- 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)