Hetzner cloud servers are now available in Ashburn USA
hetzner.com
hetzner.com
Hopefully this means dedicated servers will come soon.
For those unaware, Hetzner truly has unbeatable pricing. Pricing that's even substantially cheaper than OVH.
I welcome competition.
EDIT: what's odd is that on their FAQ [0] they state dedicated AMD servers are available in Ashburn, but when I go to their actual dedicated server page [1] - no US locations are listed for any dedicated offering.
FYI - your AX101 dedicated offering in my mind is the best offering in the market. I'd love to see this come to the US.
https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax101/configura...
I'm really surprised though how many servers survive for that long. But they probably mix-and-match components whenever one part of a server fails.
Usually a few disks have blown up, or are erroring or have smart errors. I then need to open 1 ticket per disk to get it fixed. They get replaced with really old disks (25k+ hours) which suffer same failures soon after.
At one point support complained that I was making too many requests to change their broken disks as if it was my fault that 20% were screwed.
Then they treat you like an idiot as much as they can. They ask you to provide disk slots numbering for disks which are impossible to get/know for a customer because they cannot read the serial number labels on the chassis and generally assume customer's fault to not know where they plugged something.
Sometimes machines do not restart after changing the disks and they don't realize so have to follow up again.
Network isolation doesn't exist so any weird network behavior from the machines towards then LAN gets you blocked.
If something is wrong you have to beg for some console access that they need to enable on demand only to find they plugged something wrong.
But they're cheap so...
I still use your services today, but that interaction left a lingering taste in my mouth, so much so that I haven't bought any new services from your company since that incident.
Looking at their price sheet, and converting Euro to U.S. Dollar, it appears that their "$5 droplet" currently costs $4.05. You'd have to make sure you pay with a credit card that doesn't charge foreign transaction fees, and you'd have to hope that the currency exchange rate doesn't shift in a less favorable direction later.
If you're a company operating larger VM's or larger numbers of VM's, then maybe? I guess. But if you're a self-propelled company or an investor-funded startup, then you're probably on AWS, Azure, or GCP anyway. And for personal side project use in the U.S., I'm just not seeing any real reason to jump for a 95 cent discount that will fluctuate.
EDIT: A thank you to the people who actually answered the question, or gave their own personal experience, rather than just downvoting. Looking more closely at the price sheet, I can see that while the smallest option is not very distinguishable from DO or Linode, Hetzner does get more competitive at larger VM sizes.
And the Hetzner 2 vCPU / 2GB Ram / 40Gb disk space is ~$5.50 USD/month.
Digital Ocean's closest offering has one less vCPU, 15GB more disk space, but is $10/month.
I recently made a switch and now have a AMD Epyc server with twice the specs for the same amount / month.
I'll probably move more and use docker for my WordPress instances there. Easier to maintain than in my droplets and it should be much cheaper too.
Hetzner used to be only significantly better than OVH. Now they are in a different league.
It is also interesting that Linode, DO, Vultr and UpCloud are all moving up the value chain and try to be a simplify, mini AWS with managed services. Hetzner will now take their place and becomes the more affordable cloud hosting provider with very little features.
And I am surprised at all the dedicated box comments, really wish Hetzer will some day do that on US or may be Canada. But my guess is that it would require something like OVH with huge investment on Datacenter.
They sent me an email saying my account was paused and to contact them to resolve it, which I did within half an hour.
My account was reinstated minus all of my environment.. just a blank account. They deleted everything and told me they had no way to restore it.
Beware hosting anything with them unless you keep backups with another provider.
[0] 8.2. of https://www.hetzner.com/assets/Uploads/downloads/AGB-en.pdf
Thanks for researching a footnote cite to the TOS document. But it's not literal. Whoosh.
Sarcasm doesn't always communicate itself, particularly in very short comments.
They won’t stop you from hosting your own private onlyfans site though.
GB * cost per GB
1 * $0
9999 * $0,09
40000 * $0,085
100000 * $0,07
800000 * $0,05
= $51.299,91
I posted screenshots of some communications in another reply.
That should be true of any provider / data.. 3 is 1, 2 is none, and 1 is crazy...
If you are not following 3-2-1 backup you are asking for trouble I dont care what provider or service you are using
I did however lose a full two weeks of heavy effort.
Anecdotes like these are enough to tarnish a brand forever in the minds of potential customers.
I would immediately consider to move my projects to another provider if I were a customer with them.
They have an account on HN, so maybe they could clarify. I certainly wouldn't be considering to become a client with them.
Okay my response - Again, I think there is a bit of a cultural misunderstanding going on here. I would say most Germans understand that they are responsible for verifying their identity and using their legal name when making important purchases or doing something else official. Here, names that do not match are often a sign that the account is fake. We find hundreds of fake accounts every week. Fake accounts are very closely linked with criminal behavior, people who otherwise abuse our products, and people who do not follow our ToS. Clearly, we do not want to attract customers with fake accounts to our company. So if we find an account that seems fake, it does not make sense for us to expend extra time and energy to write to that customer and ask them if they made a mistake when they entered their name on their customer account. That would dramatically increase the likelihood that spammers and scammers would get accounts and abuse our services. It would not only hurt our customers (because it would hurt our the trustworthiness of our IPs, etc.), but it would also lead to a massive increase in abuse and to victims affected by that abuse. So, I agree that the tone from my colleague could be better here. And I will talk to him about that. And, again, for that, we are sorry. But the basic content of what he wrote is sound in my opinion. --Katie
As I mentioned in other comments, my issue is not whose mistake this was, as I'm sure we can both agree that technically I am to blame for my mistake.
My issue is that there was no attempt to amicably resolve this.
The end result was that I lost 15 days worth of labor where I was spending 10-16 hours per day trying to launch a product.
I was unable to recover from the loss of momentum that was incurred by this. (I mean, who really can maintain that type of work effort for an extended period?)
The end result was that the project eventually failed and I lost an amount of revenue that was significant to me.
Again, I am not trying to express that I am not to blame for not closer checking forms that my browser autofills for legal accuracy .. moreso I am suggesting that this could have been resolved by just sending an e-mail to double check things with me before deleting all of my data.
I also reject your idea of deleting accounts that "seem fake". If you have a valid e-mail address, and a valid credit card, which all share more or less the same name, are you really going to reach for the delete button?
This is exactly my issue, and is what cost me so much grief.
If someone gets married and changes their name, are you going to delete their data too?
This is a rhetorical question. At any rate, I can only hope your company adopts a less hostile stance towards your customers, but I do appreciate you taking the time to respond.
The marriage-name-change question is a good one, actually. If someone legally changes their name after they are already a customer with us, they can write us a support request and make sure this gets changed in their customer information. If a customer who's just changed their name legally wants to be sure they get an account, they should update their legal ID first. (But I think most people in this situation do quickly update their legal IDs. I know my husband did when he took my name.)
We do have a brand new Head of Customer Service, and I will be sharing feedback from customers about their negative experiences. And I am sure that he will talk that into consideration when he assesses our processes and how we can improve them. --Katie
I'd think twice before hosting anything with them.
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You blurred out your own name but left the other person's name in cleartext. That's not playing fair.
I've killed this comment. If you want to make another image that blurs out both names, let me know at hn@ycombinator.com and I'll be happy to unkill the comment.
You can make your substantive point about your interaction with the company without spotlighting an individual like that.
Just a note that I appreciate all of the hard work you do here to keep the conversation here civil, and will strive better to follow the example you set for all of us.
The redactions have been redone and forwarded.
It's difficult to pronounce, so I usually go by my preferred name.
(They have my full name from my e-mail and credit card)
I'm most upset that there was no opportunity to resolve this minor confusion amicably, and what really got me the most is that there was no attempt at an apology, considering the e-mail I got clearly stated that service would resume "once steps are taken to remedy the situation"
I was very polite to them, but everyone I talked to at the company was telling me that it was my fault.
I've never left an encounter with a company feeling more frustrated.
Seems like a silly argument to say because the contract could be unenforceable you should expect them to delete your data.
The more likely scenario is a script or employee thought it was a fraud account, and deleted the vms.
If you make a typo, you need to remedy the issue as soon as you become aware of it.
You need to use at least your first and last name, unless you are from a culture that does not use last names.
There was no chance to remedy this.
I understand that they have no legal obligation to me, and am posting to make others aware that the company might not be interested in resolving conflicts with anything other than the heaviest of hammers.
Most people come from cultures where filling a form incorrectly does not entitle people to immediately destroy their things.
I also come from a country where putting "full name" on a form only means people expect more than your first name and it is customary to not use all of your last names. I am sure many are in the same boat.
I am not trying to express that I am absent of blame, but rather expressing frustration that there was no attempt to resolve the matter.
It was only a guess on their side about my name, and they jumped straight to deletion without knowing anything for certain.
This is the warning I wish to convey, that if you get caught up in such a mixup, that you may not expect some sort of due process.
So not Hetzner's fault, then.
Your head of sales [name redacted] was the one that reinstated my account and called me "unprofessional" for using a shortened version of my last name.
He told me that it is not worth contacting people like me (his words), and suggested there was nothing wrong with their internal procedures and that they had no intention to do anything differently.
I understand that mistakes happen, and I do not absolve myself entirely, but I found the response to this particular incident overly offensive and accusatory for a mistake that I do believe to be an error in the way the incident was handled.
In Germany, whenever you sign up for a product or a service where there is likely to be an ID check or a validity check, people here know that they need to use their full legal name, even if it is a really long name, or if they have middle name(s) that are part of their legal name. It they are using a credit card, that name needs to match, too. For a German sysadmin, it would be unprofessional to not use the same name as is on their legal ID/payment information.
I know that some cultures may abbreviate parts of their middle/last names, so it's understandable that customers from these countries may not be aware of how important it is in Germany for names to match exactly.
I know that this issue isn't just an issue in Germany. I used to work in a retail store, and my store was very serious about preventing credit card fraud. We regularly did NOT let people buy things if their name on their ID didn't match the name on their credit card. I also had several Brazilian friends in the USA who had similar issues, and they learned to always use the version of their names on their passports for everything.
We will likely still be strict about customers' information matching their IDs/payment information. He's right that we will likely not change this any time soon. However, I am sorry that his answer came off as abrasive and impolite. -Katie
I have been using Hetzner for business purposes for 8 years or so. Never had a problem with them, and the bang for buck is high and above anyone else in the industry.
But please feel free to prove me wrong. :)
Guys, I love you but couldn't you just give me a way to pay forward or roll it in the next one?
It's really not a company's fault for stopping to provide a service when it's not paid for.
Instead they're just extrajudicially screwing with him, likely due to organizational incompetence - nobody was empowered to evaluate the situation with human judgement. Legally they can do this, as they can choose to not do business with anyone they'd like. But potential customers are free to judge the poor handling of this situation as a real risk, and avoid relying on Hetzner too much.