Not everyone likes wasting money.
Moving away from the US also felt great.
How deep does this go?
So it's a Claude ad inside a Hetzner ad inside a decent grammar ad.
It's worse than Oracle and they don't even use lawyery contracts.
The technology itself is the tendrils.
Recently we had several of our VMs offline because they apparently have these large volume storage pools they were upgrading and suddenly disks died in two large pools. It took them 3 days to resolve.
Hetzner has no integrated option to backup volumes and its roll your own :/ You also can't control volume distribution on their storage nodes for redundancy.
Sure, it cost me £6/mo to serve ONE lambda on AWS (and perhaps 500 requests per month). Sure it was awesome and "proper". But crazy expensive.
I host it now (and 5 similar things) for free on Cloudflare.
But if you need what AWS provides, you'll get that. And that means sometimes it's not the most cost-effective place.
Because with a single-server setup like this, I'd imagine that hardware (e.g. SSD) failure brings down your app, and in the case of SSD failure, you then have hours or days downtime while you set everything up again.
Once the first SSD fails after some years, and your monitoring catches that, you can either migrate to a new box, find another intermediate solution/replica, or let them hotswap it while the other drive takes on.
Of course though, going to physical servers loses redundency of the cloud, but that's something you need to price in when looking at the savings and deciding your risk model.
And yes, running this without also at least daily snapshotting/backup to remote storage is insane - that applies to cloud aswell, albeit easier to setup there.
Yeah. This blog post reads like it was written by someone who didn't think things through and just focused on hyper-agressive cost-cutting.
I bet their DigitalOcean vm did live migrations and supported snapshots.
You can get that at Hetzner but only in their cloud product.
You absolutely will not get that in Hetzner bare-metal. If your HD or other component dies, it dies. Hetzner will replace the HD, but its up to you to restore from scratch. Hetzner are very clear about this in multiple places.
They could, but they didn't and instead they wrote that blog post which, even being generous is still kinda hard to avoid describing as misleading.
I would not have written the post I did if they had presented a multi-node bare-metal cluster or whatever more realistic config.
What do you feel was misleading?
I agree with the other poster, this is fine for a toy site or sites but low quality manual DR isn't good for production.
Not every app needs 24/7 availability. The vast majority of websites out there will not suffer any serious consequences from a few hours of downtime (scheduled or otherwise) every now and then. If the cost savings outweigh the risk, it can be a perfectly reasonable business decision.
A more interesting question would be what kind of backup and recovery strategy they have, and which aspects of it (if any) they had to change when they moved to Hetzner.
Asking the obvious question: why not your own server in a colo?
Then, say if the motherboard gives up, you have to do quite a bit of work to get it replaced, you might be down for hours or maybe days.
For a single server I don't think it makes sense. For 8 servers, maybe. Depends on the opportunity cost.
Have you seen what the LLM crowd have done to server prices ?
The problem with actually owning hardware is that you need a lot of it, and need to be prepared to manage things like upgrading firmware. You need to keep on top of the advisories for your network card, the power unit, the enterprise management card, etc. etc. If something goes wrong someone might need to drive in and plug in a keyboard.
Eventually we admitted to ourselves we didn't want those problems.
I see the DigitalOcean vs Hetzner comparison as a tradeoff that we make in different domains all day long, similar to opening your DoorDash or UberEats instead of making your own dinner(and the cost ratio is similar too).
I work in all 3 major clouds, on-prem, the works. I still head to the DigitalOcean console for bits and pieces type work or proof of concept testing. Sometimes you just want to click a button and the server or bucket or whatever is ready and here's the access info and it has sane defaults and if I need backups or whatnot it's just a checkbox. Your time is worth money too.
You're describing Hetzner Cloud, which has been like this for many years. At least 6.
Hetzner also offers Hetzner Cloud API, which allows us to not have to click any button and just have everything in IaC.
The issue is though, that you loose the managed part of the whole Cloud promise. For ephemeral services this not a big deal, but for persistent stuff like databases where you would like to have your data safe this is kind of an issue because it shifts additional effort (and therefore cost) into your operations team.
For smaller setups (attention shameless self-promotion incoming) I am currently working on https://pellepelster.github.io/solidblocks/cloud/index.html which allows to deploy managed services to the Hetzner Cloud from a Docker-Compose like definition. E.g. a PostgreSQL database with automatic backup and disaster recovery.
They do offer VPS in the US and the value is great. I was seriously looking at moving our academic lab over from AWS but server availability was bad enough to scare me off. They didn't have the instances we needed reliably. Really hoping that calms down.
As such, I doubt the noted price reduction is reproducible. Combine this with Hetzner's sudden deletions of user accounts and services without warning, and it's a bad proposition. Search r/hetzner and r/vps for hetzner for: banned, deleted, terminated; there are many reports. What should stun you even more about it is that Hetzner could ostensibly be closely spying on user data and workloads, even offline workloads, without which they won't even know who to ban.
The only thing that Hetzner might potentially be good for is to add to an expendable distributed compute pool, one that you can afford to lose, but then you might as well also use other bottom-of-the-barrel untrustworthy providers for it, e.g. OVH.
> $1,432 to $233
a difference of 5/6 in price does not materially change the decision to move between providers, even with a 40% price increase
I wish the industry would adopt more zero knowledge methods in this regards. They are existing and mathematically proven but it seems there is no real adoption.
- OpenAI wants my passport when topping up 100 USD
- Bolt wanted recently my passport number to use their service
- Anthropic seems wants to have passports for new users too
- Soon age restriction in OS or on websites
I wished there would be a law (in Europe and/or US) to minify or forbid this kind of identity verification.
I want to support the companies to not allow misuse of their platforms, at the same time my full passport photo is not their concern, especially in B2B business in my opinion.
Cloud is ludicrously marked up.
For backups we use both Velero and application-level backup for critical workloads (i.e. Postgres WAL backups for PITR). We also ensure all state is on at least two nodes for HA.
We also find bare metal to be a lot more performant in general. Compared to AWS we typically see service response times halve. It is not that virtualisation inherently has that much overhead, rather it is everything else. Eg, bare metal offers:
- Reduced disk latency (NVMe vs network block storage)
- Reduced network latency (we run dedicated fibre, so inter-az is about 1/10th the latency)
- Less cache contention, etc [1]
Anyway, if you want to chat about this sometime just ping me an email: adam@ company domain.
[1] I wrote more on this 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45615867
Sounds like from the requirement to live migrate you can't really afford planned downtime, so why are you risking unplanned downtime?
DigitalOcean just absolutely is just not an enterprise solution. Don't trust it with your data.
Oh, and did I mention I had been paying the upcharge for backups the entire time?
Full of scanners, script kiddies and maybe worse.
nixpulvis•1h ago
bingo-bongo•1h ago
One of the new risks is if anything critical happens with the hardware, network, switch etc. then everything is down, until someone at Hetzner go fixes it.
With a virtual server it’ll just get started on a different server straight away. Usually hypervisors also has 2 or more network connections etc.
And hopefully they also got some backup setup.
It’s still a huge amount of of savings and I’d probably do the same of I were in their shoes, but there is tradeoffs when going from virtual- to dedicated hardware.
traceroute66•53m ago
As the other person already said here, this blog post comparison is skewed.
BUT
EU cloud providers are much better value for money than the US providers.
The US providers will happily sit there nickle and diming you, often with deliberately obscure price sheets (hello AWS ;).
EU cloud provider pricing is much clearer and generally you get a lot more bang for your buck than you would with a US provider. Often EU providers will give you stuff for free that US providers would charge you for (e.g. various S3 API calls).
Therefore even if this blog post is skewed and incorrect, the overall argument still stands that you should be seriously looking at Hetzner or Upcloud or Exoscale or Scaleway or any of the other EU providers.
In addition there is the major benefit of not being subject to the US CLOUD and PATRIOT acts. Which despite what the sales-droids will tell you, still applies to the fake-EU provided by the US providers.
electroly•47m ago
Anyone who thinks DO and Hetzner dedicated servers are fungible products is making a mistake. These aren't the same service at all. There are savings to be had but this isn't a direct "unplug DO, plug in Hetzner" situation.
missedthecue•3m ago