It works well, and the pricing is very appealing. But it's not even remotely in the same league as AWS/GC/Azure.
All you get is DNS, private networks, load balancers VMs and storage volumes. That's it.
Sure, you can self-host Kubernetes, and they even have a CSI driver for mounting volumes and an official Terraform provider. Which is great.
But you miss out on the incredibly rich service offerings you get from the others.
It's a great start though, and I hope they keep expanding their offerings.
IMHO Hetzner is far above AWS/GC/Azure in price and simplicity.
The only drawback I see in Hetzner is that they don't have a lot of data centers with a relevant geographic dispersion, but that's only relevant for a Unicorn-level scale, or applications that require TP99.99 latency in the lower-end of the double-digit scale uniformly throughout the globe.
How can a serious company using a relational database get by without paying for database expertise in some way or another?
But is "companies of scale" what "modern devs" refer to? What is a "serious" company?
There is a lots of parameters that goes into the choice of self-hosted DB / managed DB, not just if the devs are "modern", or the company is "serious".
There are other companies, though, that have great cloud-managed DB offerings. Herzer (I'm not previously familiar with it so don't know if they already do this) would do better to just partner with one of these companies in a "marketplace" like arrangement.
I was extremely close to switching to Aiven-managed postgres until GCP finally supported point-in-time-recovery on postgres.
Only gripe is that they only have servers in Europe, wish they had at least North/South American + Asian centers too.
Tried to use it earlier this year. Opened an account to host a new project.
Went to login the next week to create the instances and launch the projects. Couldn't login because the Hetzner console was broken for 2 days. Yes you heard right, everything was broken and unusable for 2 days. Imagine the AWS console down for 2 days for comparison, that doesn't happen.
Few days later when the service was restored. I found out the account was banned. It seems they ban new accounts automatically because they're afraid of bitcoin miners or something. It's not uncommon among cloud providers to ask for an ID or something to verify the account, only problem, Hetzner banned the account but didn't ask for anything.
Couldn't raise a ticket to have the account unlocked because the only way to raise a ticket is to open the account and raise a ticket, that's not possible with the account locked.
Tried to contact support through the provided support email on their site. They never replied. Tried to contact again. They never replied.
At that point the project launch was 2 weeks late. Had to have horrific meetings to explain why everything was late with my reputation on the line, all the fault of Hetzner. Will never use again.
Scaleway looked closer to an AWS competitor but I haven't used it enough to know how good it is.
I've tried out Scaleway a while ago , and unfortunately they double-charged my CC just because. I'm not sure how widespread is that behavior, but to me it was enough to remain a OVH/Hetzner client.
Maybe we could create EU cloud catalog website for people to find all the providers that actually already exist (in Sweden the company Glesys is a similar provider).
They compete primarily with companies like DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, OVH, Scaleway and traditional co-location and dedicated hosts.
Look at the software offerings from Hetzner, they're barely existent. AWS and Hetzner are very clearly not in the same business. AWS makes its money primarily off of software services, Hetzner makes money primarily off of primitive (basic) hosting. The AWS software side of the business has enormous margins compared to the primitive hosting side. You'll find that Hetzner barely has any margin, as with all the others in their segment. Meanwhile AWS is a half a trillion dollar global juggernaut, funded by its software margins.
This assertion makes no sense at all. I mean, if you're in the business of getting an online business up and running, it seems to me that both do provide the infrastructure that allows you to achieve your goals.
Arguably, AWS and GCP have more data centers spread throughout the world, but beyond unicorn-scale companies you'd be hard pressed to find any business that does need that sort of infrastructure. Yet, when you're at that scale you're far better off running your own infrastructure, both in terms of cost but also reliability.
Now if only they would start offering managed K8s and enable us to switch from $US-BASED provider.
Could you elaborate on this? Whose infra are they selling? Could I get it directly from them?
I think you don't talk about hetzner.