I wish they would go public.
Would be very interesting to see how their business is doing compared to IONOS and OVH.
We need more public cloud companies in Europe.
I wish that they'll just keep on running a good profitable business without going public, or getting bought by Amazon, or otherwise shifting focus to providing shareholder value.
If they go public they will be bought by foreign private equity.
Private companies are inherently less social since they don’t allow ordinary people to participate in growth.
In this sense, they’re selfish.
PS: yes I know that there are also downsides to public companies. But looking at the trade-offs I prefer that success can be shared as broadly as possible.
(Also - might your "allow ordinary people to participate" sympathies extend to people who would like to participate in your own financial affairs?)
Selfish VC becoming filthy rich through an IPO is exactly my point. Up to an IPO a private company will only make their owners rich - in your example "selfish vulture capitalists".
After an IPO anyone can participate. When Google, Amazon, Apple went public, VCs got rich. Everyone after that included every day people like you and me.
After that - X's best assets are sold off (the VC's get the money), X goes deeply into debt (again, the VC's get the money), many of the employees are laid off, and X generally goes bankrupt within 7 years - because what is left of it can't make the payments on the debt.
Sounds like the selfish vulture capitalists are the insiders who sell the company.
>X's best assets are sold off (the VC's get the money), X goes deeply into debt (again, the VC's get the money), many of the employees are laid off, and X generally goes bankrupt within 7 years - because what is left of it can't make the payments on the debt.
This doesn't make any sense, because X is the original asset. If part of X is sold, then the remaining portion of X loses value (assuming the sold part is the good part). If X is used as collateral, then it also loses value.
They can also choose enshittification, but they are not pressured into it like companies with institutional investors are.
As a Hetzner customer, I would lose out if they went public.
some ordinary people who worked hard and made it happened: founders and early workers, usually rewarded very well
Consider two possibilities. The first is, if you want to make money in an industry, you start a company in it. Lots of people start companies because lots of people want to make money and then there are lots of companies, causing the profits to be widely distributed.
The second is, if you want to make money in an industry, you buy shares of an existing company. You have to buy them from whoever currently owns it, so the ones who got in early become billionaires, meanwhile even if an ordinary person were to invest their entire net worth they wouldn't even own 1% of the company so they have so little influence over it that it isn't even worth their time to vote their shares, and therefore have no influence over it at all. But you still make some profit while not having to actually do the work of building a company, so more people do that instead of entering the market themselves and then there are fewer companies that are each bigger.
The second one leads to market consolidation and concentration of wealth and power, so which one is actually less social?
For further comparison, Google at a similar latitude in Saint-Ghislain, Belgium, claims 1.08.
> PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) measures datacenter efficiency - it's total facility power divided by IT equipment power. A perfect 1.0 means all power goes to servers; higher numbers mean more waste on cooling/overhead. OVH's 1.24 vs Hetzner's 1.11 means OVH burns 24% extra power on non-IT stuff, hurting margins since electricity is their main cost. Google hits 1.08 at similar latitude.
Going public usually means unlocking funding, so they could grow business, build more services, compete with say OVH or if some hyperscaler will decide to step into this niche.
I just migrated my selfhosted email server to Hetzner and I don't want them turning into monstrosity like AWS or Azure, with theit miriad of ways to nickel and dime the customers.
If you are not desperate for one specific offering of IONOS, that Hetzner doesn't offer, and you have any other options, there is no good and justifiable reason to go for IONOS. IONOS is a low effort, low quality, high marketing spend shop. Hetzner is almost the opposite. They don't waste money on advertising, they cost much less to rent servers from, their OS images work, they got good technical support.
I would say decidedly yes for Hetzner. Mittelstand can somewhat be characterized by size, but it's mostly that they are more like a family, have different values and more long term thinking than the larger industry and public companies. It's also kind of a brand that many companies would like to attribute to themselves, even much larger companies that like that seal of quality.
Robot is a brutally functional tool but it does function (well) and had zero issues.
I like brutally functional it just needs to get me to SSH and I'm good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2P8mjWRqpk
The second is especially interesting as it demonstrates Hetzner's unique semi-custom hardware.
At least they're not as bad as Azure... :)
You can then just put an allow rule between arbitrary v6 addresses anywhere on the internet when you need connectivity without any other hacks like proxies, NAT, etc and the associated complexity and addressing ambiguity/context dependence of rfc1918 addresses.
So fex you can just curl or ssh to your mycontainer.mydomain.net or you can put an allow rule from mycontainer.mydomain.net to a vm or laptop on your home network.
Internetworking, they call it.
"Internal" is a context dependent term that you introduced. But to give a use case for that, for example you might want to have (maybe at a future date) two hosts on your networks on AWS and Hetzner talk to each other, still without allowing public connectivity.
If your containers have a Global Unicast Address then it's possible to look at connetion logs and figure out which container made a particular request, for instance.
Are you also afraid of port forwarding? Have you considered that your ISP could choose to send your router packets destined for RFC1918 addresses?
In Hetzner's specific case: they won't give me one or more additional /72s: only a /56 if I pay for it. Per server.
You can save additional 0,50€ if you go with only IPv6.
Maybe it's location dependent, I can't get it to show me prices for US.
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.
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.
If by recent you mean that was how Hetzner has been since start (20+ years ago) then yes
Freak_NL•2mo ago
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/606528332#map=13/50.46220/...