http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr...
thomaslutz 13y ago
Did anyone benchmark the SSDs yet?
krembo 13y ago
Can anyone name any big sites hosted on Hetzner datacenters?

90 points by oellegaard 13y ago

The i7-920 is almost five years old at this point and only clocks a 5k on passmark. Very strange offering. That being said, I'm sure the 4770 is great for Minecraft or as a testing server (lack of ECC ram makes them a bad idea for serious use).

sspiff 13y ago
I'm not sure, but isn't the 920 also a lot more power hungry? That could explain the higher price. Or they just quickly whipped up some consumer-grade Haswell servers to offer while working on more reliable offerings of the higher end segments. Hetzner usually discards their old servers on their server bidding robot [1], I'm surprised these 920's haven't been moved there yet. [1] https://robot.your-server.de/order/market https://robot.your-server.de/order/market
grk 13y ago
This is most likely a mistake on their site. The i7-920 doesn't even support this much RAM. For >32GB it has to be some kind of xeon, maybe sandy bridge E.
- oddx 13y ago
  i7-920 works with 48GB http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/313665-30-48gb#4425619 http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/313665-30-48gb#4425619
hannibal5 13y ago
Is Amazon using EEC ram in their servers? Has anyone ever asked if they do?
- theatrus2 13y ago
  Amazon runs nothing but Xeons and Opterons, which require the use of ECC memory.
  - hannibal5 13y ago
    Xeons support both EEC and non-EEC ram. It' depends on the north bridge chipset on the motherboard if you must use EEC. Some Opterons require EEC, some don't.
    - buryat 13y ago
      It doesn't depend on the north bridge, since Xeons and Opterons have memory controller inside itself.
  - hannibal5 13y ago
    I became interested of finding the answer. It seems that answer is no. http://serverfault.com/questions/433221/does-amazon-ec2-and-rds-have-ecc-memory http://serverfault.com/questions/433221/does-amazon-ec2-and-... >AWS does not comment on this question. The general consensus (based on seeing this question asked on SO, HackerNews, Reddit and so on) is that, unless AWS specifically tells you the instance type is running ECC memory, you should assume it is not. >Although unscientific and inconclusive I suppose this makes sense - ECC is a selling point, and the fact that AWS does not plaster "all our instances run ECC" on their info pages certainly suggests that they are not.
    - bbgm 13y ago
      (My team owns product management for the Amazon EC2 instance platform) I wanted to clear up all the confusion on this topic and am cross-posting on other threads where this has come up recently. All the hardware underlying Amazon EC2 uses ECC memory. In our experience ECC is a necessary requirement for server infrastructure. We will be updating our detail pages/FAQs with that information.

antirez 13y ago

Be prepared to incredibly unreliable disks. Or better, ask for new disks for your box, even if this will require some additional cost. Clarification: I had bad experiences with disk reliability, I told different friends, that in turn had very bad experiences including multiple disks in RAID breaking in the same time range.

sspiff 13y ago
What makes you say this? I've been running on Hetzner for about half a year now, no issues so far.
- carlio 13y ago
  Presumably his bad experiences make him say this.
  - sspiff 13y ago
    He only added this clarification after I asked, so my question is not as redundant as it would seem.
- gmac 13y ago
  My 2¢: I've been on Hetzner for a few months, experimentally, and the sporadic 'offline uncorrectable sector' emails I'm getting from smartd are making me nervous.
- FooBarWidget 13y ago
  Maybe you're not stressing your disks enough. I recently setup a database server and a disk broke (as in becoming unaccessible, not just bad sectors) within a day.
  - annnnd 13y ago
    I seem to recall a research by Google which concluded that stress is not really an important factor in disk reliability... Can't find a link now though. Of course, that doesn't make parent's claim any more true; just pointing out that this is probably not the reason.

runarb 13y ago

That is some impressive pricing. 32 GB ram, 20 TB Traffic at 49€ / month is cheap. Is there any way of getting VMware or Xen on thus? I have a project ( http://www.opentestsearch.com/ http://www.opentestsearch.com/ ) that currently uses 9 small virtual machines, running some different operating systems and software that can't easily run on the same server. Currently colo has been the only viable option. Cloud servers would be too expensive and no cheap dedicated host I know about support virtualizations systems like VMware or Xen.

sspiff 13y ago
Not sure about Xen or VMWare, but I use their auto-installer for getting Ubuntu on their servers, after which you can just install KVM.
- runarb 13y ago
  Unfortunately I also need some Windows servers :( But running the Linux ones on one server, and the two Windows ones somewhere else is of course an option.
  - sspiff 13y ago
    You could probably install Ubuntu, install xen-hypervisor on it and use that Ubuntu as your Dom0. Haven't tried though.
tiernano 13y ago
You can install anything you want on them. Ask them to attach Lara (their KMVoIP system) and give them the ISO to boot the machine... I had VMWare on one of these boxes previously, and they had the installer up and running for me within an hour or so of asking...
oellegaard 13y ago
I successfully ran ESXi on it, without any issues. I had burn the image and insert it into the server, had to pay a small fee for that, but nothing noteworthy. I think I had to get a different NIC as well, an Intel one, costed like 30 eur or something like that.

WA 13y ago

Currently, I rent a managed server from Hetzner for my SaaS business. However, it has some limitations and I'm thinking about switching to a root server. Thing is, I don't want to deal with security and updates and administration and that stuff. Can anyone recommend a solution? Is there a good software that works as good as their managed version, e. g. keeps itself updated and has a more or less tight security package out of the box? Or do I need to hire a system administrator? I do have some Linux/command line skills, but I don't want to put a lot of time in it.

sgift 13y ago
If you want a root server hire an admin. Especially if you want a root server from Hetzner. We had two incidents where our machine either lost power because of a problem in the datacenter or was shut down outside of a predefined service window. Hetzners reaction to the resulting problems* was that they won't do anything because it is a root server. They didn't care that they were the source of the problem. We changed the hoster afterwards. * First time was only a hanging connection to the server, because the machine was still performing disk checks (they didn't tell us that, we had to request local access), second time the hdd crashed and we learned the hard way that they are unable to configure a software raid properly (but tell you that the root servers are preconfigured with raid), which resulted in a complete data loss. External backups saved us here.
- kbar13 13y ago
  three thing you need to always expect when dealing with a provider who hosts your stuff: 1) offsite backups 2) potential that things go sideways during maintenance 3) offsite backups Them external backups are always worth the cost!
  - annnnd 13y ago
    I think you forgot another one: 4) offsite backups

ksec 13y ago

Ok, i am going to ask, any reason to go with Hetzner when your have OVH's DC in Canada offering similar if not better Server for more or less the same price?

babuskov 13y ago
If your customers are in Europe and you want everything to be fast.
gaadd33 13y ago
I've seen a lot of posts on various hosting forums that OVH's Canadian offering is pretty subpar as far as reliability of the network goes. One report (admittedly I think it was a bit old) showed a traceroute that went from Canada to Europe then back to where the user was. Perhaps that's all been fixed now though.
- comatose_kid 13y ago
  happy OVH (Canada) customer here - good price, good h/w, no problems so far (just one box so definitely on the anecdotal side)
tokyovapr 13y ago
I don't see anything from OVH that comes close to an i7 with 32GB RAM for the price of Hetzner. Am I missing something?

rmoriz 13y ago

duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6042442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6042442

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

hackerboos 13y ago

Pity Hetzner's policy on user submitted content is really strict. A single malicious user can get all of your servers take offline for 'breach of terms'.

nodata 13y ago
cite?
- hackerboos 13y ago
  http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/legal/agb http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/legal/agb Sections 6 and 7
- dsl 13y ago
  If any abuse complaint goes 24 hours without a response your server will be powered down. If you are hosting user generated content that will generate a lot of complaints, you need to be responsive.
codesuela 13y ago
they usally give you 24hrs to fix it

DCoder 13y ago

Be careful and ask support to confirm all the software in your stack will be runnable. We tried to launch an SQL Server (MSSQL) -backed system on one of their root servers and their support said "the Windows licenses we use do not allow installing MSSQL - you will have to buy your own licenses for Windows and SQL Server".

gaadd33 13y ago
You need a special version of windows to run MSSQL? In any case, isn't it normally the customer's responsibility to provide licenses for software they install and run?
- DCoder 13y ago
  It appears I misremembered this a little bit - the issue was with license ownership, not license type. The answer we got from Hetzner support was: " we don't offer MSSQL licenses, if you want it you need your own license for MSSQL and also for Windows server 2008 R2, because you can't use your own licenses with our Windows license. " And yes, it is reasonable to expect the customer to provide the licenses for the software, but hosting companies can also sell monthly software usage to their customers - we ended up choosing a host that did exactly this. The monthly cost we pay for Windows + MSSQL will not reach the total cost of a full MSSQL license for three years.
  - gaadd33 13y ago
    Oh I didn't know that Microsoft changed their licensing to allow that, I was under the impression that only select partners (Amazon, et al) were large enough and Microsoft cared enough about to permit that.

moreentropy 13y ago

As today seems to be advertising day, I'll plug HostEurope, http://www.hosteurope.de/ http://www.hosteurope.de/, another large german datacenter operator from Cologne. I've got a virtual server running there flawlessly for the last five years. Customer service is amazing (all communication is english and german), and I can only remeber one single downtime for a few hours in all the years.

thejosh 13y ago

This was on the frontpage just 13 hours ago... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6042442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6042442

runarb 13y ago
Looks like hn do distinguish between http and https in submissions. This thread is about the same Hetzner page as the other thread, only the old thread was about the https url. This: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ex http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr... Old: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ex http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr...
- LogicX 13y ago
  FTFY: This: https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ex https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-p... Old: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ex http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr...

thomaslutz 13y ago

Did anyone benchmark the SSDs yet?

krembo 13y ago

Can anyone name any big sites hosted on Hetzner datacenters?