Tell HN: I got 10x Hetzner storage at the same price | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: I got 10x Hetzner storage at the same price

195 pointslovelearning162 comments

I had a 100GB BX10 Hetzner storage box for photo backups. I was paying €2.9/month.

Today, I logged into their console and noticed BX10 wasn't listed as an option. The lowest config now is a 1TB BX11 for the same €2.9/month.

Just changed the storage option to BX11 and now I have 10x the capacity for the same price! Had I not noticed, Hetzner would have kept me on a 100GB box for that price.

If anyone here is using that service, check if an unexpected capacity upgrade is available to you.

View on HN

I've used them for more than 15 years. Their business model started and still is to some degree desktop grade components for cheap servers and they've also added more server-grade components/systems in the last years. Generally their service is good, but there are some tradeoffs. With Hetzner it's mostly network redundancy and sometimes power. I have some experience with DC design and one of the most expensive and rarely used part is creating a fully redundant network layer. You're basically investing for something that you'd use rarely and most clients won't treat is as a differentiation to pay more for it. So even if you get some downtime you won't lose that many clients in the long run. If you are cost conscious and know how to manage your servers you can get a very good value for money with them. A mix of bare metal and some VMs can give you HA and performance. There are some downsides, some protocols are filtered on the network level locally so it may be more tricky to build a fully HA solution, but still it's much better than OVH, their only true competitor currently. Also, they have a Finland DC now, so off-site backups are possible. And the price structure is predictable and you won't get that emotional high of getting those damn AWS bills that always grow.

> Also, they have a Finland DC now, so off-site backups are possible.

They've had Falkenstein and Nuremberg for a long time, so off-site has already been possible.

Don't forget they recently added a new DC in Ashburn, VA...

https://www.hetzner.com/news/11-21-usa-cloud/

Can you say more on how Hetzner is better the OVH.

It is very common among hosting providers to introduce a new cheaper better service without actively reaching out to existing customers about it. Why would they? The older infrastructure is paid for and maintenance on it has a lower cost, and some customers don't want to move anyway because they lack the time to migrate, or don't want to take the outage.

That's why it pays to shop around periodically.

It can be rationalized. But I'd have been happy to be told they're (optionally) gifting me 10x the resources for the same price if I want it. It actually opened up some backup solutions that I'd been thinking about how to implement from many months. 100GB was not enough. The other options I wasn't sure if I wanted to invest. This hit the right spot.

> Why would they?

I won't try to answer in general, but in this case? The price is the same so they're getting the same amount of money, there's a good chance the customer isn't running into the 100GB limit any time soon and there's literally no cost to the provider until they do, and if the customer was going to run into the limit naturally the first thing they'd do is see what a higher tier price is and find out about it being free anyway.

That is a common strategy for phone providers too: Keep old customers in old and expensive call rates and compete for new customers with cheaper ones. Providers even store a "sleeper score" in customer data. The higher that score the more may a call center agent spend on one-time incentives to keep a customer in his or her old call rate.

A common strategy for car insurance companies in at least the US too. If you (have time to) shop around every couple years, you'll get better rates.

Insurance companies in general and it's also the case in Europe. You often get a better deal just by switching to the current offering even at the same company after a couple of years but they don't tell you.

Things recently changed in the UK with regards to insurance companies:

      The biggest shake-up to the insurance industry for decades 
      takes place on Saturday, when insurers will be banned from 
      quoting policyholders a higher price to renew their home 
      or motor insurance than they would offer a new customer.

Anecdotal, but it was the reverse for me. We were locked in to a cheap rate and new customers had to deal with it being more expensive.

Same here.

Sometimes, if rarely, these things actually work in your favour. Many years ago, I signed up for a PAYG [pay as you go] mobile tariff with O2 [in UK]. It offered 300 texts and 500mb data for £10/month top-up. The really unusual thing with this tariff though was that, unlike every other tariff I'm aware of, whatever credit you hadn't used at the end of the month carried over to the next month. Usually, with these kind of tariffs, the credit resets every month.

So, as I rarely use the phone for phonecalls I usually have most of that £10 left at the end of every month and it just keeps accumulating. Last time I checked, I had about £260 of credit. Since you can buy Android apps on the Google Play Store and charge them to your phone credit, this means I can effectively get any Android app I want for free. In addition to this, I get a 10% 'reward' back every three months on my top-ups. So, every three months, I get £3 back from 02. I save these up until I've got £10 or £20 of Rewards credit and then exchange it for Amazon vouchers. So, every now and then, I get some free Amazon stuff too.

I'm 100% convinced that some bean counter at O2 made a colossal cock-up, when coming up with this tariff because it was only available for a short time before disappearing and [as I said] I'm not aware of anything like that being offered by anyone else.

O2 keep trying to persuade me to 'upgrade' to a 'better' tariff, which would offer a bit more data and/or texts, in return for my credit disappearing at the end of every month. Er... no thanks. I'll stick with the one I'm on.

I'm actually surprised they haven't [yet!]force moved me to another tariff and cancelled this one.

[Hope no-one from O2 is reading this. Don't want to give them ideas!]

Linode in the 20teens did actively tell me that i was eligible for upgrades.

They also provided wizards to automate the upgrade process at a downtime convenient to me

My ISP replaced their 1000/100 fiber plan with a 1000/400 plan that I didn't get automatically. But it was either the same price or cheaper, so it was merely just a matter of placing an order for the better plan.

> The older infrastructure is paid for and maintenance on it has a lower cost,

If it had lower cost, then it would be priced lower. Energy costs for new hardware are much lower.

"If it had lower cost, then it would be priced lower."

The cost of production is a floor on the price, not a ceiling.

They did announce it on Reddit

On their forums as well...

If you have anything with Hetzner, i strongly recommend you to get an account there: https://forum.hetzner.com/

It's mixed German/English spoken.

As I wrote above, we'll include this news in our next customer newsletter, which is due out soon. --Katie

I didn't see BX11 in Hetzner's VPS offerings. After searching I realized it's a different "storage box" product. Looks like they support FTP, SCP, SFTP, rsync, WebDAV, HTTP, and more. I didn't realize anyone other than rsync.net offered SSH transfer for cloud storage. And this is about 1/10 the cost. Also rsync.net doesn't support anything HTTP-based by design[0]. This could be a nice alternative. @rsync do you know enough about Hetzner's offering to give us a breakdown of tradeoffs?

I'm feeling super jealous right now that these boxes aren't offered in the US currently. Anyone know if that's planned? Might be enough to get me off Backblaze/Wasabi. I'd love to have more options than S3 as protocol.

Also Hetzner's VPS bandwidth allowance (20TB/~$5/mo) is insanely good compared to the next best I'm aware of, which is DigitalOcean (1TB/~$5/mo), and that is offered in the US. This might be perfect for a tunneling service product I'm working on. Anyone have experience with how good the speeds are from their US East datacenter?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24501103

OVH might be worth looking at for tunneling as well as they have newish unmetered offerings for a few $ more: https://us.ovhcloud.com/vps/

Nice, thanks! I think I had heard about the 250Mbps option a while back. Are the 500 and 1000 newer? Those are all great deals.

EDIT: Those VPS options only seem to be available in the US. Is that right or am I doing something wrong?

If you click the flag icon in the top you can rotate locations. I have only personally used CA (https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-ca/vps/) and US, but it looks like similar are offered in other countries such as https://www.ovhcloud.com/de/vps/.

In my experience transit into hetzner in EU from the US ain’t the greatest- perhaps level 3’s fault.

Hetzner is buying cheap traffic, you get what you paid for. It's usable, but you likely won't get full speed outside of Europe. You can set up a VPS on DigitalOcean in Frankfurt as a reverse proxy if you need a better network.

We do have another storage option, which is our Hetzner Cloud Volumes. The prices are visible here (https://www.hetzner.com/cloud) when you scroll down and here's some general info about Volumes (https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/volumes/). All of our cloud products, including Volumes, are also available at our ASH location (Ashburn, Virginia). --Katie

I worked out in with a start-up in Berlin that used lots of Hetzner servers. This was around 2017, and we had a good number of outages at the peak of the summer heat where, presumably the cooling in the data center wasn't up to the task and they shut things down... At least that was our theory, since it only ever happened on really warm days and only at the warmest part of the day.

In fairness, we didn't lose any data, but it was a major headache for a month or two.

Their buildings are passively cooled so this sounds quite plausible. Pretty fun video showing the realities of their setup https://youtu.be/5eo8nz_niiM?t=260

That's really interesting! And for like 10 months out of the year you could imagine that cooling setup would work beautifully (in that climate).

Even in the middle of winter my Hetzner server occassionally logs a high cpu temp alert.

Off-topic: Is there a Google Photos like app out there for Android that can use a custom backend like Hetzner? By Google Photos, I mean ability to share photos with family, tag faces and have some level of smart categorization.

i didn't test it, but i know friends using nextcloud for that

Nextcloud doesn't support color profiles in images, so anything not sRGB looks off in their gallery app -> I wouldn't recommend it.

I'm dipping my toes into self hosted services, but I haven't tackled photos yet. Ars Technica reviewed a few photo options last year:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/the-big-alternatives...

UPDATE: Somebody mentioned they're using "Seafile" in the comments and it seems to support Android and network drives - https://www.seafile.com/en/features/ . For tagging and categorization, try digiKam.

I don't know if there's an all-in-one solution.

Perhaps use NextCloud (self-hosted or managed) for sharing.

digiKam can detect and tag faces, and connect to NextCloud or network-mounted drives.

But digiKam's a desktop app without an Android port AFAIK.

I switched to photoprism a while ago, after having been a long time digikam user. Not being web based was becoming more and more of an annoyance. Heck, even using it on more than one PC with a shared db was a hassle.

Photoprism definitely isn't there yet feature-wise, its facial recognition is sub-par compared to digikam, it's sometimes sluggish for one reason or another, but generally speaking I like the vision and where it's going. I'm sponsoring the project, as it's basically a one-man- (and one woman) show and they like to make it their full time jobs. I like the idea, although it's still a relatively rare thing in the open source world. Currently they seem somewhat overehelmed though.

I'll check out photoprism. Thanks for the tip!

I'm kicking the tyres on BX21 (5TB Hetzner Storage box).

Photoview, photoprism and photostructure are the apps I shortlisted.

Google photos has great UX out of the box for RAW and general photos usage, but is garbage if you have a classically organized album/folder situation.

Howdy: author of PhotoStructure here.

This is the first I've seen of their storage box offering: it seems like this is just a storage offering, right? Like, it can't run arbitrary software, right?

If I remember correctly, nextcloud android client has automatic gallery sync support. It also has an option to mount secondary storage device which supports SFTP, webdav, S3, openstack, etc.

syncthing - I use. Sync to my local server then that sync to remote server.

Photoprism might be worth a look

I've been seeing a suspicious amount of mentions of Hetzner on HN lately. (Just an observation.)

Hetzner is pretty good

I'm just a customer and this is my first post in months.

The post is actually a negative for Hetzner. They never told me they were offering 10x the capacity for the same price. That's why the Tell HN PSA.

I get that this is an upgrade, but it is a 'change' to the configurations that the customer set up their instance with. It would have been outrageous if they opted everyone is without their consent.

Certainly not upgraded automatically. My complaint is that they never even told me the option's available.

Thanks, in the same situation as you and feel the same!

They have great services for the price, and their machines are reliable.

Hetzner has been known in Germany for quite a while now. They are a very cheap but reliable hosting provider, not really a cloud service. A friend of mine used them over 10 years ago for some dedicated servers and got them to connect the servers to the same switch for sub-millisecond latency (try that with AWS...).

They have VMs and sell them as "cloud" but provisioning happens like you fill out a form and they give you a server. It's not instant but fast enough if you don't spin VMs up and down like crazy.

The thing to remember with Hetzner is that they are cheap. Low prices and good infrastructure but you have to do quite a bit yourself and many features one expects from a cloud provider aren't available. Last time I checked they don't have an API to change DNS settings for your domains. You can write GPG signed emails to a bot but I don't know how well that works.

That's outdated information, Hetzner launched a cloud service a few years ago.

Provisioning of cloud instances is pretty much instant.

Plus there's a Terraform provider for it as well: https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hetznercloud/hcloud/...

Not to mention they also have a terraform provider. So you don’t need to use the website if you don’t want to.

(the bare metal offering does not have terraform support)

Edit: ahh someone already mentioned this. Didn’t read that comment before posting

They also have a REST interface [1] and a command line tool [2] to do those operations (and others) without having to use the website.

[1] https://docs.hetzner.cloud/ [2] https://github.com/hetznercloud/cli

They are cheap because they are huge, and because they design almost everything themselves, from rack sizing to cases to cooling systems.

der8auer has a somewhat recent video on yt about one of their data centers for the curious.

Direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM

Really enjoyed the video, thanks for the suggestion!

> They have VMs and sell them as "cloud" but provisioning happens like you fill out a form and they give you a server. It's not instant but fast enough if you don't spin VMs up and down like crazy.

I think this information is outdated - I just did a quick and dirty test and it took 8 seconds to have a new instance up and a second to shut it down.

Very good to hear. When they launched I remember them saying that it will take up to 15 minutes for the VM to be ready.

My small Hetzner VM has been reliably running for years now, so I'm super happy with them, don't get me wrong.

OVH is also nice. They're French I believe. And you're right, they're mostly like old school VPS providers.

In US there is https://phoenixnap.com/

In UK there is https://www.heficed.com/

I am sure there are more.

> A friend of mine used them over 10 years ago for some dedicated servers and got them to connect the servers to the same switch for sub-millisecond latency (try that with AWS...).

AWS offers that with placement groups for EC2 [1].

It's also probably worth mentioning the Dedicated Hosts [2] and Dedicated Instances [3] features of EC2 in this context which allow you to ensure that EC2 instances run on the same physical hardware.

[1]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/placemen...

[2]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/dedicate...

[3]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/dedicate...

Dedicated hosts and instances are super expensive especially compared to Hetzner.

Also just a customer, but always happy to see Hetzner on HN, never been let down.

Suspicious?

as a customer i doubt its coordinated.

their marketing is always extremely, how should i phrase it.... old? i'd seriously doubt their PR department is even remotely aggressive enough to even think of influencing social media.

That's just what a PR department coordinating a social media influence campaign would say.

/s (but not really)

Recently, somebody on hn posted this crazy video showing what the hezner data centers look like https://youtu.be/

I enjoyed it

Your link is a link to the YouTube site, not the video.

Ah shit I screwed up the copy paste on my phone. No matter, on this thread someone else one posted the same "der8auer" video again.

GDPR creates an interesting opportunity for European-owned datacenter hosting in Europe

Hetzner provides unbelievable value but didn’t get much US attention since they were only located in Europe.

3 months ago they launched in the US, and as such - they are starting to get more attention.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29092715

It is interesting to see comments expressing extreme concerns about US employees being able to access Hetzner servers, but then I'd wager: 1) they're probably using Google/US services at their companies with almost a gaurantee 2) Germany has ties with US for surveillance 3) Hetzner uses US servers (Intel, AMD, Micron) and a whole bunch of other components in their servers. Or worse, Chinese components.

I guess I fail to see the logic in all of this, appears to be uninformed security theatrics.

I think it's just about latency. If most of your users/employees are located in NA, it doesn't make much sense to give them degraded network experience to save few Euros on hosting costs.

It’s not a few euros. It’s easily a factor 10-20 in costs.

Compared to AWS et al, sure. But there are plenty cloud services with datacenters in USA that are similarly cost-effective.

I used to run a service that hosted about a terabyte of video content and at its peak did 1 TB of outbound traffic in 24 hours. Cost 25 €/month with Hetzner.

With AWS, that amount of money would only cover about 300 GB of outbound traffic. No compute, no storage, just egress to last like a third of a busy day.

Hetzner has been providing me with a suspicious amount of value for my money.

I've had a really great experience since switching over from DigitalOcean after Hetzner opened their Virginia datacenter.

DigitalOcean was a nearly perfect experience for eight years - I can only say good things about them. And then Hetzner went and gave me twice the value with comparable reliability. Frankly I feel spoiled.

Yeah, HN really likes: Postgres, Rust, Linux, Hetzner topics dislikes: google search, crypto, aws outages

I would (and will) jump on Hetzner as soon as they build datacenter in UK. Seems like amazing cloud alternative for companies that cannot justify prices of the big 3 (aws, gcp, azure).

> Yeah, HN really likes: Postgres, Rust, Linux, Hetzner

You forgot SQLite.

> Seems like amazing cloud alternative for companies that cannot justify prices of the big 3 (aws, gcp, azure).

It is. The big 3 can be crazily expensive and there are many use cases where you can happily go with a less features but more affordable option. Also traffic is generally way cheaper.

Out of interest, what's wrong with Hetzner's data center(s) in Germany?

GDPR, as UK has its own rules (maybe it would be okay as well, but our legal team has huge backlog and for now on-premises works just fine)

Ah, I see. Somehow I thought it was for personal use. Too bad business use is complicated by (possible) differences in laws.

Pretty sure UK and EU is still near identical on this. Hasn't been much drift since brexit.

likes adblockers too. hates SF nimbyism.

U forgot cloudflare, its over hyped here.

They probably have many happy customers in Europe. At least I'm one. And now they finally have an US data center, so now it makes sense to talk about them.

It's all fun and games with Hetzner until you get a denial of service attack or someone uploads content against their ToS.

They will shut you down without informing you.

> "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> I've been seeing a suspicious amount of mentions of Hetzner on HN lately. (Just an observation.)

I never get tired of praising Hetzner. Their prices are remarkably a fraction of AWS's equivalent products,and their pricing model is completely rational.

What about suspicious amounts of mentions of AWS and GCP?

To the best of my knowledge, I am the only Hetzner employee actively responding to comments on HN. We don't pay for people to make comments. --Katie

Is there any benefit using that service over Backblaze B2 that can offer you much higher price per storage?

I'm currently using B2 to store 120 GB of my personal backup and only paying 0.5 dollars per month for years and they still haven't change their price for years.

More flexibility with storage protocols I suppose if you do need that.

Almost all of these Hetzner Storage boxes in my experience are basically treated as appliances; you get it provisioned, install one piece of software to utilize the disks in the way you need, and then move on with your job. In this particular case I assume the OP is actually running some webserver on the box to serve up the photos to people, so the photos obviously need to be on the server as well for that to work.

Most older photo sharing applications expect the photos to simply be discoverable through the filesystem. There are some advantages to this, for example you can leverage the filesystem indicies to get fast directory listings, organization can be done using hierarchical folders which users already know, et cetera. On the other hand, you have to manage things like this, occasionally.

For a case like photo sharing I agree something like B2 is probably much better if it can be made to work. It's not too performance sensitive and outside of the photos themselves, there's minimal persistent state necessary for the system to function. Maybe there's a photo sharing application somewhere out there that is all "cloud native" (AKA runs in a container) and is designed to work with B2/S3 in this manner...

Backblaze is great. Their machine backups seem a little expensive, but very reliable (the whole point). B2 though, I’m the to get a bill. I don’t store much but it seems to get rounded down.

The first 10GB on B2 is free.

I’m way past that, maybe 400gb?

Edit: no, I’m just plain wrong. I am paying and it’s about 4TB.

Doesn't look like it, at least not on price. Don't know how they compare on features. How do you transfer data to B2? I use BorgBackup and chose this service because it has built-in support.

I use rclone to sync it with my machine that hosts Seafile application to easily manage my family's photos and personal stuffs.

Whether one is better than the other depends a lot on your individual use case and preferences.

Both types of storage have their strong suits. BackBlaze is great if you need an S3-compatible storage option that won't "max out" at any particular storage limit. The Hetzner option will be great if you want to be able to tinker around with a Linux instance and not pay for egress bandwidth.

If you're dealing with an amount of data that is consistently at the 100GB and don't have a large amount of egress, BackBlaze is the cheaper option. If you are storing closer to 1TB and do a fair amount of egress, the Hetzner option will be cheaper.

If you read this Hetzner, please add managed PG to your cloud!

Don't hold your breath; I'm pretty sure their whole thing is that they don't do managed anything. Their primary product is bare metal servers, they eventually added unmanaged virtual servers, and these storage boxes are the closest things they have to managed services but that's still just an appliance that's probably quite simple under the hood.

Their volume storage, LBs and firewalls look managed to me, but YMMV

https://www.hetzner.com/de/cloud

> If you read this Hetzner, please add managed PG to your cloud!

I dare say that if they offered managed Kubernetes with autoscaling at prices not too far away from their Hetzner Cloud offerings (vcpu, IP, block storage, etc) then there would be absolutely no reason at all to use any other cloud service provider, at least in the EU.

That seems to be the norm for low cost Kubernetes services ( the control plane is free, you only pay for the underlying storage, compute, networking you use) like Scaleway, OVH, Digital Ocean.

Didn't know I wanted this but that'll be awesome!

I can pass that request on, though, I cannot make any promises of any sorts. We don't publish a roadmap of which new features/products we plan to develop, and when they will be ready. We prefer to make announcements on our social media channels when things go live. This is the first request for a managed PG feature that I have seen so far, so I am not sure how likely it is that we will consider adding it. Our dev team naturally wants to implement features/products that are highest in demand. --Katie

Database is a lot of work to add as managed service, you need backup, encryption, replicas, scaling etc. First I am expecting more control on public ip(disabling it for cloud vps) and internal dns(maybe i could not find).

I noticed the same thing a couple of days ago and upgraded from 2TB to 5TB, still priced at 10EUR/mo.

What is a storage box? That price seems relatively good - how does it compare to other offerings?

It's all described here: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box

Basically you have a nice amount of space for a very reasonable space and can connect in a number of ways or just attach it as a network drive. Transfer speeds are reasonable.

Like an external disk on the network. Closer to a NAS than to something like Google Drive or Dropbox. We can FTP/SFTP/Borg/rsync to it.

I haven't explored all options in detail. I use Hetzner because it's cheap and supports BorgBackup.

I used to keep backups on GDrive but all the anecdotes about accounts locked by bots and non-existent customer support made me uncertain about using it for long-term photo storage (10-20 years time frame).

S3/EFS network costs were too expensive for my 10s of GBs.

It's basically a restricted access linux server. You're given access to SCP/RSYNC/WebDav but no interactive shell, no applications under your control. AFAIK, you can't host a web site on it, as all access requires an account. You could pair it with a Hetzner server/vm (mounting over network) to provide a service, but it's mainly used for backups.

They also have a "Storage Share" which is about the same, but you can serve static files to a group or with the public (ie, hosting videos, images, iso images).

In the US rsync.net provides the same type of (storage box) service. Hetzner's new pricing comes out much cheaper, but if sometimes it's the latency between your location and the storage location.

No geo redundancy and they don't backup your stuff.

Hmm that’s a point to note.

Here's also a basic overview and how it compares to our Storage Shares (a Nextcloud-based product): https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/storage-box/faq/storage-box-v... --Katie

Is there currently any way to:

- have more secure passwords for Storage Boxes? Currently they're 16 characters long which is quite weak. Plus the usernames seem to be predictable/enumerable (e.g. u000000).

- or even disable password logins entirely for boxes where there is ssh-key authentication set up?

Thanks.

Hmm. You stumped me with that one. I suggest that you write directly to our Support via Robot to ask this question. The team responsible for the Storage Boxes will be able to give you a detailed information. And if you have more questions about the topic, using the ticket system is more direct, efficient, and quick. (I usually only check HN about once a week because we're short-handed at the moment.) --Katie

Storagebox is a nice service, but what I really love with Hetzner is their auction of used dedicated servers ("Serverbörse") at https://www.hetzner.com/sb.

are those real auctions, because i see a price and the option to order it with that price. for example currently auction has a 64gb ram 500gb ssd and a old quad core xeon with a cpu score of 8000 for 44 eur vs a new amd ryzen with a score of 20000 for 40 eur + 46 eur setup. the old server does not make sense here.

Where do you see the Ryzen for 40 eur? The cheapest Ryzen I see is €61.00 / month and none have any set up fees.

https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver?ram_from=2&ram_...

https://postimg.cc/xXxpNw1k

i was comparing the "used servers auctions" vs new dedicated servers.

They increased prices recently because of the increased electricity costs.

Yeah and not just by a bit. My existing server went from 24 to 33€. I mean it's still cheap I guess, a 4th gen i7 with 16gb ram and 2tb HDD, but still, that's like a 50% increase for a machine that's mostly idle and occasional peak load.

Back in the day when I rented a server from their auction, the prices indeed did drop by 1€ every 24h or 72h or whatever. But not below a minimum they had set per computer type, perhaps that is still how it works. And yeah, it doesn't make sense to get an old Xeon for a higher monthly fee than a recent Ryzen, only some of the auctions make sense. (But then they might make a lot of sense: I got 6T of disk, 16G RAM and 8 cores for 27€/m.)

In the case of the Xeon, i think they also price in their electricity costs - supposedly, the Xeon uses more power than the Ryzen?

Due to a recent price hike with electricity, their CEO once again acknowledged on their forums that they do not sell (rent, rather) the servers in the Serverbörse at a loss.

From what I understood, the price goes down occasionally (not sure how often). If you're happy with the price, then go for it. Otherwise wait for it go lower and risk someone stealing the deal. That's why the price varies widely. You need to wait for the price to go down. It's kinda like a reverse auction I guess?

  >You need to wait for the price to go down. It's kinda like a reverse auction I guess?

It's called a Dutch Auction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction

Good to know, thanks!

It's referred to as a Dutch auction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction

Thanks for mentioning the Server Auction servers. For anyone else who is interested in our Auction Servers, we have an FAQ here: https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/server-auction-faqs --Katie

Probably stupid question: can you use rclone to sync data over or does it have to be via rsync only?

I'd prefer rclone since it can encrypt a remote.

Based on their list of supported procotols[0] you should be able to make rclone work. Worst case you can use the SFTP backend.

[0]: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box

I can confirm that rclone works over sftp on port 23. They also support rsync and borg (not tested) [1].

I would also recommend adding `sha1sum_command = /usr/bin/sha1sum` to the rclone.conf entry in order to enable rclone cryptcheck.

[1]: https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/storage-box/access/access-ssh...

Yes rclone works. Either through ssh or WebDAV I think.

What about 'borg' ?

Do they maintain the borg binary on their end or do you have to run that over sftp mode (or whatever it is ...) ?

OP here. I chose storage box because it has built-in borg support. I don't need to mount it locally to run borg.

Maybe this tutorial will be helpful: https://community.hetzner.com/tutorials/install-and-configur... -Katie

the same goes for all other storage box sizes. updated all of ours without any problems yesterday.

1TB BX11 is €2.9/month or € 3.45 monthly incl. 19 % VAT

These are standard prices...

https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box

BX10 (which is what you could get before, but which is no longer available) used to be that same price for less storage capacity.

Current users weren't automatically updated to the new plan, so for them it's a big storage upgrade at no extra cost.

The BX10s come for free with most dedicated root servers, and are meant to be used as free backup space. They will continue to be free. They are not visible anymore on the website because they are only available to customers who already have dedicated root servers. Customers who already have free BX10s can continue to use them for free. If they would like to upgrade to a BX11 or something else, though, we ask them to pay the monthly fee. --Katie

With sshfs, these storage boxes can also be mounted as a virtual file system. Filesystem hard links and user and group permissions may not work as usual in sshfs mounts, but they can come handy.

Brilliant, I'm paying 4.90EUR for 500 GB NX20 (nextcloud hosting) and can hopefully just switch to the NX10 with 1TB for only 3.90EUR or 5TB at the same price as before

I'm also considering a nextcloud box. Are you satisfied with the transfer speeds?

Depends where you live. I live in HK and the speed is usually pretty bad unless I use a VPN / reverse proxy on a service which uses higher quality bandwidth.

They changed their storage share (hosted Nextcloud) offerings as well. I had NX10 100GB for €3.45, which is now gone. The NX11 1TB is €4.64 and the base offering.

Same was true for me on Digital Ocean. Basically, regularly check your service provider because prices for servers and storage tend to drop.

Anyone looking for even cheaper backup storage, AWS Glacier Deep Archive is $1/month/TB. Retrieval costs are high though.

Thanks for sharing this information. There was at least one other post on HN when we first announced the new prices on 7 Feb 2022. (I think I answered a few questions there.) And we posted it on our social media channels (Twitter, facebook, on reddit (r/hetzner)). We'll also include it in our next monthly customer newsletter. We don't send out this newsletter by default. There is a double-opt in. Here's some general information on our Storage Boxes (https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/storage-box/faq/storage-box-v...), info about migrating to a new Storage Box model (https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/storage-box/faq/storage-box-v...), and how they compare to another storage product we have, called Storage Shares (https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/storage-box/faq/storage-box-v...). --Katie, Hetzner Online

Tried to sign up, tells me I have an invalid postal code (I don't).

Doesn't inspire confidence.

Hetzner has been around forever. So maybe it's a bug in the sign up form.

Hmm... I wonder if there's a common postcode lookup software used in Germany that's to blame for this?

I recently moved house and had to update my details on Spreadshirt's [also a German co.] website. As with you, their site refused to accept my postcode was a valid postcode and wouldn't let me change my ddress. This also had the side-effect of locking my account.

After I emailed Spreadshirt about it, I had to go through the ridiculous palaver of them sending me a snail mail letter from Germany to my address in UK, containing a code which I had to then email back to them. At which point, they finally accepted that I [as the person who actually lives in the house!] might actually know my own postcode better than some database lookup software they were using in Germany.

Teutonic efficiency at its best!

Hmmm... I cannot promise you anything, but perhaps it would be worthwhile re-doing your account and adding an extra note explaining that the postal code is real. Perhaps you even have a form of ID/documentation where you can see it...? Unfortunately, our low prices attract the usual suspects. We receive a very high volume of new fake accounts. Sometimes things that are actually real will raise red flags unintentionally. If we are not sure about an account's validity, we usually make the safe decision and reject it. We know that means that we lose customers, but it also prevents a lot of abuse. As a customer with other online stores in the past, I have had my customer account flagged as fake because I have a last name that is unusual, because my home town's name sounded fake, and because people thought New Mexico was not part of the United States, so they thought the delivery address was fake. Our team tries its best, but it's not perfect. We know we probably accidentally accidentally falsely mark some accounts as fake each day, and we are constantly trying to improve our system. --Katie

Thanks for letting me know. I currently pay 3.45€ (or so) for 1TB.Need to check it out.

Welcome, but I think for you the price+capacity hasn't changed. I'm in a non-VAT country and was charged 2.9 euros for 100GB till now.

OK. Then we have the same price. I am actually still thinking in price +VAT while the cost is billed to me as a freelancer and I practically don't pay VAT. ;)

Thats really good advice, was also still using the BX10 Storage Box. Upgraded now :)

Thanks!

Those are not the prices I see. It says 3,45 EUR for the cheapest option.

3,45 includes 19% VAT. The price excluding VAT is 2,90.

nice from: € 7.9000 to € 3.45 but my electricity prices go up by 60 Euros heheh

Because of network speed?

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