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Comment by glogla | Hacker News Reader

The author writes about spinning virtual machine from Linode.

There's one cool alternative I found: Hetzner Online[1] leases dedicated hardware that their other customers stopped using or ordered but didn't use, etc. It is in form of reverse auction - unused hardware gets cheaper until someone rents it.

You can get i7-3770 server with 2x3 TB disks and 16 GB RAM for 32 EUR per month. That's not much more money than linode, but it is much beefier and just your (but no SSD). If you pay more you can get something like i7-3770 with 32 GB RAM, 2x3 TB disks and 2x240 GB SSD for 65 EUR a month.

The servers are in Germany, which might be interesting for Europeans who are wary of US cloud companies.

I'm not affiliated with them in any way, I just find their offer cool.

[1]: https://robot.your-server.de/order/market/

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Exactly. I found a similar configuration for 26eur a month on their server bidding platform. Besides smaller projects and demo/staging instances for clients I get almost 3Tb of "cloud storage" by running owncloud for the price. Even when I payed double for the same hardware I couldn't understand the appeal of heroku. Setting up a web and database server as well as stuff like redis and message queues is not some arcane art. Plus it's much easier to troubleshoot performance problems when you have full control over the environment.

For many kinds of tiny one-off hobbyist projects, why bother with servers or dynos at all?

Couldn't help but wonder if the (valid) cost and performance problems the author has with heroku will end up pushing devs faster to Backend-as-a-Service platforms like Parse, Firebase, or something like Amazon Mobile Hub (Lambda on Rails?).

(Note: not affiliated with any of these platforms, etc. Just a lazy mobile developer with lots of things that never make it to the app store.)

Was Hetzner not the company that stored the customers password in plaintext a few years back? Since I am not entirely sure on this please correct me if I am wrong.

But the prices are nice, thanks for posting this. Would love to use dedicated hardware but suspect that i am too dumb to secure my box good enough and end up in a botnet or as a spam server.

I've been using them for 5 years and never heard of this. They did start to offer 2 step auth recently.

Can confirm - I've been using Hetzner for over 2 years now with no problems. I serve quite a large amount of traffic on an EX40 (it was costing me a fortune when I was with AWS).

Although a company I worked for had a Hetzner server where 3 out 4 of the hard disks failed. So it might be wise to do regular backups off-site.

This was most probably due to shitty Seagate harddrives, the ST3000DM001 which are failing left, right and center...

Quote:

Beginning in January 2012, Backblaze deployed 4,829 Seagate 3TB hard drives, model ST3000DM001, into Backblaze Storage Pods. In our experience, 80% of the hard drives we deploy will function at least 4 years. As of March 31, 2015, just 10% of the Seagate 3TB drives deployed in 2012 are still in service

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/3tb-hard-drive-failure/

Edit: They (Hetzner) have since long stopped putting those drives into servers and if such a HDD shows signs of failure they're replaced by support no questions asked...

Nice! Great suggestion :)

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