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Comment by humanbeinc | Hacker News Reader

Have been a customer for years now... they're one of the really innovative hosters from Germany with dead cheap competitive pricing...

Also their new cloud options are top notch.

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I absolutely love Hetzner -- they're pricing is near unbeatable. To be a bit more precise, I believe that they offer cut rate pricing (which is not a bad thing if you're the consumer) but not cut-rate service -- there is just enough for a DIYer to be very productive and cost effective. This gets even easier if you use Hetzner Cloud directly, and they've got fantastic prices for beefy machines there too -- while a t2.micro on AWS is ~$10/month on hetzner cloud CX51 with 8 vcores and 32GB of RAM & and 250GB SSD with 20TB of traffic allowed is 29.90 gbp.

Discovering the robot marketplace[0] (thanks to HN) was an eye opening experience for me that showed me dedicated servers were viable and could be competitive with the VPSes I'd been purchasing/using for years (I was so excited I wrote blog posts about it). I've recently been thinking about making a subreddit for hetzner (r/hetzner), so fellow users can talk with each other but I am worried it would do more harm than good (increasing the burden on them in terms of having to do PR in yet-another part of the internet that can be pretty toxic in terms of community at times).

You can even deploy to them with terraform[1].

-- warning, rant/ramblings below --

I feel like I say the same thing all the time, but I'll repeat it again here -- if devops/infrastructure goes at all correctly in my mind, going to one vendor for both your compute/data and your value-added services (so asking AWS for EC2 machines and to run RDS on top of them for you and offer support) is going to dissipate.

Smaller companies can run sufficiently niche (many might disagree but I think running postgres is within this ) with more innovation and decent support for less cost than Amazon can. The vast majority of people who run RDS with something like Postgres as a backend are unlikely to run into crazy issues simply due to how well postgres is built, and how well known it is, outside of gross misconfiguration.

Companies are already offering on-your-cloud solutions that use EC2 machines to run their own software and offer support on top -- as container orchestration systems become even more widespread I think people will stop asking AWS or GCP for more than basic compute/data and a few tools they're really good at, and go to more specialized smaller vendors.

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

[1]: https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/hcloud/r/server.html

> they're pricing is near unbeatable.

If you really want to penny-pinch unbundled solutions that charge you separately for compute, storage and ip addresses might be even cheaper, e.g. on scaleway you could get way with 1€/month if you go ipv6-only on their smallest instance type with a minimal amount of storage. Plus you get unlimited traffic with them.

I remember looking at Scaleway in the past and not liking their prices compared to Hetzner but now that I look again[0], it looks pretty competitive, thanks for pointing this out. Also, there's terraform support which is awesome too[1].

I'm really digging their baremetal and ARM offerings -- both C2M and C2L look great to me and no setup costs is even better.

While I don't know if it's worth the headache to try that hard to cost-maximize I love that it's an option! I'm personally OK with paying more for a bit more breathing room on the utilization side (good ops is to keep your servers @ no more than 70% in case of burst right?).

[0]: https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/#anchor_baremetal

[1]: https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/scaleway/index.html

Personally tried Hetzner, Scaleway and online.net, it's parent. Online.net and scaleway have payment issues and their payment systems failed me more than once, their website kept logging us out and their support staff did not seem to bother. So I called it quits with online.net/scaleway. Hetzner has been rock steady for me, however. Just my $0.2.

here is your change: $0.18

I also had payment issues. It is so wierd. Payment system is the one thing that even shady business wants to work 100%. I mean if i owe you money for server and i am not able to pay with any of my cards that work anywhere else... I just switched lol.

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