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Comment by heipei | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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?

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