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Comment by nik736 | Hacker News Reader

I'm from Germany but Online.net is the way better alternative to Hetzner for me. Server grade hardware, cheaper, no compromises, internal network, etc. etc. I think they even hired a lot new support people recently so you get an answer pretty fast. Hetzner always has this "cheap feeling" even though the hardware looks good on paper.

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I'm in the UK and have used Hetzner for servers for a few years. I've found them to be extremely responsive for support and remarkably good value. (Also, not being locked in to a 6-12 month contract is great.)

But I'll check out online.net, so thanks for that ;)

Tbh it's been the oposite for me.

Had a few machines on hetzner for years and rarely had issues. The few issues i had with them i got fast replies.

I did try online.net few years ago and had a lot of network issues (it wasn't stable, kinda like when you have a misconfigured vps and your neighbour is eating all the bandwidth at times). Have they improved on that?

You can get server grade hardware with the PX line at Hetzner, which is a bit more expensive of course. And an internal network is possible as well from what I read, though you have to pay for the Flexi pack because it counts as a modification of your server.

The internal network is a joke, it only works if you have all of your servers in one rack and you need to rent a switch to connect all of them. Online.net has a real RPN where you can add SAN storage to it etc etc.

The PX line is a Fujitsu Desktop PC with a server CPU and ECC Ram. For me that's a compromise I don't really like.

Also the network is a bit shitty since they don't route through DTAG (largest german carrier), you have to pay a premium so that they activate it for you, and that's only one thing that feels weird about Hetzner. Of course I understand the reasoning behind it, but still, why should I choose Hetzner if I can get a way better solution from Online.net?

If you need xx TB storage servers then you will not find any cheaper hardware + storage + network option in EU than in hetzner. I have storage servers there.

That's true, I agree. If you just need cheap storage Hetzner is probably the way to go.

On the other hand, if you need 24x 1 TB SSD storage with a 10gbit RPN connection: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CblcJ2pUUAAtbhK.jpg :-)

Are those R730XD's, or SC4020's? Can't tell from the pic. Either way, super cool!

Apparently R730(XD): https://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-st24-ssd

Yep, true. I use a used dedicated server for backup with FreeBSD w/ ZFS and 2 3 TB disks in mirrored ZFS. I pay 36 EUR/m for this setup. I think you must be lucky to get a similar setup for the same price from online.net.

regarding DTAG it's wrong (or outdated ?), we have a peering through HOPUS (hopus.net) since a few months with them :

  mma@duvel:(~) mtr -rwc4 93.210.14.100
  Start: Thu Sep  1 12:45:41 2016   
  HOST: duvel                            Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev  
    1.|-- 62.210.128.13                     0.0%     4    0.3   0.3   0.3   0.4   0.0  
    2.|-- 195.154.1.20                      0.0%     4    0.4   0.4   0.3   0.4   0.0  
    3.|-- 195.154.1.16                      0.0%     4    0.8   0.8   0.7   0.9   0.0  
    4.|-- lag-online-1.dc3-1.rt.hopus.net   0.0%     4    0.4   0.4   0.4   0.5   0.0  
    5.|-- lag-pop-dc3-2.dc3-1.rt.hopus.net  0.0%     4    9.1   2.8   0.4   9.1   4.2  
    6.|-- lag-pop-std-1.dc3-1.rt.hopus.net  0.0%     4    0.7   0.9   0.7   1.5   0.0  
    7.|-- 62.159.61.37                      0.0%     4    1.7   2.8   1.7   4.5   1.2  
    8.|-- 62.159.99.230                     0.0%     4   22.1  22.0  22.0  22.1   0.0  
    9.|-- 87.186.202.209                    0.0%     4   22.9  22.9  22.9  22.9   0.0  
   10.|-- p5DD20E64.dip0.t-ipconnect.de     0.0%     4   48.5 119.1  48.3 329.9 140.6

Mik (Network Manager Online.net)

I was talking about the Hetzner network, not yours :-)

ho sorry, misread you :)

> Also the network is a bit shitty since they don't route through DTAG (largest german carrier)

Because DTAG is a bunch of <insert choice swear word here>. What they did and continue to do to site/net ops, is amounting to extortion. It's good that Hetzner stands up to Telekom, lots of other net ops simply pay the extortion fee.

Yes, I agree, but as a customer that sucks. The customer is the one who suffers, Hetzner is the one who wins coz they don't have to pay.

The main reason why we migrated our servers from Hetzner to OVH is Hetzner's hard drive policy. Basically, if one of your drives fails, they will swap it for… another failing drive. You will keep getting various refurbished or re-tested drives. Basically, if it passes their test, it is considered a good drive, even if SMART shows a history of errors.

Obviously, these drives do not last very long, so you end up with hardware that fails more and more often as time passes. Makes you look bad in front of customers.

I guess it's a matter of pricing — Hetzner is relatively cheap, and you get what you pay for. But you should know what you're getting.

You can pay around €50 to get a new drive - and you can skip the proof that the drive failed or is failing. For us we always choose this option as soon as we see SMART problems arising. Even with occasional drive failures the overall costs are so much lower than cloud hosting or self-owned hardware.

Looks much better than Hetzner.

What caught my eye is, if you scroll down long enough on dedicated servers page [1], you will eventually see GaaS - "Geek As A Service". This made me giggle far more than I am wiling to admit :)

[1]: https://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server

I just compared both services to find a new VPS provider and decided in favour of Hetzner. Why do you think online.net looks better? My main problem with online was the poor IOPS performance due to non-local SSDs. But maybe my test was just on the wrong node?

The one that completely solidified my love for Online.net was last April 1st. They had an additional option "Selfie - €0.00" when ordering a server

https://console.online.net/en/server/selfie/Al5dpTp6Awp3

Back when I tried them Online.net's international network was significantly worse than OVH.

Their support was responsive but ultimately unable to do anything.

online.net kicked us out for using too much of an unmetered network connection.

May I ask how much you used? Did they offer throttling or gave warning at least?

nope, nothing. it was something like 45 tb

My personal experience with Hetzner is also mixed, two of the four servers we had had disk failures a few months into the contract. Luckily you are only bound for a month. The other two servers on the other hand are great - a good price for powerful hardware and fast support.

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.online.ne...

why is this downvoted? This is a valid concern... why trust a hosting company which cannot handle SSL well enough?

I've spent a lot of time pricing low end hardware and online.net is currently the winner for cores and ram per dollar. Unfortunately for me their servers are not on the same continent as my customers.

Looked pretty good untill I saw the €30/mo for windows licensing :( I pay €7,50 for the same windows license @ TransIP; wonder why there is such a big difference (Windows 2012 R2 Standard)

They allow you to install your own windows license to avoid that recurring license fee. We use a (non-public) server there for internal development and use an MSDN license on that. It involved a one time 25€ fee for their involvement in the setup process.

But whats their policy on DDoS? Since this is the topic you are posting this on just saying Hetzner "feels cheap" doesn't make that any less important.

what the heck:

    VPS VC1 S - €2.99 /month
    2 x86 cores	2 GB	200 Mbit/s	50 GB SSD

That is really cheap.

That's on Intel Atom processors and a network-SSD though. I guess sharing the SSD is what makes it so cheap.

it actually gets the same requests per second than my hetzner instance which costs 2 € more per month, which is a lot in this price range.

I'd not seen the Scaleway hosting/VPS range before, so thanks for pointing to Online.net.

How does OVH compare to the above two?

In some cases cheaper. Often lower setup fees. You can choose to have your setup fee split over your first 6 months.

On the other hand their support is not great. I've heard it's all PC-grade hardware rather than server-grade. They complain Canonical tried to charge them out the backside for Ubuntu licensing when in reality it'd be nothing if they'd stop using a modified, unsupported and un-maintained Ubuntu derivative.

Hit or miss really, depends what you're after and what you're personally ok with.

Have you been using online.net for long? Their offer looks interesting except for availability rate 99.5%. That's almost 4 hours of downtime every month. within availability range.

I have couple of dedicated servers there. No downtime. But i had problems with support when one of hard drives was EOL and was causing problems. They launched with Live CD and said that everything is fine, i needed to show them logs from dedicated hp raid software and after that they replaced the hard drive. Overall besides that one incident i had no problems at all.

Yes, for several years. I am also using Scaleway (their bare metal cloud) which is dirt cheap, you get a 8 Core Atom (4000 Passmark score) with 32 GB Ram and a 250 GB direct attached SSD for 22 EUR / month.

You can get more uptime (99.95%), more IPs, better and faster support with their business service (35 EUR / month).

They have very competitive pricing and I haven't had major issues with them, polite and fast support as well.

The only thing that rubbed me the wrong way is that they downright refuse to delete your credit card from their system when you terminate your (fully paid) account.

Yes, such shenanigans suck.

But they are not the only ones (not that this makes it good)... Linode did the same to me, I asked kindly after their latest data breach and they refused to do so.

Tell your card issuer. That should get their attention quite promptly.

Checking billing I've had my longest server there since 2014-06-02 so just over 2 years.

In that time I've had* one network issue < 1 hr and one instance where the server rebooted unexpectedly. Any other downtime has been either on purpose by me or accidentally by my hand. I can't even recall any scheduled maintenance that's taken my server offline.

* That I've noticed in my elsewhere-hosted monitoring.

My only complaint if I can even call it that is that the price of the server doesn't keep up with the specs they're selling - i.e. if you can get a server with <x> resources for cheaper than my server with <x-1> resources my price should come down to avoid me churning it). Having said that I don't know anywhere that actually does that and for reliability reasons it's probably better to cycle machines out when they get old enough for it to be worth the savings.

So they're willing to provide a SLA with 4 hrs of downtime every month. This does not however mean that you will have 4 hrs of down-time per mont - it's a managed risk.

Also, depending on the nature of your application, you can often get away with that kind of downtime. Something trivial (yet extremely popular) like Twitter had lots of down-time and it made the users love the service even more.

Huh, never heard of that. Care to explain how that happened?

The claim that downtime "made the users love the service even more" is probably a stretch, but Twitter's error page became a bit of a phenomenon in its own right for a while:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/the-st...

I think the main lesson here is that your error messages are part of your UX and need to be treated as such.

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