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Comment by foepys | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

That's outdated information, Hetzner launched a cloud service a few years ago.

Provisioning of cloud instances is pretty much instant.

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

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

> 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.

> 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.

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