But there's no support for that. So every time I spin up a 1 vCPU tiny VM, which will never connect to the public internet, I'm wasting an expensive resource. Sorry.
Also, some services, like, say, DNS servers need long-term portability of specific IPs across multiple providers.
I do both, actually on Vultr.
Unless they're TCP services. Or stateful UDP services. Then you're in for a world of pain if you try to anycast them.
The list of sensibly anycast services is surprisingly low. Stateless UDP services, essentially, which isn't a big list. Especially if you're the kind of person who's using Vultr's cloud, and not a megacorp.
If you have the resources to develop backend state sync, you're probably still better serviced with a (set of) load balancer(s).
I run a CDN with anycast BGP, this obviously uses TCP. Works great. I've also done it with a global network of physical datacenters and our own transit/peering network but eventually migated to the cloud for reasons.
Their margins are low, however, so I understand it is possible to get fired as a customer if your support burden is too high and your ROI goes negative, so be on your best behavior to keep access to those prices.
That's not a nice statement.
It sounds like Hetzner will cancel your contract as soon as you submit a support request, which is not true (I personally opened in ~May 5-10 tickets within a few days when trying to boot from UEFI).
I really do not think that they track single customers in relation to their single ROIs.
I don't know what gave you that impression, as that was not my claim.
We've experienced some networking issues, usually not on the Hetzner network, but there have been some peering issues with some ISPs over the years. Generally nothing too bad.
Their Cloud API is a joy to work with. It obviously isn't anywhere near as future rich as AWS, but it's got everything we need, and we can spin up VMs with a couple of simple HTTP requests.
Anyway just fyi:
currently having 2 root servers in germany and 1 in Finland.
If I remember correctly I had within 8-10 years at least once a full unexpected shutdown of a server (don't honestly remember how long in took until it was back online, it was a few years ago).
A few weeks ago I could not reach for ~4 hours my (new!) server in Finland from my own Internet provider at home (it was super weird - I could ping any other server in Finland/world but not the Hetzner stuff) but at the same time it was absolutely reacheable from my mobile phone and from other ping-test-sites in CH and D => interesting, probably something to do with my ISP but I'm wondering why exactly my Hetzner server was involved, mmmhhhh... .
Maintenance downtimes (few) are scheduled and communicated by email.
Throughput is good - currently writing a web crawler and I can go up from time to time to at least 50MiB/s download if I want to (BUT I try to be "nice" to not get banned :) and anyway my processing queue cannot currently keep up with that rate).
Support is good - servers in Germany want tickets to be written in german, servers in Finland want tickets to be written in English. Both are fast (e.g. initial reaction time usually max ~1h to pick up a ticket, answers to replies usually within minutes), german support can be verbose, finnish support wasn't at all in my case (e.g. if you ask "I have problem X because blahblah so I was wondering if maybe boot on disk #2 is disabled in the BIOS?" they might just reply with "boot activated").
About HW replacement: I had so far only 1 HDD failure (some years ago, in a classic mdraid5 array) => I opened a ticket and pasted the proof of the drive failing together with the output of "smartctl" to identify the drive => got a reply asking for a downtime => agreed to the downtime and shut down the server at that time => drive was replaced and the server was booted => I then resync'ed the mdraid and that was it.
About HW upgrades: opened a ticket asking details about feasibility & pricing => got back a statement 1-4 hours later => sent back a reply agreeing to it => I was asked a few minutes later by the tech team "when" to perform the upgrade => I replied "now" and shut down the server => a few minutes later the server was up and running with the extra 32GB RAM.
So, all in all, as you probably understood, I'm currently happy with them. The costs are ok for me (especially for the servers that have >=10 HDDs - is there a better offer anywhere, honestly asking?), the reliability of the infrastructure is good, the support is good.
I was before (many many years ago) at OVH (good support + reliable, at that time) but it then became very expensive therefore I left them. Nowadays they have a more differentiated offering, but it looks messy to me, and bigger servers like the ones that Hetzner offers (e.g. 8+ CPUs with 3+ HDDs and 1 NVMe/SSD) seem to be extremely expensive to me.
Cheers
Working with them is nice, the APIs are a breeze, and are really dirt cheap. And they take security very seriously.