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Comment by mythz | Hacker News Reader

Been using Hetzner for years, their hardware's has been rock solid, predictable pricing with sweet price/performance ratio resulting in large savings from consolidating existing AWS EC2 instances.

Still using AWS for Apps which rely on cloud features, e.g. SES/RDS/etc but for static servers Hetzner is now our goto.

Super exciting to see them entering the cloud space and offering easy snapshots + backups, should open it to hosting more stuff on there.

The one difference is noticeable latency from their DC in Germany vs the instant response times I was getting from AWS's N.Virgina DC. Would obviously love it if Hetzner could open a DC in the US.

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If they open a DC in the US, then - by the US laws - their US company will have to provide the data even from German DCs when requested by the US government. So it is maybe better not to enter the US...

They could form a separate company to handle US operations only.

OVH tries to do that but I doubt that's waterproof. Probably easier to have an agreement with a US provider.

Having everything in the EU makes it much easier for them and is a selling point for many customers.

A US company can't force a German company to hand out data, I don't see what you mean by "waterproof".

The US government might not agree that they are two separate entities (they're not), and could take action based on that position (e.g. shut down the US company, ask the German government to compel the German company to comply with their laws etc.)

Microsoft has contracted their German Azure region to Deutsche Telekom (which is clearly a separate company) and claims to not be able to access the data. An arrangement similar to this (where basically the brand and technology is used by an actually independent company) could be possible.

Unless the US government slightly extends the law to include also the brands...

Actually, Microsofts challenge is still pending at the Supreme Court, no?

Good point. Maybe if they opened a DC in Greenland or Iceland.

Iceland would theoretically be great, ideal location for US and Europe. But they'd need to lay a cable first, traffic Iceland-US is currently routed through Denmark/UK.

Iceland also has cheap renewable energy. There is the Greenland connect cable¹ built in 2009 that goes from Iceland to Canada. Sounds like it currently has 60GBit/s.

-- ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_Connect

At least when I was in Iceland traffic to the US was never routed through that cable (from traceroutes).

Quebec appears to be the better choice for cheap renewable energy.

That is an Interesting questions, so Canada is currently the best for US citizen if you dont want a DC inside US?

Perhaps Canada could be a location that's beyond US jurisdiction but mostly solves the SoL problem.

Somewhere on their forum (not sure if this has been made public somewhere) they said they're looking to open a datacenter in Finland...

Not sure if that helps with your latency problem or not, but options.... :)

http://www.goodnewsfinland.com/hetzner-sets-foot-finland/

They should start operations this year

I don’t mind the latency. I rent a a large GPU server from them for my own machine learning experiments. Their prices are so reasonably inexpensive that this is affordable. I think it would be more expensive for them to provide the same service in the USA - I base this in pricing. OVH is the only local provider I have used that is somewhat price competitive.

Which plan do you use?

the [EX51-SSD-GPU](https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ex51-ssd-gpu) is the only GPU plan they offer

Thanks! I thougt they didn't have GPU servers.

A fair warning to you: IMMEDIATELY TURN OFF UPDATES FOR THE NVIDIA DRIVER

Since a few weeks ago, Nvidia changes their driver ToS, and any new versions of the driver are not permitted to be used in datacenters (except for crypto mining).

See more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15983587

The terms of service would (potentially) only apply to Hetzner, not to users of Hetzner's services.

The driver ToS apply to whoever installs the driver. That is you, not Hetzner.

You're right. My thinking on that wasn't quite straight.

Nvidia is going to have a difficult time enforcing that in the EU (where Hetzner operates).

That is a good point, but if a US citizen rents a server from Hetzner, they might still be affected. Better safe than sorry.

How do you see Nvidia enforcing it on individuals?

Not necessarily now, but if you decide to turn that little ML project into a startup, staying on the same infrastructure at first, Nvidia might just come after you.

Considering this is HN, it's a pretty safe assumption that people are running these side projects to turn them into startups.

How would they know your startup is doing ML violating their EULAs? I really don't see how this can be a concern for anyone, but very few companies.

Thanks for the heads up. I don;t plan on updating the drivers - everything works fine and hopefully nvidia drivers don’t need security updates.

in my previous gig we used hetzner server to have several VMs and storage of that server failed , resulting that all our production servers went down. luckily we had backups, and restored partially our production, but after that incident we moved everything to DigitalOcean, just to not risk anymore. so our experience was bitter with Hetzner.

Why not go with Hetzner VPSes if you didn't want to deal with dedicated HW anymore? Or are you blaming Hetzner for a hardware failure?

I was just saying that our experience with Hetzner was not as rock solid as others were saying, that's it. Don't understand why some people are downvoting my comment. Also it happened ~6 years ago, so I'm not sure if they offered VPS at all.

I guess the downvotes are because it sounds like you frame a characteristic of the product type as something the vendor did wrong.

Hardware fails, and part of having a dedicated server is that you are directly on top of said hardware and have to be prepared for it to fail.

Yeah, but I didn't write "Hetzner sucks because their disks are failing constantly".

One commenter wrote "Hetzner has an excellent reputation for rock-solid engineering" and as a counterpoint I wanted to tell my anecdote which opposes that "rock-solidness". So for that I get downvotes :)

In retrospect yes, I agree that we had to be prepared for such event, to have failovers and so on.

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