Hetzner launches three new dedicated servers
hetzner.com
hetzner.com
Nobody seriously uses AWS/GCP/Azure to have a couple VMs or dedicated servers alone. If someone can run their full workload in e.g. Hetzner without much hassle then they shouldn't be using any of the other cloud platforms in the first place as they'd be definitely overpaying.
EDIT: I want to clarify that I unfortunately do know some companies use the big 3 as simple VPS providers but it seems that everybody agree here that it's a waste of money and that's one of my main points, which is also why the comparison of the big ones vs Hetzner or any other standalone VPS/dedicated server provider is pointless as they serve different use cases.
Hmm, anything that doesn't have insanely huge traffic and requirements does, and in those cases the major cloud vendors are still cheap and easy enough for those use cases.
Hetzner seems to fit the "not big enough to get major discounts and support but large enough to have considerable cloud bills" customer and that is fine.
I know cloud can make sense but not like this.
I think you're seriously underestimating the amount of cloud customers that do a simple lift and shift.
(The most egregious was a system peaking at maybe 5 hits a second during the month-end busy period living in multiple pods on a GCP Kubernetes cluster.)
I've done exactly that at a previous startup. Granted, it was 10 years ago, but going from racked infra to AWS ended up being half the cost for what was effectively twice the infra (we built out full geo-redundancy at the same time).
It actually does happen. They build some software, deploy it on VM and have said software use cloudy database service that removes a headache of maintaining backups, standby, point in time recovery, secure data at rest.
I have couple of shell scripts that do all of that and use Hetzner but I can imaging some org with enough money to not care about the price for convenience of somebody else taking care of your data.
They already pay for the cloud and someone to manage their cloud stuff I bet they would shell out half that if you offered your scripts.
I think that just shows how nonsensical these cloud providers really are when you can just write some scripts to handle it
Believe me I do ;) I adapt those to particular products I develop for my clients. However not worth my time to bother releasing those in generic form. Suddenly I would have to satisfy bazillion specific constraints and requirements for generic users.
Most of my clients do just that - just EC2 on AWS. Ofcourse, my experience may not represent average case, but it is certainly not "nobody". I believe that most do it because AWS/Azure is the "safe option".
Choosing AWS/Azure is the modern version of "Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM".
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I just recently tried Hertzner myself and I love the experience for now. I am aware that I am comparing apples and oranges here but; Hertzners UI is just so fast and simple compared to AWS and the pricing is great. Even their invoices are clean and understandable.
Not all businesses decide that’s a risk worth mitigating, but some do.
If they're going to do that... why not at least choose Lightsail?
Many companies and people do host loads that would be better served on dedicated hardware on EC2 because "cloud".
> Hetzner without much hassle then they shouldn't be using any of the other cloud platforms in the first place as they'd be definitely overpaying.
The ability to provision, de-provision, clone, load balance and manage without talking to people, waiting for hardware or really even having to understand in detail what is going on (yes this is bad, but still... ) is one of the big reasons cloud is popular. Many dedicated hosts have gotten a lot better in this area.
- Someone that used to fry lil hetzner servers for fun
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/04/ddos-for-hire-service-we...
should be enough
I understand that you never received attacks of such 'large' scale but it takes $5 to take a hetzner server down (assuming you don't know how to do it yourself)
Glad that I'm regularly seeing how awesome this company is lately.
- EX44: Intel Core i5-13500 / 64 GB / 2x512 GB NVMe - From 44€ [2]
- EX101: Intel Core i9-13900 / 64 GB / 2x1.92 TB NVMe - From 84€ [3]
[1] https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax52
- EX101: Intel Core i9-13900 / 64 GB / 2x1.92 TB NVMe - From €84
- AX101: AMD Ryzen™ 9 5950X / 128GB / 2x3.84 TB NVMe - From €101
But including a platform for access configuration, monitoring, deployment, automatic replacement, and many other things. AWS as a whole is not really comparable to getting servers from hetzner. (Unless that's all you want from them, but then you're overpaying for lots of stuff you don't use)
However my first one did often reboot randomly and the support wasn’t very helpful. They told me to just rent another one, which I did. The second one rebooted randomly once in about a year. I guess the first one went on auction and still happily reboots.
Hetzner feels like a hard discount cloud provider. I still prefer them over AWS or Azure for non critical workloads that have a little budget.
Everything is normal such as temperature, cpu load etc. the load is very idle. The server is indeed an auction one though.
Other non auction one has been rock solid.
It was first suspected to be certain brands of RAM, so I requested a RAM-swap which unfortunately didn't help. Then a BIOS update which also didn't help. Then someone figured out that nohz=off on the KCL fixed the problem and I had it running like this successfully for a few years. Long after at least one dist-upgrade I remembered that and removed the option again, and the server still ran stable.
There's no real morale to this story I guess, but at least the support is super responsive, and as the root cause wasn't clear at that point didn't hesitate to swap random stuff if you requested so. Also had a faulty HDD last Sunday in one server and requested a swap, which they did within 20 minutes of me opening the ticket.
I guess it would be good habit to report the server to hetzner though.
Not to discount your experience, but honestly, my experiences with Hetzner support have generally been unexpectedly good. They've been very quick to respond, tend to immediately start on whatever my issue is if I provide enough info in the initial ticket, etc. And unlike OVH, I haven't felt like I needed to call them on the phone to get decent service. Kind of surprising to hear that their solution was just "rent another".
Overall pleasant experience for me, especially given how cheap the servers are. My only real wishes would be dedicated servers in the US or Canada, and possibly something in between their unmetered 1Gbps and metered 10Gbps offerings -- being able to burst a bit higher than gigabit occasionally without paying the €1/TB bandwidth fee would be beautiful.
IIRC you get 30tb/month included - so it's not "pay nothing vs pay from first tb" - but I could be wrong - I've not yet had any projects where 10gbps made sense.
They are a discount provider. In my experience however, this kind of problems are very rare. They pop up now and them. I would just order a new server. In one company I was involved with, hetzner was used from the start and architecture was built around it, and at some point we calculated the costs compared to using AWS or similar. The cost savings were insane.
Hetzner is more hassle, but the question is how much do you are willing to pay to get the hassle removed, and in which way.
I asked them about one of the incidents, and they said that the breaker serving the rack had popped. I would guess that is a fairly common cause of this problem.
Another issue is disk failures. They replace the disk incredibly quickly (<1hr) but unless you are willing to pay for a brand new disk they fit whatever they have in stock. Sometimes that seems to be a unit which is itself close to death, and in another couple of months, guess what happens. Mostly they give you something reasonable so it all works out in the end.
Hetzner are a discount cloud provider. For the money, I'm basically delighted with them. The only other realistic option at a similar price point would be to self-host... and I'm not at all convinced that would be worth the hassle.
Increasing the memory to 128 GB, i.e. to two DIMMs per channel, drops the memory speed, more severely for AMD (DDR5-3600) than for Intel (DDR5-4400).
Overclocking the memory, like in gaming computers, would be unacceptable in server computers.
It seems like Hetzner is the only company in the world offering these kind of prices, right? What's the catch?
We use a mix of SYS and Hetzner here and have found them both to be excellent and very comparable.
ECC memory on the Cloud products? I'd like to assume they're using AMD's CPUs (consumer grade ECC support; as everyone should), ECC RAM, and at least mirrored storage. However I'd really like to see such basic features confirmed.
Neither of those are lock-in. Postgres is pretty much the same if you self-manage it, or if you let Scaleway or AWS or OVH manage it for you. Functions can be if in a special format (Lambda), but pretty much everyone has standardised on Containers as a Service (KNative/OpenFaaS).
To me, there kind of isn't one. I have generally had very good and fast support, even on the auction servers (which are even wilder in terms of pricing than the ones linked -- e.g., I was paying like 40 euros a month for 40TB storage + a modern i7 and 64GB RAM).
The real 'catch' is the more limited offerings; it isn't the kind of one-stop-shop that AWS is where you can rent 8x A100s in a dozen datacenters while having them manage your database and a billion other things.
But if you just need lots of CPU, memory or storage, don't want to pay exorbitant bandwidth fees, and Europe is fine, they are pretty great.
> It seems like Hetzner is the only company in the world offering these kind of priced, right?
OVH is not quite as cheap, generally, but they have lots of inexpensive offerings, especially on their SoYouStart/Kimsufi lines [1], with much more variety in terms of datacenters, including Singapore and Australia, depending on what you need in Asia/APAC -- likely better DDoS mitigation than Hetzner as well.
LeaseWeb can be really cheap as well. Their public pricing on the main website can appear kind of expensive, or at least not Hetzner-tier cheap, but if you're ordering a decent number of servers, they seem to offer great volume discounts.
For example, through a reseller [2], I've got 100TB of their "premium" bandwidth @ 10Gbps, Xeon E-2274G, 64GB RAM, 4x8TB hard drives, and a 1TB NVMe SSD in Amsterdam that I use as a seedbox for like 60 euros.
Another semi-low-cost provider, depending on what you need, in Asia that is worth mentioning is Tempest.
I believe they are owned by Path.net, and they've so they've got better DDoS mitigation than most other providers without costing an arm and a leg; in Tokyo, $140 will get you an E3 1240v2 + 16GB RAM and $200 will get you a Ryzen 3600X + 32GB RAM, both servers are 10Gbps unmetered.
Not a great option for someone who needs a ton of variety in their hardware, but if you need something high-bandwidth with decent specs in Asia, it's not awful.
[1]: Worth noting that, although unmetered, SYS is generally limited to something like 250Mbps speeds, and Kimsufi is 100Mbps. You do get lucky occasionally and sometimes your server magically has uncapped gigabit, but for guaranteed high-bandwidth servers, the main OVH site is the only option.
[2]: I'm using Andy10gbit, who is fine for my needs - e.g., I don't need to reinstall the OS 24/7 or have instant support since it's just used for torrents. It'd be a bad option for a business, though, since I wouldn't want to be relying on some dude on Reddit if something goes horrifically wrong. WalkerServers is another example of one of the ultra-cheap LeaseWeb resellers.
You can get server-grade hardware from them, but then the pricing difference isn't so significant when compared to other providers.
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Yes, non-ECC RAM is an issue, but that's easily upgraded on their AMD servers.
For €63 you'll get a Ryzen 7 7700 (Zen 4, 8 core, 16 thread) box with 64GB ECC RAM and 2x1TB NVMe SSDs. Google Cloud's N2D-Standard-16 with 8 cores (16 vCPU threads, Zen 2 or Zen 3), 64GB ECC RAM, and no storage costs $550/mo. Yes, it's may not be a perfect comparison, but it's also 8x the price - oh, and Google will charge you $0.085/GB for bandwidth that Hetzner throws in for free. Even Google's Spot Pricing is more than double the cost.
I do agree that non-ECC RAM is an issue, but if you're willing to go with AMD servers, it becomes a very cheap issue to fix.
Their Service has always been impeccable and their servers just run.
I have been running k8s clusters on hetzner for quite some time now and the flexibility for the price is exactly what i expect from a hoster!
Now with this addition Hetzner closes another gap that made projects spends thousands more on enterprise clouds. So im not only happy but also proud that they just keep innovating!
CPU temperature: 40C
Even Herzner cloud just works and I don't know how they do it but it's dirt cheap.
If you've have 500 servers for a long time, and a new script discovers 5% have a failure and sends 25 emails at the same time, I can see why Hetzner might want a single email. Numbers made up, but you get the idea.
It's just something you have to do yourself with Hetzner.
We had a bunch of racks and fan failures gotta be one of rarest one. Even on my personal junk I had zero actual failures, just one getting noisy
> Was still worth it because it's cheap, but they're cheap because it's not new and reliable hardware.
Not really different than cloud, they aren't buying top of the line servers, they are making their own just like hetzner, for cheapest per performance unit.
Big german language report: https://www.golem.de/news/besuch-im-rechenzentrum-so-betreib...
Personally I only had some network issues with them.
I use them, and I've been very happy with both pricing, reliability and the service.
Only possible bad thing to say about them: their static IP's aren't always "clean": I had a couple of instances where the IP I was allocated was blacklisted and it took some back and forth with their customer service to fix the problem (got a new IP).
But other than that quality / price ratio is way higher than GCP, AWS and their ilk.
I also use OVH, they're pretty decent as well, in the same ballpark as Hetzner.
For instance i was trying to migrate a large exchange group off to office 365 recently and their migration assistant simply has not been updated to support modern auth for office 365 amongst other things.
Also the migration failed from their own accounts for some reason....
As for the dirty ips: yes that happens but its not really hetzners fault, as the ip you had assigned had been taken away from the "bad actor" prior. If you tell that to your support agent, i have gotten a new one without a problem
EDIT: Ironically, not i cant even list my exchange accounts in ovh. it just keeps on loading and loading
Isn't that a problem you're always going to get with $any provider? You never know who previously owned that IP and what they did with it.
I used to work for a team that rented dozens of servers from them and we had disk failures almost every other week, which required creating a support ticket and asking them to swap out the drive so we could rebuild the RAID array.
They used regular SATA consumer drives and they were probably pretty old or refurbished or something.
I've been very happy with Hetzner for some workloads.
* Though GCP (back when it was just AppEngine) wasn’t always this way and as GAE users inside Google we had to write our own code for what we expected to fail, retries, backoffs etc.
Obviously replacing AWS features like RDS multi-AZ masters is not going to be as easy and might be worth paying the whole AWS premium, but that really depends on the business size, traffic, internal experience and many other factors.
With hetzner - failure means your monitoring detected disk failure, sent you a pagerduty alert, which you then have to check the alert, figure out what has failed, and send in a support ticket to get the disk replaced. This will take a couple hours, after which you have to rebuild your RAID array, and hope no more disks fail. All the while operating with degraded performance.
(Don't get me wrong, hetzner is _great_, I've used them for years and highly recommend for numerous scenarios - but the idea that their failure and reliability is anything like "the cloud" is fanciful)
On AWS, something is constantly breaking. One of the 100s of services will always have performance issues, degraded availability or some other crap going on.
On Hetzner, the hard drive, CPU or RAM on one of the machines will die once every few years. Maybe.
(This changes as your service grows and scales out, but there's a stupid high amount of traffic a few machines can take.)
I've been responsible for millions of dollars of AWS spend over the last decade. I've had virtually zero AWS caused downtime in that period outside of the few major outages that affected the whole world (for example that major S3 outage) - but the "100s of services will always have performance issues or degraded availability" has literally never been true for me. I've had hundreds of instances be retired - but that is all automated and without downtime.
Over the last 18 months at my current company, we've had 100% uptime - there has not been a single AWS incident that has affected us in us-east-2. And since we're using ECS and fargate, we've also not had to worry about instance retirement.
On the other hand - I've also had numerous personal servers with hetzner over the years - and the hardware is _old_. I've had at least 3 hard drives go bad over the last ~8 years.
Again, I still strongly recommend hetzner for many cases - but I just think it's important to go in understanding the difference in responsibility for things like hardware level monitoring.
So I guess you can blame your own team for ordering consumer sata?
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[1] https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax52/configurat...
They do provide a csi driver for kubernetes for their blockstorage and private networking for both too.
you can even have the masters of VMS and the nodes on bare metal
I've only become a customer again since their vps cloud offering and I've actually been recommending that because it has been flawless for me for years.
No but i get it, but i had a lot of failures in general with spinning disks. I think it has to do that SSDs and NVMEs are much better at telling you how much juice they got left in them. I don't neccesairily think its a problem of hetzner alone though, as disks on other hosters have failed too for me.
I also used to maintain a couple of "plain old offices" and Hard disk failure is sadly just all around us, when you are using bare metal.
Another reason for kubernetes!
Hetzner bare metal have unlimited bandwidth.
If you pull a short straw, your box will be sharing bandwidth with a few bittorrent seed boxes or someone’s video CDN node
That being said, I run much smaller projects and servers and have not worked at a scale that really requires heavy workloads that generates thousands of monthly bills at GCP.
So I think most devs being conditioned to start their first projects on the free-tiers of most cloud providers makes it really difficult for them to move to their own servers when they need it.
For example, I was running some experiments that required lots of RAM. Right now you can get a server with 256GB RAM for €60/month.
The channel is well worth a subscribe too.
Servers start at $9 per-month. A comparable example:
Dual Xeons - 36 cores / 72 threads - 128GB memory - dual 1TB nvme - 5 IP's $80 per-month $0 setup. Setup with dual 2Tb nvme is $100 per-month.
I'm colocating a couple of servers there for $40 per-month each, bandwith is 1Gbit unmetered and comes with 5ip's. A couple 1U's and towers. I recently bought a used 1U server off Amazon for $400. It has 48 cores, 96 GB memory and 4x1TB drives and came with a one year warranty on the components.
Hetzner was solid, but their network was sketchy at times.
just clicked, unfortunately it is out of stock..
> I'm colocating a couple of servers there for $40 per-month each
are you living nearby? Or you sent them server and they installed it?
You can check back, they update the list at server availability changes. Other providers there are Dedispec and Joesdatacenter, may have something in stock you're looking for.
joesdatacenter.com (Kansas City) has single server COLO for $50 a month.
Haven't found anything by Googling, so was wondering if anyone here works somewhere that does this.
I'm used to cloud VMs where if one dies, I can quickly spin up another one effortlessly (I never have to contact support or anything like that).
Then you contact support, appoint disk change, you first deactivate disk on raid (save geometry etc), they replace disk and then you rebuild raid in new disk. That's it. With SSD you may not even need to do this anymore.
I imagine this would take time, right? Like not 5 minutes, but maybe 3 hours top? So, if I pretend to run a saas (that shouldn't be down more than 1h/day), then renting only 1 dedicated server could be qualified as "risky"?
They will all be hot-swap disks. You remove the old disk and slide in the new one (or in this case, tell them to do it). The RAID system rebuilds the array in the background over the next few hours.
During that time you will lose data if it's RAID 5 and another disk fails.
mdadm --manage <array> --remove <failed disk>
so your machine doesn't have a fit when the disk is detached. Or equivalent.
For example I have loads of stuff on Linode but always make sure I keep backups off-linode, incase I get a random TOS account shutdown and they stop speaking to me etc
Provisioning of servers was always quite fast. Same day or the next business day.
My experience is a little dated, I used to order bunch of dedicated boxes from them for our clients and with Hetzner we always had the best experience. Also the most bang for the buck.
Some failures I experienced and had to monitor/detect myself were: overheating (they replaced thermal paste when I told them I saw strange readings from the CPU stats), raid disk failure or ssd high burn (ie. partial failure, server still running, they replaced the failed disks after I told them).
Most of the time the issues have been resolved within 1-4 hours on low-cost Kimsufi and SoYouStart offers, even on weekends and nights. Often when the server is running they can require a shutdown.
I'm quite happy with this as I am highly technical in those subjects and like to look under the hood, but with dedicated servers you really have to do some more maintenance/monitoring/planning yourself.
> They don't monitor other health issues however (how would they since you are running your own system?) and therefore don't do anything before they detect a "down" status.
My server has a hardware raid card. I have had one incident where OVH contacted me and said there was an issue with one of the drives, and that they will reboot the server at X time to replace it. They did so, and the problem was solved with no requests or intervention on my part.
I had another incident where I was told the motherboard died. IIRC, it died around 1am my time and was replaced by 5am my time. They of course turned the system back on for me. I was asleep the whole time, and this was likewise solved with zero requests or intervention on my part.
Besides this, I can count the number of times an internet or power issue made my server unreachable on a single hand. IMO, a great experience for a dirt cheap host.
That all being said: OVH's ipv6 solution is laughably bad and is the single reason why I would switch hosts, if a better one with a north American presence appears.
But somes issues are not failures and you have to work on them on your side.
Most of the time the raid is software nowadays for example.
IPv6 works fine for my many servers at OVH.
But they often go even above and beyond for you. I rent several servers from them for many years, and I've had it happen once or twice that I got an e-mail from their datacenter team telling me that they noticed an error LED blinking on one of my servers, and actively offered to plan a repair intervention. All I had to do was to come up with a downtime window and communicate it to them. Very slick.
I'd say about half of overall value of Hetzner is in their quality support.
I showed them the sudden loss of power events in the logs. "It must be a problem with your OS modifications that we don't support".
OK, I wiped the machine to the stock image that you provide and it's still having power loss events. "Sure, we'll run a stress test for a couple minutes ... stress test passed OK, it's still your fault!".
The events happen randomly during the week, a stress test is not going to show that. Can you just move me to a different physical machine? "No."
This was over the course of several days, when I had an event coming up that I NEEDED the server for. I ended up going back to Azure and paying 10x the cost, but at least it worked great.
https://i.imgur.com/3DKc9OC.png
I have never seen this page before when trying to login. Make of that what you will.
That's some dedicated client response team if so!
IT departments really need to revise their due diligence processes. I wonder how many folks were coerced to do a similar migration just to benefit from household brand credibility.
Does anyone have experience to share with that kind of setup? What's the maintenance like?
I use single dedicated server that costs ~40EUR/month, AX41-NVME, and each runner is a separate user account to allow for some isolation.
Depending on your setup, you might need to spent some time adjusting jobs to have proper setup/cleanup and isolation between them (but it's not really Hetzner specific, just general issue).
Do you have any alternatives? I thought Hetzner was fairly unique in their dedicated server offerings (for the price, I mean).
My only issue is that security scanners can’t run on self-hosted runners (GitHub refuses the artifact result, so technically, they do run, but the results fail to upload).
We provision them with ~200 lines of shell script, which we get away with because they are not running a "prod" workload. Don't forget to run "docker system prune" on a timer! Overall these machines have been mostly unobtrusive and reliable, and the engineers greatly appreciate the order of magnitude reduction in github actions time. I've also noticed that they are writing more automation tooling now since budget anxiety is no longer a factor and the infrastructure is so much faster.
Recent Linux kernels finally support these CPUs (do they have full support?), but if you host a service where you want predictable (and fast) response times why you use the mix of both cores? Or would you just turn off those efficient cores for the server-side usage?
I'm assuming you don't shoot yourself in the foot by running strictly single-threaded workflow explicitly pinned to the efficiency cores.
> running strictly single-threaded workflow explicitly pinned to the efficiency cores
Those cores are slower than e.g. the cores from the (Desktop) AMD CPU we tested at the same time (offered from Hetzner). So it is rather expensive and inefficient to use Intel (Desktop) CPUs for server-side applications as we can only use their performance cores.
When these guys open up dedicated servers in a USA region it's going to be huge. Unfortunately, at the moment only the cloud offering is available in the USA so you're stuck with a bit of latency round tripping to the EU.
Weird. It seems like they are reading the origin header or something and just redirect HN users to the root of the website.
Works fine if you copy the link and paste it in a new tab.
Amazon has done an amazing job of convincing people that their hosting choice is between cloud (aka, AWS) or the higher-risk, knowledge intensive, self-hosting (aka, colocation). You see this play out all the time in HN comments. CTOs make expensive and expansive decisions believing these are the only two options. AWS has been so good at this, that for CEOs and some younger devops and developers, it isn't even a binary choice anymore, there's only cloud.
Do yourself, your career, and your employer a favor, and at least be aware of a few things.
First, there are various types of hosting, each with their own risk and costs, strength and weaknesses. The option that cloud vendors don't want you to know about are dedicated servers (which Hetzner is a major provider of). Like cloud vendors, dedicated server vendors are responsible for the hardware and the network. (If you go deeper than say, EC2, then I'll admit cloud vendors do take more of the responsibility (e.g. failing over your database)).
Second, there isn't nearly enough public information to tell for sure, but cloud plays a relatively minor role in world-wide server hosting. Relative to other players, AWS _is_ big (biggest? not sure). But relative to the entire industry? Low single-digit %, if that. The industry is fragmented, there are thousands of players, offering different solutions at different scales.
For general purpose computing/servers, cloud has two serious drawbacks: price and performance. When people mention that cloud has a lower TCO, they're almost always comparing it to colocation and ignoring (or aren't aware of) the other options.
Performance is tricky because it overlaps with scalability. But the raw performance of an indivisible task matters a lot. If you can do something in 1ms on option A and 100ms on option B, but B can scale better (but possibly not linearly), your default should not be option B (especially if option A is also cheaper).
The only place I've seen cloud servers be a clear win is GPUs.
For one, people generally underestimate the performance cost of their choices. And that reaches from app code, to their db and their infrastructure.
We’re talking orders of magnitude of compounding effects. Big constant factors that can dominate the calculation. Big multipliers on top.
Horizontal scaling with all its dollar cost, limitations, complexity, maintenance cost and gotchas becomes a fix on top of something that shouldn’t be a problem in the first place.
The primary deciding factor is always security. You simply cannot use any small vendor because of the physical security (or the lack thereof). Unless of course you do not care about security. If a red team can just waltz into you DC and connect directly to your infra is it game over for some businesses. You can easily do this with most vendors.
The secondary deciding factor is networking. Most traditional co-los have very limited understanding of networking. A CCIE or two can make a real difference. Unfortunately those guys usually work some bigger companies.
The third deciding factor air conditioning and electricity considerations. Worst case you are facing an OVH situation. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/opinions/ovhclouds-dat....
(It is really funny, because I have warned them that their AC/cooling solution is not sufficient, and they explained to me that I am wrong. I was not aware of the rest (wooden elements, electricity fuckups, etc.)
"""During the year, an article in VO News by Clever Technologies claimed there were flaws in the power design of the site, for instance that the neighboring SBG4 facility was not independent, drawing power from the same circuit as SBG2. It's clear that the site had multiple generations, and among its work after the fire, OVHcloud reported digging a new power connection between the facilities.""")
The fourth would be probably pricing. TCO is one consideration, after you made sure that the minimum requirements are met, but only after.
So based on the needs somebody can choose wisely, based on the ___business requirements___. For example, running an airline vs running a complex simulations have very different requirements.
From a sales point of view, I agree with you that, for a lot of folks, this might be the main concern. If you're doing B2B or government work this might be, by far, the most important thing to you.
However, this is at least partially pure sales and security theatre. It's about checkboxes and being able to say "we use AWS" and having everyone else just nod their head and say "they use AWS."
I'm not a security expert (though I have held security-related/focused programming roles), but as strong as AWS is with respect to paper security, in practice, the foundation of cloud (i.e. sharing resources), seems like a dealbreaker to me (especially in a rowhammer/spectre world). Not to mention the access AWS/Amazon themselves have and the complexity of cloud-hosted system (and how easy it is to misconfigure them (1)).) About 8 years ago, when I worked at a large international bank, that was certainly how cloud was seen. I'm not sure if that's changed. Of course, they owned their own (small) DCs.
(1) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26154038 The tool was removed from github (conspiracy theory!), but I still find the discussion there relevant.
so, anywhere where your workloads or data are physically co-located on the same hardware as someone else's should be automatically disqualified, right?
Doing your career a favor is how we ended up in this situation in the first place. The tech industry had way too much free money floating around that there was never any market pressure to operate profitably, so complexity increased to fill the available resources.
This has now gone on long enough that there are now entire careers built around the idea that the cloud is the only way - people that spend all day rewriting YAML/Terraform files, or developers turning every single little feature into a complex, failure-prone distributed system because the laptop-grade CPU their code runs on can't do it synchronously in a reasonable amount of time.
All these people, their managers and decision makers could end up out of a job or face inconvenient consequences if the industry were to call out the bullshit collectively, so it's in everyone's best interest to not call it out. I’m sure there are cloud DevOps people that feel the same way but wouldn’t admit it because it’s more lucrative for them to keep pretending.
This works at multiple levels too, as a startup, you wouldn't be considered "cool" and deserving of VC funding (the aforementioned "free money") if you don't build an engineering playground based on laptop-grade CPU performance rented by the minute at 10x+ markup. You wouldn't be considered a "cool" place to work for either if prospective "engineers" or DevOps people can't use this opportunity to put "cloud" on their CVs and brag about solving self-inflicted problems.
Clueless, non-tech companies are affected too - they got suckered into the whole "cloud" idea, and admitting their mistake would be politically inconvenient (and potentially require firing/retraining/losing some employees), so they'd rather continue and pour more money into the dumpster fire.
A reckoning on the cloud and a return to rationality would actually work out well for everyone, including those who have a reason to use it, as it would force them to lower their prices to compete. But as long as everyone is happy to pay their insane markups, why would they not take the money?
Personally, so far, the best near-equivalent provider I've found that actually offers well-specced machines in North America, is OVH, with their HGR line and their Montreal DC. Are there any other contenders?
And if not, why not? what's so hard about getting into the high-spec dedicated hosting space in the US specifically? Import duties on parts, maybe? (I've found plenty of low-spec bare-metal providers in the US, and plenty of high-spec cloud VM hosting providers in the US, and plenty of high-spec bare-metal providers outside the US; but so far, no other high-spec bare-metal providers in the US.)
Also they'll run off with your money if you can't provide an ID after you've already paid. No service but no refunds either.
[1] https://servicestack.net/blog/finding-best-us-value-cloud-pr...
We're currently using these at OVH: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-ca/bare-metal/high-grade/hgr-hci... — and we really need the cores, the memory, the bandwidth, and the huge gobs of direct-attached NVMe. (We do highly-concurrent realtime analytics; these machines run DBs that each host thousands of concurrent multi-second OLAP queries against multi-TB datasets, with basically zero temporal locality between queries. It'd actually be a perfect use-case for a huge honking NUMA mainframe with "IO accelerator" cards, but there isn't an efficient market for mainframes—so they're not actually price-optimal here compared to a bunch of replicated DB shards running on commodity hardware.)
But seriously, there's been lots of talk on HN recently about alternatives to the big clouds. This is it - rent a big server and do it all on Linux.
Request on Hold - Suspicous Activity Detected.
Edit: so I use that time wisely to shitpost about it on HN, then check TrustPilot and I see:
"Unfortunately, based on your description (I need a ticket number or other customer information to find you in our system), you accidentally resembled an abuser."
Not a good outward appearance. I'll stick with AWS and paying through the nose.
Is this a business? No.
Should we follow any of the practices of HN? I do not think so. My personal website has a more scalable infrastructure than HN.
- stop operating in countries they don't want business from
- treat people equally
What they are doing is: pathetic.
There is no excuse for being a victim of an algorithm.
And I never get this anywhere else!
In technology circles I am guilty until proven innocent.
That's the difference, the outcome of which is the technology provider can quite frankly fuck off.
Is anybody aware of anything that's price competitive in the US (or within a 50ms ping)?
[1] https://www.ionos.com/servers/value-dedicated-server#package...
Edit1: missed word;
Edit2: people pointed below that the us locations don't have dedicated servers, cloud servers only;
OVH [1] is not quite as cheap, but I can't really think of anyone else in the area that is totally comparable. One draw of OVH, Hetzner, etc, for me over the truly small, cheap dedicated server providers is they both have pretty decent networks and free DDoS mitigation, which is really nice for things like game servers and such where CloudFlare isn't an option.
OVH's sub-brands like SoYouStart [2] will sell you decently specced dedicated servers started at around $30 a month in Quebec, which tends to be more than good enough for most of my "US" needs.
They do have a couple datacenters in the United States too, not just Canada (+ quite a few in Europe, one in Singapore, some in Australia, etc), but I believe the Virginia/Oregon servers aren't available on the cheaper SYS site -- still cheap, though, but not quite $30 cheap.
[1]: <https://www.ovh.com>
[2]: <https://www.soyoustart.com/> (main downsides compared to OVH proper is the connection is capped at ~250Mbps, and although all servers have DDoS mitigation, the SYS and Kimsufi servers don't allow you to leave it on 24/7 -- so when you get attacked, it might take a minute or so to kick in, and then it'll remain on for 24 hours, I believe)
We've been a happy dedicated server customer since 2013, although we've just finished our transition from their dedicated servers in Germany to US Hetzner Cloud for improved latency.
Always happy to see Hetzner's name in lights, DHH also used Hetzner as a deployment target when announcing their MRSK tool that 37 Signals are using to automate deployments as they begin transitioning off the cloud.
[1] https://servicestack.net/blog/finding-best-us-value-cloud-pr...
Yeah, types of.
France (OVH), Sweden, Norway, and (usually) Switzerland are much better (thanks to nuclear for France, and hydro for the others).
Migrated to Hetzner, I hope it will be ok.
As I understand it, cloud VMs are not capable to run large neural networks like StableDiffusion, Llama etc because they don't have a GPU, right?
I would like to play with these new toys, but I don't know where I can get a cloud machine capable of running them.
If you just want to play with DL, I suggest Google Colab Pro.
In Hetzner's case, you'll find some with GTX 1080 (https://www.hetzner.com/sb?additional=GPU), but they'll cost you at least double of what they'd cost without one.
Oh and their service is great :)
I don’t need 64 GiB of RAM or a gazillion CPU cores or whatever, I just need reasonably-sized (1 TB+) storage. Not HDDs, but SSDs.
Might as well get a bigger server for the higher price.
I think it is about $10/TB, looks reasonable.
edit: seems the entire hetzner site is doing this, redirecting me to /_ray/pow which is an error
Heray is a security product powered by Hetzner
They also "shadowban" users, i.e. you'd try to register only for them to lock your account, make you send them your ID and such, and then still refuse to open an account for you. All because their crappy fraud detection system didn't like the IP from which you sent it or something.
What happens when hardware component break? Does the price include repair?
What happens when storage fail? Are data backupped or it is on me to make them?
You have to do your own backups, but they offer storage for that.
> What happens when storage fail? Are data backupped or it is on me to make them?
Servers are configured as RAID1 arrays, so after a disk fails you can ask them to replace it for you at a convenient time and no data should be lost. You're 100% responsible for backups, though.
It depends on the exact provider, but as a general rule, they are (a) slower to repair and (b) not as proactive (e.g. they might not detect an eminent failure). On even a medium-sized contract, you can generally work in 1-4 hour repair windows (many providers even offer this as standard), and better ones are definitely a bit more proactive.
There's like 1000 different dedicated provider, so it will depend on what yours offers, but unless it's a "managed dedicated provider", you're going to be responsible for your own backups. At best, you'll get some external storage you can use (e.g. Hetzner include free 100GB ftp you can use, if I recall).
*imminent.
So if you say see SMART errors on hard drive you have to open ticket with them to fix.
> What happens when storage fail? Are data backupped or it is on me to make them?
You have full control over server. If you want backup you need to set it up yourself.
I'd start with VM if you want to learn ops stuff. Those also usually have backup option at some extra cost.
kimsufi (ovh brand) also have some cheap ones, I have some atom serwer with TB drive for some offsite backups and few services and so far no problems.
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