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Comment by piokoch | Hacker News Reader

That's very true. Another thing is that it is not like EU is somehow very far behind the US in terms of services hosting or "the cloud". There is French OVH provider and there is German Hetzner. While the former has an opinion of being cheap but no so great (especially in terms of support), the Hetzner really shines.

Hetzner does not have all the AWS like "cloud" bells and whistles, however their VPS-es and especially dedicated servers are first class. In many, many situations it makes much more sense (both from costs perspective and ease of migration to other provider) to use dedicated servers and hire someone who will manage them, than throwing tons of money into Amazon pockets to get "X-large instances" that have power of old Celeron laptop (exaggerating a bit, but not that much).

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As much as I'd love for Hetzner to step up and start offering more managed services a la AWS, I just don't see it happening, and if it were I'm not sure I'd like the side-effects of that. Hetzner is laser-focused on delivering beefy and very affordable dedicated servers, apparently the way they are able to trim costs is by running most support functions on auto-pilot and having a very narrow set of products (servers, storage box, web space) which can presumably be serviced by a small staff without a high engineering bar. If they went ahead and started building out complex and highly engineered services like S3 or even more complex ones I'd see that immediately eating into their profit margin. Plus: Hetzner is a privately held company.

That's true, but there is also cloud.hetzner.com. It is rather newish and lacking most features the big 3 offer, but it might be getting there.

Hetzner Cloud is great for what it is, I personally love it. But the pace of product development at Hetzner is such that I would anticipate something like a managed load-balancer maybe being available in 1-3 years from now, and after that another year for the next product etc. They don't seem to be in a rush to compete with AWS (or even Scaleway) by broadening their product offerings, they'd rather stick to their strength which is fast and cheap servers. I commend them for it, and their approach is very German, but it doesn't help you if you need these managed services.

To give an anecdote regarding Hetzner and them building out an S3 clone: I once asked support if there was a way for me to upgrade the 10TB max object storage solution (Hetzner StorageBox) to more than that since I had outgrown it. Simple reply: No, but you can spin up multiple storage boxes...

I wonder how much that is based on the company background. Hetzner is a traditional hosting company. Cloud companies either had large existing software development base and datacenter expertise, being way larger than a company like Hetzner, (Amazon, Microsoft, Google) or don't run the hardware themselves (Heroku, various DBaaS offerings, ...) and focus on the software offering, typically backed by VC to cover the initial investment. I assume Hetzner would like to expand there, but it's expensive, a culture shift and somewhat risky given their well-founded and established competition.

EDIT: I guess DO, Linode, ... are closer equivalents to Hetzner?

Isn't that an opportunity for another company to run managed services like S3, RDS, SQS, SES on top of Hetzner servers? I see some issues with multiple companies being involved in support requests, but nothing that can't be solved.

Or, in case their virtual servers suck (which I don't know about), running VM hosts on Hetzner servers as a service.

You can't just run a service of S3 scale on someone else's datacenter, both from a technical and a business perspective. You need fine-grained control over every aspect, from servers to cooling to network fabric to utilization by other applications etc etc. And you need to be in control of the business trajectory. If you forecast your S3 clone to grow 1000% every month, you need to start building actual datacenters and make bulk deals with hardware suppliers months ahead of time. If you tell Hetzner that they should build a new datacenter because your demand will outstrip their current ones, they're gonna shrug their shoulders. Even if you handed them the cash you got from your VCs for scaling, they might say "eh, not really the direction we want to take, thanks".

Regarding their virtual servers: They're great, don't get me wrong! But it's a tiny piece in the puzzle that is AWS, starting from things like VPC/Security Groups to managed services like load balancers, gateways, cross-DC availability, etc. And that's just the EC2 part.

OVH's support is not great but at least it's cheap and they have some transparency. Azure and AWS have shitty support too for small customers but they are expensive.

Hetzner is nice. We also have Scaleway in the same category.

> Azure and AWS have shitty support too for small customers but they are expensive

oh yeah, AWS is terrible with support! I have to rely on their support forum for any support as 20% of our spend for crappy support is just not feasible. I.e. I get no support whatsoever. You can trick them a bit by wrapping it up in a sales inquiry though.

France also has online.net (now Scaleway?) which I haven't used recently but was very good and reliable for me 3 years ago. Been using Hetzner ever since, which has set the new bar.

You know? When you hire someone to manage some VPS or dedicated server in some DC, why not have them manage your own rack(s) connected via your own fiber on premise instead?

That is one thing i fail to understand, since it goes against the lore of decentralized, packet switching, nuke proof, and so on.

It may have been prohibitively expensive for many in the not so recent past, but it isn't anymore in more and more places. Even redundantly connected.

And to be honest, some pizzeria or hairdresser could be run from some NAS.

Just search for someFAANG is down on HN, to get a feel for the ripples it causes globally when they have a hiccup.

How is that different?

It really is about the affordances of getting access to space, power and the network. Nothing is hard individually, but not knowing how to navigate the landscape is much more daunting than typing some numbers into a web page.

This is basically the same line of reasoning used by people that say you could replace your corporate slack with IRC. Of course you could, but there's a good reason that people don't. If you just want to compare one VPS to another, the only thing you're comparing is cost and availability. But really there's many more factors that people are interested in considering beyond just that. Even if the only service you're interested in using is a VPS, using an AWS EC2 would have so many benefits over a Hetzner VPS that I'd struggle to list them.

Amazon, and Google, and Microsoft... don't win cloud business because people are dumb, they win it because they offer a better product.

well, the thing is, if you literally only need one server, AWS is ridiculously expensive. the value proposition is just not there. you have to design for the cloud from the start to come out on top.

Well literally only needing one server is already a contrived use case. But if I was only in charge of one server, I'd still prefer to be in charge of one server on a platform that had AMI, CloudTrail, IAM, Amazon Inspector, GuardDuty, AWS Certificate Manager, CloudFront, AWS CLI, EBS, CloudWatch, AWS Config, ALB, Route 53, Secrets Manager, AWS WAF, and plenty of the other features that I might find perfectly useful in a one server environment. The value proposition of vanilla VPS providers is just "figure it out yourself". Deciding that a feature rich platform is worth the expense over a single product service provider is often a perfectly rational and cost effective decision.

And have wild swings in load - if its steady sate load then owning the kit outright and renting space in a DC is much more cost efficient than AWS.

And bonus you can write of the depreciation cost of hardware in your accounts.

I have a vps at hetzner. I use it as irc bouncer and as a git remote for pass. Sell me on why I should use amazon instead.

I wouldn’t imagine personal IRC servers are what Germany and France are talking about when they discuss alternatives to AWS.

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